Glorious overkill

Sir. Finding, to my surprise, that I have reacted rather more as a traditionalist than I’d have liked to, the news that my beloved Motor Sport was to change its livery meant that I waited for my October issue with trepidation. I needn’t have worried. Like many cars do, it looked better in the flesh than in the illustration.

But I have to confess, my faculty for dispassionate analysis was perhaps diminished by your wisdom in featuring surely the most brutally elegant, or elegantly brutal, car of all time on the cover. A car I had the fortune to compete in for three seasons: the glorious GT40. And you cheated by swamping my senses with photos of at least one GT40 or replica on 22 pages. Final judgement must therefore be withheld until I am forced to see the cover GT40-less.

Interestingly, the lines of my old acquaintance Jackie Oliver, who appeared in your GT/GT40 feature, also seem to be withstanding the passage of time and changing fashions equally as well as the GT4Os we used to drive — which brings me to a criticism.

Back in their, and my, Formula Three days, Howden Ganley and Tim Schenken were on their way up toward F1 drives and onward to their Tiga association. I feel that their successes might have qualified them to be squeezed somewhere into your feature concerning the ’50 Greatest Partnerships’.

Brian Jordan, Somerset