Max Schröder

A few years after the Cars & Coffee-Meets started gaining popularity in North America, similar events started being organized in Germany too. These are a bit smaller than those in the USA, but still manage to assemble a few hundred cars from all parts of the car-culture.

While Ferrari’s regular cars are everything but boring the company occasionally puts their prancing horse on a car that is just a little faster, a little louder, a little more powerful and a little more extreme than the others. And somehow, those cars are still road legal.

The Porsche 959’s development began as the “Porsche Projekt Gruppe B” in 1981, when the then-new managing director Peter Schutz was approached by Porsche’s head of engineering Helmuth Bott. Bott proposed a new generation of the Porsche 911 that would be developed from scratch, while, after great success in Le Mans, rallying would be an interesting field of motorsport to use to get a good public image.

When people talk about Bugattis they usually talk about two companies: -The original company, “Automobiles Ettore Bugatti”, which was founded in 1909 and made its last road car for a customer in 1965 (a Bugatti Type 101 with a body by Virgil Exner) after technically already ending operations in 1963 when the company was sold to Hispano-Suiza (with the ’65 101 being a car that took a long time to finish, with Ghia handing the (shortened) chassis off to Virgil.

Nowadays the “hot hatches” are pretty common, with over half a dozen companies offering their take on “take a small hatchback and drop a rather powerful engine in it”. When comparing the hot hatches the Volkswagen Golf GTI is usually seen as the benchmark, the car all others are compared to. That is because the Golf 1 GTI, the ancestor of the Golf 7 GTI currently on sale, is generally assumed to be the very first hatchback. And without it, or rather, without two men who had the idea to make it, we may not have the hot hatches today.

The Germany-based company “Isdera” is one of the least known car-manufacturers in the world, despite having existed in its current form since 1982, while one of their five models has been released over a decade before the company was founded.

The History of the Rotary Engine

Wiesmann is a company that is rather unknown, and while the cars are very recognizeable very few people ever heard of the company. This post is meant to change that, if you may give me a few minutes. The Wiesmann GmbH was founded by Friedhelm und Martin Wiesmann, the sons of the owner of a local car dealership in Dülmen, Germany. At first they produced aftermarket removable hardtops for convertibles, with their dream being that to build their own sportscar, more specifically to connect a classic roadster and the famous German product quality.

Note: The timeline of the movies is a little confuse, but I decided to simply list them in the order in which they appeared.

Since my profile here is centered around car-photography, and since I keep finding posts of other CTzens asking for advice, I decided to make this post. Actually, I’ll make two posts. This one about what camera-equipment I use, and a second one about (what I see as) some rules/“tricks” for good results. But first of all I have to apologize for the photos of the camera-gear, since those were taken with an (old) smartphone, and it shows.