Gullwing doors are a stupid idea really. Sorry Tesla, Mercedes-Benz and DeLorean but they are. Let’s not forget that the Mercedes-Benz 300SL was banned from race tracks for the simple reason that if the car rolled over, the driver could not get out. The Tesla Model X and DeLorean both remind us that making such doors a production reality is a bloody nightmare. They’re nothing more than a very silly gimmick.

A truly scrumptious design – Giugiaro Gabbiano.

Yet, when Giorgetto Giugiaro applied them to his Gabbiano Renault 11 proposal, I must admit that I was swept away both with the beauty of the design – uncluttered and clean – and the practical case for gullwings. Very easy access to all seats being the main one and a major point Elon Musk makes about the Model X.

As a child, I studied pictures of the Gabbiano for hours. It really is Giugiaro at his very best. Yet, barely anyone knows it exists. That made me all the happier when, earlier this year, I included the Gabbiano in a feature on one-offs and cars that sadly never made production that was published in Classic Car Buyer.

Gabbiano is Italian for seagull, so there’s a clear reference to the doors. In terms of styling, there’s a very-1980s wedge profile with pop-up headlamps and another styling trait that became the rage about this time – a ‘floating’ roof where the pillars are blended into the glasswork. See also the Rover R8 200 and XX 800 and Citroen XM. Once more, Ital Design was at the cutting edge of car fashion. Yet, there’s always something very real and believable about Giugiaro’s designs. Note the really entirely normal rear lights that so neatly form part of the rear styling, while also having a bit of a nod to the original Renault 5. No fancy-pants LEDs here, or gimmicky slashes, just really practical, neat design.

Giugiaro’s talents toned down for the production 21.

My disappointment was increased at least ten-fold when Renault replaced the 11 with the dull, dull 19. Especially as Ital Design had a hand in it! Not one of its best efforts, though it did redeem itself with the 21 – not an especially exciting design but one which again, has a delightful neatness about it. I guess it goes to show that concept cars are far too often judged too radical for the real world. A shame.

I watched the Formula 1 a couple of weeks ago. My timing was spot on. It was an absolutely thrilling battle, with Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg having a titanic tussle for the lead. But as thrilling as their fight was, the spectacle of Formula 1 still doesn’t grab me. It hasn’t really done so for years. The problem is the noise. No, not that the cars are too quiet – these latest ones have a nice V6 growl and pleasant turbo whine – but that the noise just isn’t that nice.

This is where historic racing comes in.

Old is better than new when it comes to racing

You get a lot more variety with historic racing for a start. Here, a TVR does battle with an Austin-Healey and a Triumph TR4 at the Goodwood Revival. Not that you need to stump up the frankly scary prices for admission at the frankly incredible Revival. Historic Racing takes place all over the UK and indeed the world. The Silverstone Classic lacks the atmosphere of the Revival, but features much of the same metal. There’s the Donington Historic coming up soon too – first weekend of May. There’s stuff going on all over the place, creating the sort of noises that racing cars should make. Hearing exotic V12s pumping out sweet music, joined in chorus by straight-sixes and tuned V8s makes for a true motoring spectacle. It creates the sort of soundtrack that modern F1 completely lacks.

It creates moments like this too. An extremely well-driven Ford GT40 at a soggy Goodwood. Remarkable car control.

You won’t see cars squirming around in Formula 1 like that. It really is astonishing stuff.

Prefer a V12? I bet you didn’t even know that a Jaguar XJ-S could make this sort of noise. The road car is rather more refined.

Those are the sorts of noises that set my blood curdling. There is an increasing interest in historic racing, and rightly so! Modern racers may be quicker, but like modern cars, they seem overly sanitised and some of the fun has gone out of it. It’s not just track racing either. Here’s perhaps one of my favourite motorsport videos. The late, great Colin McRae giving it some serious beans in a Metro 6R4, and losing it completely at one stage!

This sort of thing generates a level of excitement that modern racing just can’t match. Whether it’s 2CVs or Ferrari GTOs, historic racing has a massive range of interesting tin in action. I bloomin’ love it!

Consumerism can be a right pain in the backside. I hold it directly responsible not just for making undesirable fat cats very wealthy, but also ruining just about everything.

Consider cars. Even just a few decades ago, you could identify quite a few cars just by listening to then. A Citroen 2CV sounds very different to a Ford Escort or a Renault 5. The differences were often much larger. In Eighties, you could still buy cars with rear-mounted engines (ok, mainly just Skoda) while the family saloon battle was between the blobby, rear-wheel drive Ford Sierra and the boxy, front-wheel drive Vauxhall Cavalier. Two intense rivals yet so very, very different.

Other family cars were equally different. The Datsun/Nissan Stanza would try and kill you if you made the mistake of trying to drive it quickly in the wet. Peugeot’s 405 brought style, ride and handling mixed with a delicious blend of cheap plastics inside.

Blimey. Information overload! Tests aren't like this anymore

Journalism was so different as well. Car adverts would contain actual information, and motoring magazines had features that were almost Encyclopedic. Here’s an example borrowed from Autocar. There’s all the information you could reasonably want, as well as (on other pages) honest appraisal by a team of testers.

When you wanted to make an informed decision about which car to buy, this information was very useful.

Yet, it turned out that you could sell more magazines if you just featured high performance cars and used words like ‘lairy’ and ‘tail-happy,’ even when describing a Volkswagen Golf Cabriolet – not exactly a sports car.

Journalism became more like a chat with your mates and less about providing useful information. The problem is you see, while us car enthusiasts and those who like to know what they buy appreciated these earlier efforts, you can sell a lot more magazines to the wider public if you cut out the techno-babble and just talk sheer emotion. Emotion is, after all, the biggest driver for most people when it comes to buying a car. They don’t care if the rear seat is cramped, or if the over-the-shoulder vision is appalling – they only care about how the car makes them feel. You could build technically the best car in the world, but even if you market it at £10,000, people won’t buy it if it gives the wrong impression, and nor will today’s magazines want to write about it unless it provides ‘lairy’ handling on a race  track.

I despair of a world where information is treated less importantly than marketing babble. As someone on the Autoshite forum said recently – if you compare the Mini against the MINI, one is a triumph of engineering while the other is a triumph of marketing. Sadly, we know which one the capitalists prefer…