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Bob’s Bambina video

3 December, 2024

Bob McMurray has spent a lifetime inside Formula 1, including 33 years he and wife, Shaune, spent working for McLaren from his earliest days as a mechanic through to watching Scott Dixon’s first Kiwi win at Indianapolis. Bob is now one of our top motorsport commentators and Toyota Racing New Zealand’s ambassador, a role he relishes. He wrote a book about his experiences, Behind the Pit Wall – My life in Formula One and beyond.
Bob’s involvement with Fiat cars goes back to McLaren in the mid ’70s, “when there wasn’t much money in motor racing,” so Bob supplemented his income with a job at Heathrow Airport, as he explains.
“We needed a car to get about so I bought a Fiat 600. We had to use the perimeter track around the airport to go to the centre of the airport in the mornings. If I was travelling to the airport and the planes were landing in my face towards me, I would fly along no problem at all. But if it was the other way round, I couldn’t get it into top gear!”
Bob recalls that designer Gordon Murray – another famous name at McLaren – had a Fiat 500.
“Gordon is 6 foot 6 inches and drove his Fiat to work daily.”

A FIAT ON OUR DOORSTEP
Bob now has a Fiat 500 F. The story of how he became its owner almost by accident and of its restoration is one of those that has ended well, and it was a bit of a laugh getting there. Bob’s Fiat actually has a distant McLaren connection.
Here’s a short video Classic Car magazine made when we recently photographed Bob’s Fiat for a feature in the November December 2024, issue 396

More to the point

6 March, 2026

This Daimler SP252 is so rare, few people know it exists. It’s one of a kind. It’s the only surviving, in fact the only SP252 ever completed; the would-be successor to the SP250 Daimler Dart. It is also the last sports car to have been designed by Jaguar’s legendary founder, Sir William Lyons.
Perhaps one of the original Dart’s biggest problems was it’s somewhat-divisive looks. It certainly went well enough to win fans, although Sir William wasn’t among them. It crushed the opposition in the Bathurst six-hour race, finishing five laps ahead of anyone else, and it was snapped up by police forces in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, as it was the fastest thing on the road.
So you’d think a stunning new body with the magic Lyons touch would have been a surefire success. Why this car never made it into production is still something of a mystery, as the official explanations barely stack up.

Polishing to perfection

26 February, 2026

The secret to a show-stopping finish is colour sanding, no matter which paint system you use. Even a good painter, no matter how experienced or talented — like my mate Bruce Haye, CEO at Ace Panel and Paint in Whitianga — can’t shoot to a perfect mirror finish. To get that level of perfection, you need to colour sand.
It used to be called ‘rubbing out’ or ‘cutting’, and it was done with pastes that came in cans. They worked — sort of — but the compounds really just rounded off imperfections instead of eliminating them, and they removed a lot of paint in the process. But now your new finish can be made flawless, thanks to microfine sandpapers that come in 1000, 1500, 2000, and even 2500 grit ranges, and Farecla G3 polish — available from automotive paint suppliers.