The Road Rat is a fairly new journal that attempts – very successfully, we think – to overhaul the conventional model of the car magazine. And we stress ‘overhaul’ rather trying soup the thing up. It’s less interested in technical detail and performance. The Road Rat instead firmly believes there are many interesting and untold stories located in both the past and the present, on the road and on the race track. And, most pleasingly, The Road Rat is a proudly analogue thing: a lush, beautiful, valuable, collectable and exquisitely crafted magazine. About Issue 23, ‘The Bugatti Ascendancy’, from the publisher: ‘The Bugatti Ascendancy’ charts the rise, rise and rise again of the car maker at the peak of the hypercar mountain. Described and photographed in sumptuous detail are the one-of-one new Programme Solitaire F.K.P. Hommage and Brouillard, the 1990s EB 110 and the 1930s Type 57. Alongside are Chris Harris on the M5 version of the E39-generation BMW 5 Series (‘the car world’s Chanel black cocktail dress’); the 1965 Ferrari 275 GTB that French movie star Jean-Paul Belmondo wooed Ursula Andress in; an examination of the genius of the winner of the fateful 1957 Mille Miglia, Piero Taruffi; Jonny Lieberman on the secret late-1980s Lamborghini Miura II; and arguably the most beautiful Jaguar E-Type of them all, the XK GT. This is the most tactile edition of The Road Rat to date, printed on a gorgeous mix of heavy translucent, gloss and uncoated art papers.
