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Story

Porsche, Plaid, and the Highlands: How a 911 Turbo Brought Tartan Home

The Porsche 911 Turbo has always balanced on the sharp edge between heritage and horsepower. But this time, the story isn’t just in the flat-six or the boost gauge—it’s in the seats. Specifically, in a Weathered Dress Mackenzie tartan pattern that has taken the Turbo on a pilgrimage straight to its ancestral homeland: the Scottish Highlands.

When the door of the 911 Turbo 50 Years swings open outside Castle Leod, the ancestral seat of Clan Mackenzie, 38-year-old Viscount Tarbat—Colin to his friends—breaks into a grin as wide as the castle’s stone courtyard. “I suppose that means we’re now officially the fastest clan,” he laughs, eyeing the green-and-brown tartan inserts like a proud team captain admiring a new kit.

Behind him stands three-year-old Roddy and John, the 77-year-old Earl of Cromartie and current clan chief. Castle Leod may be one of the oldest continuously inhabited buildings in Scotland, but today it plays host to a brand-new Turbo whose interior points to a surprisingly deep Porsche–Highlands connection.

A Plaid Path to Zuffenhausen

The legend begins not in a castle, but in a design studio. Anatole Lapine, Porsche’s head of design in the early ’70s, walked in one morning wearing Black Watch tartan trousers—Bay City Rollers era, remember—and by lunch the idea had ignited: why not put tartan in a 911?

The 1973 911 Turbo RSR concept arrived first with bold blue, green, and black Black Watch upholstery. A year later, the first roadgoing 911 Turbo, gifted to Louise Piëch for her 70th birthday, appeared wrapped in an even brasher Maclachlan red-and-blue plaid. Porsche was hooked.

Dorothea Müller-Goodwyn, a longtime member of Porsche’s styling team, recalls that the company originally tried to source the fabrics from Scotland. The mills were historic, the patterns iconic—but the materials simply weren’t rugged enough for a sports car’s interior. Sunlight and sliding bolsters are far less forgiving than Highland weather. The company eventually relied on an automotive textile maker in Germany’s Swabian Alps, but the tartans remained unmistakably Scottish in spirit.

By 1975, Turbo buyers could choose from three official tartan upholstery options. One of the most memorable found a home in Ferry Porsche’s own Oak Green Metallic 911 Turbo: Mackenzie tartan—a fabric that returns, in evolved form, in the Turbo 50 Years now parked outside Castle Leod.

A Clan, a Castle, and a Turbo

The backdrop couldn’t be more cinematic. Castle Leod is widely cited as the real-world inspiration for Castle Leoch in Outlander, and today the Mackenzies are less medieval warband and more global family. “We can’t just march down the A9 brandishing swords and muskets anymore,” the Earl says with a smile. “But we can show that we belong to a clan in our tartan. Clans unite people regardless of race, religion, or politics.”

In other words: tartan works a lot like car culture.

The clan counts nearly two million members worldwide, spread across Scotland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and well beyond. “People are looking for something that outlasts the transient,” the Earl says. “Not unlike a Porsche, really.”

The castle’s upkeep is a centuries-long project—“My job is as an explosives consultant, but my destiny has always been to be a slave to a castle,” he jokes—but the sense of continuity is clear. And seeing a Porsche interior stitched in Mackenzie colors? That’s a different kind of heritage coming home.

The Fabric of a Nation

To understand tartan properly, you have to go to Edinburgh. Specifically, to Kinloch Anderson, suppliers to the British royal family since 1903 and something like the Geneva Observatory of tartan authenticity.

John Kinloch Anderson, sixth generation in the family business, explains how early tartans were simply local textiles dyed with whatever roots, leaves, and bark were available. Over time, patterns became linked to the regions—and, eventually, to the clans themselves.

After the Jacobite uprising of 1745, wearing clan tartan was outlawed. But by the 1800s, it was back in royal fashion, codified, catalogued, and woven into Scotland’s identity. Today there are over 2,000 commercially woven tartans and more than 10,000 officially registered ones.

And yes, there’s a decent chance Kinloch Anderson made the very trousers Lapine wore to the Porsche design studio. “It was the ’70s—Rod Stewart, the Bay City Rollers,” Anderson says, smiling. “We exported a hundred thousand tartan skirts a year at one point.”

Now the company is working with Porsche again—this time on notebooks in three historic tartans. From Vivienne Westwood to Ralph Lauren, tartan has had a remarkable afterlife in global design. And now it’s helping celebrate half a century of Porsche’s most iconic turbocharged machine.

A Line That Never Breaks

The 911 Turbo has always been about lineage—linking the past to the present with a whoosh of boost and a whiplash of acceleration. But tartan interiors tell a quieter story: of heritage that refuses to fade, whether on the battlefield, in the fashion world, or stitched into the bolsters of a 911.

As the Turbo 50 Years idles beneath Castle Leod’s ancient stone walls, you can’t help but feel the symmetry. A clan pattern reimagined in a German supercar. A castle that has stood since long before the first internal-combustion engine. And a fabric that, like Porsche itself, has never stopped evolving.

It turns out heritage isn’t just something you inherit. Sometimes, it’s something you drive.

Source: Porsche

Story

Close-Up: The Mercedes-Benz CLS 350 CGI — The Shape That Changed the Game

Walk into the Mercedes-Benz Museum’s Youngtimer exhibit, and one car stops you in your tracks before you even get close enough to read the placard. Under the gallery lights, the Mercedes-Benz CLS 350 CGI looks less painted and more poured. Its body shimmers in Satin Alubeam Silver, a finish normally reserved for design studies—and in this case, created exclusively for the 2006 auto-show fleet. Even standing still, it looks like it wants to slip back into motion.

Liquid Metal, Frozen in Time

Satin Alubeam Silver wasn’t just another paint color. It was an optical flex—the kind of finish that bends reflections like soft metal, refracting light with a gentle sheen instead of a mirror shine. It turns the first-generation CLS into a visual event, guiding your eyes along the car’s long flanks, crisp shoulders, and subtly muscular haunches.

Complementing the skin are 19-inch multi-spoke alloys, bright silver and unapologetically elegant. They fill the arches just right, stretching the car visually and reinforcing what made the CLS a sensation when it debuted. When the Vision CLS concept broke cover in 2003, Mercedes expected interest. What they got instead was a global “build it now” mandate from the public. And so, in 2004, they did—barely changing a line.

The Four-Door Coupé That Rewrote the Script

Today we take the “four-door coupé” trope for granted. In 2004, it didn’t exist. Mercedes-Benz invented it, and the CLS became the brand’s first design-led halo for the 21st century.

Slim roofline. Flowing surfaces. A stance that looked tailored rather than assembled. Former chief designer Peter Pfeiffer and his team didn’t just style a car—they shifted the brand’s center of gravity. The CLS told the world that design, not just engineering, could be a reason to choose a Mercedes.

Inside: Tailored Confidence

Open the door of the museum’s CLS 350 CGI and you’re met with a soft, lingering leather aroma—remarkably intact nearly two decades later. The cabin is wrapped in semi-aniline nappa leather, supple and deep in its black-anthracite tone, contrasted by warm burr-wood trim. It’s classic early-2000s Mercedes, but done with extra intention: sporty, intimate, impeccably crafted. A car wearing a bespoke interior to match its bespoke exterior.

The Debut of CGI: When the Future Took the Stage

This particular CLS wasn’t just good-looking. It was a technology demonstrator, debuting Mercedes’ new CGI (Charged Gasoline Injection) system to the world at the 2006 Geneva Motor Show. Using high-pressure gasoline injection, the 3.5-liter V6 produced 292 hp (215 kW) while promising better efficiency—numbers solid even by today’s standards. Electronically limited to 250 km/h, it previewed the production CGI models sold from 2006 to 2010.

In other words, this wasn’t just a museum piece. It was a milestone.

A Mirror of Its Era—And a Marker for What Came Next

The CLS 350 CGI on display doesn’t just represent a car; it represents a shift in Mercedes-Benz’s identity. The early 2000s were the brand’s emotional awakening—more daring, more expressive, more design-forward. The CLS led the charge. It remains one of Mercedes-Benz’s most influential shapes, a design icon that hasn’t lost its edge.

A Time Capsule Called “Youngtimer”

You can find this CLS in Collection Room 5 as part of the Youngtimer exhibition, open until April 12, 2026. Ten icons from the 1990s and 2000s—complete with the fashion, lifestyle, and culture of their era—tell the story of a generation. Interactive retro gaming, early-Internet aesthetics, even AI-powered creative stations bring the turn-of-the-millennium spirit back to life.

But even among the neon colors and techno nostalgia, the CLS stands apart. Quiet, sculptural, confident—still doing what it did back in 2004.

Still rewriting expectations.

Source: Mercedes-Benz

Story

The Bare-Bones Birth of a Legend: How a Naked Chassis in Turin Became the World’s First Supercar

Turin, November 1965. The crowds packing the motor show expected swoopy Italian metal, maybe a new coachbuilt coupe or two. What they didn’t expect was a bare chassis—painted satin black, riddled with holes, and wearing four stark white exhaust pipes—stealing the entire spotlight. No body, no leather, not even gauges. Just a skeletal frame and a transversely mounted 4.0-liter V-12 sitting behind the cabin like an unexploded bomb.

This was Lamborghini’s P400 prototype. And it wasn’t merely a tease—it was the spark that would ignite the creation of the Miura, the car that would define the term supercar before the word even existed.

Rebels in Sant’Agata

The idea began the previous summer, not as an official project but as a late-night fantasy shared by three young hotshots in the Lamborghini ranks: engineer Giampaolo Dallara, his colleague Paolo Stanzani, and fearless test driver Bob Wallace. All three were barely older than the cars they were tuning, and all shared the same forbidden dream—racing.

Ferruccio Lamborghini had no interest in taking on Ferrari at their own game on the track. So the trio flipped the script. If they couldn’t go racing, they’d bring racing to Lamborghini’s road cars instead. Thus was born the architecture that would become Project L105: a tiny, ultra-light, uncompromising chassis meant to support something wild.

To his credit—and eventually, to the world’s benefit—Ferruccio let them cook.

A Skeleton Ready to Sprint

When Lamborghini rolled the P400 chassis onto the Turin Motor Show floor on November 3, 1965, alongside the more civilized 350 GT and 350 GTS, journalists spit out their espressos. The structure, built by Marchesi of Modena, used 0.8-millimeter steel folded and drilled to the point of translucence. The central tub carried the load. Two subframes held the mechanicals. The whole thing barely tipped 120 kilograms.

It was a racing car in everything but name: double-wishbones at all four corners, Girling discs, Borrani wire wheels. But the party trick—the feature that made engineers either swoon or faint—was the revolutionary integration of the engine and gearbox into one compact, transverse unit behind the seats. Topping it all: a dozen upright Weber intake trumpets shouting to the heavens.

Even without bodywork, the thing radiated menace.

The Coachbuilder Scramble

Coachbuilders flocked to the stand like moths to a lit MIG welder. Touring wanted to shape it, but finances clouded the partnership. Pininfarina was tied up with other automakers. And then came Nuccio Bertone.

According to legend, Ferruccio greeted him at the booth with a jab: “You’re the last coachbuilder to show up.” Bertone studied the exposed frame, paused, and fired back: “My atelier will make the perfect shoe for this beautiful foot.”

Whether or not the exchange happened exactly that way, the meaning stuck. Bertone had seen the future—and wanted to clothe it.

During the quiet Christmas break, his studio unveiled sketches to Ferruccio, Dallara, and Stanzani. They weren’t just good; they were radical. Without hesitation, the drawings were approved.

From Chassis to Myth

Four months later, Geneva 1966. The black skeletal wonder from Turin had transformed into a molten wedge of Italian audacity: the Lamborghini Miura. Long, low, sensual, and threatening all at once, it was a grand-touring car reimagined through the lens of motorsport engineering.

The world had never seen anything like it. And while history sometimes casts the Miura as design-first and engineering-second, the truth is the opposite: its soul was forged first in steel, then clothed in style.

Sixty Years Later: Celebrating the Supercar Zero

In 2026, Lamborghini will mark six decades since the Miura’s debut with a full year of official festivities, including a dedicated Polo Storico tour honoring the machine that rewrote performance-car language. It wasn’t just fast. It wasn’t just beautiful. It birthed a new category altogether—supercar—a term coined by an English journalist grasping for words to describe something that simply didn’t exist before.

It’s fitting that the Miura began as a raw, unfiltered idea, shown to the public without makeup. Because beneath every supercar since—every Aventador, every McLaren, every wide-eyed kid’s poster hero—you can still see its bones.

A satin-black chassis. Four white exhausts. Twelve vertical trumpets. And three young rebels who refused to take “no” for an answer.

Source: Lamborghini