Sir Gary Oldman’s hand-built Runge RS: “it’s oversteery, you do have to be on it”

“It’s Roon-gey,” Sir Gary Oldman says, on the pronunciation of his pride and joy. Meet the Runge RS. Sir Gary’s quite taken with it.

“Well. OK. I was at home with my wife, and I was looking through a magazine and there was an article about Chris Runge and a picture of this car,” he tells TG excitedly.

“I was just so taken with it. I said to my wife, ‘f*** me look at this car’... it has that sort of Porsche maw. You can commission them. She said ‘why don’t you get yourself one, you’re generous with other people, get yourself something'. Back then it was for my 65th birthday.

Photography: Coel Mayer

“So I made an enquiry and spoke to Chris. It was a modest deposit, and you can pay monthly... so I guess I got this beautiful car on HP!”

It is a rather delectable thing. Runge Cars is a family-run business, says Gary, with Chris and his son Fin hand-building each one over bucks using an English wheel. “It’s not a pressed body, so you do see some of the buff marks and welds, which I think is charming.”

So charming, he can’t take his eyes off it. “It’s so beautiful to look at. It sits in the garage and sometimes I just turn the lights on and go and look at it,” he says with a laugh.

That body is mounted over a tubular steel frame with bespoke shocks and lightened Porsche 356B brakes, with an air-cooled flat four sitting comfortably in the middle.

“It’s a 2.3-litre with 195 horsepower, right behind your head. There’s a panel there, but you wanna hear it. That’s the joy of it. When it starts up, you wanna clear the carbs [it runs a pair of twin-choke Webers], give it a bit of juice,” he says with a smile.

“It’s inspired by old aircraft design, which is why it looks like a 1940s American Airways plane. The dashboard is all toggles, and it’s old school in that way.”

He leans over to TG: “You must drive a lot of different cars, but going from reversing with the computer [a rear parking camera] to [mimics sticking his arm over a passenger seat and looking back]… I don’t know how we parked before without screens!”

TopGear.com asks if the thing weighs as much as a shoe. “1,400lbs [635kg].” With nearly 200 horses on tap, does that make it scary to drive? “It's oversteery, but it’s not scary. You’re focused. You’re really driving the car, it could get away from you if you know what I mean. You do have to be on it. But you really feel the machine.”

The machine itself has felt something... uncomfortable, mind. "I was bringing it back into the driveway the other day [when] I tapped the two exhaust pipes. I called Chris and said ‘I think I scraped the exhaust pipe’, and he just replied ‘patina’." A hearty laugh. "All adds to the charm!"

And would he like to take this charming car anywhere special? “I love that test track in Germany.” The Nürburgring? “Yeah. I’ve only ever seen it.

“Oh! And the Amalfi Coast. We were going to Mulholland Drive, and it was in the Cayenne, and it was handling beautifully around these bends and dodgy Californian potholes.

“I said to my wife I wouldn’t mind taking the Runge, because you’d just be working it. It’d be a workout going round those bends in it.

“Runge. Amalfi. That’s it.”