Seven times car companies rewrote their own history

Because more Veyrons are always better than fewer Veyrons, the F.K.P. Hommage is unquestionably a Good Thing.

But it’s also a Confusing Thing: a tribute to modern Bugatti’s original hypercar… based on its follow-up-to-the-original hypercar. Sure, it imagines what an updated Veyron could have become… but didn’t the Chiron do that in the first place anyhow?

But, as well as a source of significant philosophical confusion, the F.K.P. Hommage (not to be confused with FKA Twigs, who, to the best of our knowledge, does not contain any parts milled from a single piece of aluminium billet) is the latest example of a manufacturer raiding its own heritage for inspiration.

Because, hey, why let some outside company mess around with your back catalogue when you could do it yourself? Here are seven more examples of car companies getting creative with their own history.

You come at the king, you’d best not miss (artistically speaking). Alfa’s modern reboot of the most beautiful car in its really-quite-beautiful portfolio – Scaglione’s magnificent Tipo 33 of the Sixties – had the potential to be a grim, new-VW-Beetle-grade retro-disaster.

Thankfully they stuck the landing. At £1.7m – around eight times the price of the Maserati MC20 on which it’s closely based – the new 33 Stradale is admittedly a pricey way to live out your ‘Sixties Riviera Boulevardier’ fantasies. Whole lot cheaper than inventing a time machine, mind.

If you were a child of the Seventies or the Eighties, the OG Countach was the ultimate bedroom-wall poster car. With the new Countach LPI 800-4, Lamborghini was clearly hoping all those kids of the Seventies and Eighties have grown up to run successful hedge funds.

Or 112 of them, at least. Built around the bones of the Sián, the new Countach does an unexpectedly convincing job of dragging Lambo’s V12 icon into the 21st century. As arrogantly arresting as the original? Not quite. A whole lot easier to reverse-park? Very much so.

In 2016, Land Rover finally stopped building the original Defender. Only it didn’t, really.

A couple of years later – clearly spotting the long queue of punters seeking (a) that blocky old Defender aesthetic, (b) a slightly more modern driving experience and (c) the sensation of having their wallets emptied at pace, Land Rover quickly cranked up production of Classic Defenders, taking old shells and stuffing them with such modern treats as a 5.0-litre V8.

And if £200k for an ‘old’ Defender simply isn’t wallet-emptying enough for you, you’ll be wanting the new (sorry ‘new’) Classic Defender Churchill Edition, which pays tribute to the Series I gifted to Sir Winston in 1954 for his 80th birthday.

Was Churchill’s original Series I packing a 400bhp V8, Bilstein dampers and uprated anti-roll bars? It was not. Do we still approve? As Churchill himself famously said, “Oh yes.”

[‘Oh yes’ was the Churchill car insurance dog, you muppet - Ed]

Bentley doubtless does not consider its 2025-issue Speed Six a rewriting of history, instead a straight continuation. But it’s a new car from 1929, arriving nearly a century later, so clearly something’s gone wonky with the chronology here.

Built using period techniques and with absolutely no concessions to modern luxuries such as synchromesh or safety, the modern Speed Six (yours for £1.5m plus taxes, old boy) represents, in Bentley’s words, a resumption of production. Always keep ‘em waiting, chaps.

Another continuation car with Le Mans history, another grand debate on what constitutes ‘original’ and ‘authentic’ and indeed ‘furious raiding of one’s own back catalogue’.

Granted, the metaphysical implications of ‘what if Jag had made more than 50-odd C-Types in the early Fifties?’ aren’t quite so juicy as, say, ‘what if Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s chauffeur had been taught to actually read a map?’

But hey, while this particular timeline may not have averted mass global conflict, at least it leaves it with a bunch more pretty old Jags than we had previously. We’ll take it.

Another continuation car, but one with a rare sense of humour. Aston’s own tribute to 007’s company car of choice in 1964’s Goldfinger packs pretty much every gadget found on the Q-branch-enhanced original.

Smoke screen? Check. Battering rams? Check. Oil slick delivery system? Check. Bulletproof rear shield? Check. Ejector seat? Actually not-check, modern health and safety considering the finest feature of Bond’s DB5 a trifle life-threatening. Which was kinda the point, right?

Does this count as rewriting history? Debatable. But at the very least, it’s an interesting anomaly that, more than quarter of a century after revealing the first Zonda – and 14 years since replacing it with the Huayra – Pagani is still pumping out new examples of its debut hypercar.

Well, when we say ‘pumping out’, we actually mean ‘making very occasional one-off versions for its most valued and indeed valuable clientele’. The most recent, the Zonda Unico, was revealed last year and apparently inspired by the towering Kunlun mountain range of western China. On account, we’re guessing, of both being quite pointy and many millions of years old.