Soon after the chequered flag came down at the twilit Abu Dhabi circuit to close the 2018 Formula 1 season Fernando Alonso’s last of 17 drama-packed campaigns – three of the cars broke out into a display of impromptu donuts. Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes and Sebastian Vettel’s Ferrari were joined on pit straight by the retiring Spaniard’s pirouetting McLaren; soon afterwards the 2018 Champion and Vice-Champion gave the Spaniard a guard of honour. They were bidding a respectful farewell to a fellow Championship winner, and Formula One was saying goodbye to one of its all-time greats.

We’ve been very busy here at Automobilist. As well as moving to a larger headquarters and expanding our team of creatives, we are also working on plenty of exciting new projects – and have given our website a complete redesign so we can share them with you. Here’s a summary of what’s new around here.

James Hunt’s last-gasp victory at the 1976 Japanese Grand Prix was the culmination of one of the most dramatic and controversial seasons in Formula One history. Four decades later, rose-tinted memories and Hollywood histrionics have skewed the narrative – but few are in a better position to put it straight than James’ son Freddie Hunt.

How Mike Hawthorn won Jaguar’s first Le Mans race – but left a trackside holocaust in his wake that would change racing forever.

The 1955 Le Mans race was always set to be a memorable one. After a promising second-place finish for its D-type the previous year, Jaguar returned to La Sarthe with a revised version of the car it had purpose-built to win the world’s greatest endurance race. Title-holder Ferrari was back with a gaggle of six-cylinder 121LMs. And Mercedes, which had just proved the potency of its new 300SLR sports-racer by winning the Mille Miglia, had thrown its Tyrolean into the ring with an all-star team that included Moss, Fangio and Kling. Practice times had been front-page news; everything was in place for an epic Coventry-Modena-Stuttgart showdown.

One of the most recent Automobilist projects was commissioned by Maserati, which wanted to celebrate the 60th anniversary of its first Gran Turismo: the 3500GT prototype affectionately known as Dama Bianca, or White Dame. It was the star of the 1957 Geneva Salon, setting the template for the production car with only minor design tweaks and announcing Maserati’s ambitious foray into the series production of grand tourers after withdrawal from racing earlier that year. However, sixty years on, a fresh challenge presented itself: today the White Dame no longer exists, presumed destroyed once its promotional duties were fulfilled.