Coupé De Grâce

Escobar’s '90s Civic coupé hides many surprises, each one developed to​ Edenilson deliver a killer blow…

- Daniel Bevis

Endeavour, exploration and experimentation – the three Es of modern mankind. For quite a long time, primitive man was happy enough to just exist, skinning a bear here, daubing some depictions of hunting scenes onto a cave wall there, and generally just getting on with the business of finding food and not dying. But as people grew more sophisticated, carving tools and developing complex linguistic skills, so the inherent wanderlust and natural inquisitiveness of the species began to bloom and flourish. And humans have been accelerating their skillsets ever since; it’snot enough to just find food and shelter and try to keep wolves away from our young, we have to be landing men on the moon, building particle accelerators, imagining strange new literary worlds, fusing disparate strains of flora, travelling about the planet just for the sake of having a look at it because it’s there.

Now, annoyingly, some people are better at this than others. Look, for example, at the endeavours of the amateur pilots of the 1920s, desperately trying to be the first to cross the Atlantic. Near-countless attempts were made to fly from the US to Europe, with most efforts ending in missing planes, aquatic mishaps, fiery explosions, and tragedies as disturbing as they were embarrassing. And then Charles Lindbergh came along with the Spirit of St Louis, a flimsy single-engined monoplane with a fabric body, and flew solo from Long Island to Paris as if it was all in a day’s work, without a single hitch and making it all look very easy.