“Analogue” has become a catch-all word in car culture—sometimes meaning old, sometimes meaning expensive, sometimes just meaning no touchscreen. DK Engineering’s Analogue Heroes Driving Tour cuts through that noise with a simple rule that’s almost rebellious in 2025: bring a manual gearbox. Everything else—brand, era, nationality—becomes secondary to the one thing modern performance cars keep trying to engineer around: the driver.
This is not a static concours lawn, and it isn’t a closed-road sprint where the road book matters more than the road. The tour’s appeal is more elemental. A handful of properly special cars. Three days of real driving. And Portugal as the canvas—coastal drama on the Costa Vicentina (Vicentine Coast Natural Park) and a run inland through towns and terrain that feel built for momentum and mechanical music.
A Road Trip for Cars That Don’t Want to Be Museum Pieces
After DK’s F40 anniversary tour in the south of France in June 2023, the team returned to the same core idea—owners using their cars as intended—this time with White Label Events helping run the program. The mid-November schedule (Nov. 17–20) put the group in southern Portugal, where “sunny climes” aren’t just brochure talk; they’re part of the logic. When you’re traveling with machines that thrive on temperature—tires, brakes, coolant, drivers—weather isn’t small talk, it’s strategy.
DK’s people were in it, too—alongside clients—creating the kind of relaxed, clubby atmosphere that makes the best driving events feel less like a production and more like a shared obsession. The tour even leaned into car sharing, which is the fastest way to turn a group of owners into a group of co-conspirators.
The Route: Coastline First, Then the Interior’s Greatest Hits
Portugal can do postcard pretty. Over three days and roughly 450 km, the drive mixed the coastal sweep of the Vicentine Coast with inland sections passing through Évora, Monsaraz, and the São Mamede Mountain Range Natural Park. That’s the right kind of variety for analogue cars: open visibility for breathing room, tighter segments for rhythm, and enough elevation change to remind you that “feel” is a measurable thing.
The Cast: When “Greatest Hits” Is Somehow an Undersell
It’s difficult to list the lineup without it sounding like a fantasy draft, but the point isn’t numbers or bragging rights. It’s what these cars represent: an era where performance was astonishing and comprehensible.
Start with the Ferraris—because of course you do. A spread that runs from 288 GTO through F40 GT, alongside a manual 599 GTB and DK’s own manually converted 360 Challenge Stradale.
Then there’s the Porsche counterpoint: two Carrera GTs—a pair of cars that turn every fuel stop into a small crowd and every tunnel into a reason to downshift.
And just when your brain tries to classify the tour as a “2000s supercar greatest hits” drive, the Gordon Murray presence resets the conversation. The group included two T.50s, one being DK’s own and the other a prototype. That’s not just rare; it’s historically significant, the sort of thing you usually read about rather than see pointed at the horizon with luggage in the back.
The modern analogue theme continues with a duo of Singer DLS—cars that don’t simply reimagine a 911, they distill it—and then veers into wonderfully unexpected territory with a Koenigsegg CCX and a Pagani Zonda. Both brands are usually discussed in the language of top speeds and trading-card rarity. Here, they’re part of a story about inputs: steering weight, brake pressure, the human metering of power.
Why It Works: The Soft Stuff Is the Hard Part
Any driving event can book a nice hotel and print a lanyard. The challenge is creating a tone that matches the machinery. The best tours don’t feel like they’re trying to impress you; they feel like they’re trying to free you—free you from traffic, from distraction, from the constant compromise of modern roads and modern cars.
A manual-only rule is a clever filter because it’s not really about nostalgia. It’s about pace. Manuals slow things down in the best way. They make you plan. They make you listen. They make you earn the speed—and then they make you smile when the road opens up and everything clicks.
And Portugal seems like a quiet cheat code for this. The landscapes are cinematic without needing to shout, the roads have that rare mix of visibility and flow, and the variety keeps the cars honest. The tour’s photo set—captured by Alex Penfold—underscores that point: these aren’t objects posed for admiration, they’re machines mid-story.
“Analogue Heroes—Available Now”
Seeing a tour like this naturally sends people thinking, what’s my analogue hero? DK’s current inventory shows the idea isn’t limited to a once-a-year passport stamp. A few standout manual, driver-first machines on their “Available Stock” list include:
Availability changes quickly in this world, but the point stands: the analogue mindset is alive and well.
