Brooklands Reunion 2015

The Special Correspondent attended the recent Brooklands Reunion meeting, he brings us some of what he saw.

1935 Hillman Aero Minx
Hillman made a few hundred of these more sporting versions of their successful Minx model between 1935 and 1936. They had 1185 c.c. side-valve 4-cylinder engines and eventually full synchromesh for the 4-speed gearbox, mounted in an underslung chassis.
The cars were not intended as sports cars but rather touring cars; however, some private owners used them in competitions, especially in the major trials that were so popular at the time – for example, three Golds and the Team Award were won in the 1934 MCC Welsh Rally and four Golds were scored in the 1935 London-Land’s End Trial.

Delage Type X
Louis Delage put his cars into competitions almost as soon as his factory was manufacturing them. A second place was gained in 1906 in the Coupe des Voiturettes (a Trophy put up by the French journal L’Auto) and Delage cars with single-cylinder engines won the race outright in 1908. That year saw the last Grand Prix (until 1912) and the interlude created encouraged races for the lighter voiturette class.
In the meantime the Coupe des Voiturettes was joined by the Coupe des Voitures Légères which limited capacity to 3-litres. This came to supercede the Coupe des Voiturettes and the Coupe des Voitures Légères became the Coupe de L’Auto.

Delage returned for the 1911 Coupe de L’Auto at Boulogne with four specially constructed Type X cars.

These had 4-cylinder engines with horizontal valves and 5-speed gearboxes, the first to exploit the higher fifth gear.

The cars were very successful, Bablot winning with Thomas and Guyot third and fourth (Rigal’s car seizing its transmission brake, locking his rear wheels); Delage also won the Team Prize. This car is one of the four team cars.

Phoenix 11.9 hp
The town of Letchworth in Hertfordshire is not one that is normally associated with motoring heritage but it can boast having the very first roundabout in England’s road system (in 1909), and in Pixmore Avenue was a factory making the Phoenix cars from 1911. This building certainly did not look like a typical car plant and its outward appearance was in a Lutyens style and in keeping with the general architectural character of the world’s first Garden City.
The Phoenix company started in London and had been producing 2-cylinder cars characterised by their bonnets being in the shape of an inverted V. Being still chain-driven, they were considered out-moded by the second decade and they were replaced by this 11.9 hp model with a 1496 c.c. 4-cylinder engine mounted under a “coal-scuttle” bonnet and with a scuttle-mounted radiator à la Renault.
With the demise of the Phoenix car in 1926, the Letchworth factory became the temporary home of Reid Railton’s advanced Arab sports car.

1926 Frazer-Nash Boulogne Vitesse
This car was sold in 1929 to Adrian Conan Doyle, son of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and he raced it with a supercharged Anzani engine in that year’s BARC Six Hour race at Brooklands with Dick Nash as co-driver. After over five hours racing it retired with ignition problems but then went to the Lewes Speed Trials where it won the Crayshaw Cup.

Squire 2-seater
One of the seven cars constructed by Adrian Squire. They had twin overhead camshaft supercharged 4-cylinder 1496 c.c. Anzani R1 engines and pre-selector 4-speed gearboxes. This car has a body by the Reading firm of Markham.
Adrian Squire was tragically killed in a day-time bombing raid on the Bristol Aeroplane factory at Filton.
TAILPIECE

Bean 1.8-litre
A rather unconvincing attempt to take on William Morris with his Bullnose Oxfords and Cowleys. Morris undercut his rival’s prices with disastrous results for the Tipton and Dudley company!

David Blumlein, October 2015

Action in the Ardennes

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We can now all relax, the Spa 24 Hours is done and dusted. A famous victory was the result for the BMW of Marc VDS that lays to rest that team’s hoodoo in their local endurance classic. The Special Correspondent was something of a ‘crash magnet’ during the early hours of the race, it all kicked off where the Kemmel Straight turns into Les Combes. Remind me not to stand near him in future.

The Duqueine Engineering Ferrari with team owner Gilles Duqueine at the wheel clattered the barriers, apparently losing control on the unforgiving tarmac.

Sorting out the mess was complicated by the fact that the French businessman is a paraplegic, having been the victim of a serious road accident 30 years back. Since then he has become a respected racing driver, winning titles along the way. He will be back as he was unhurt in the incident, though the Ferrari was too damaged to continue.

The Special Correspondent had just got his breath back when there was a copycat incident. Karim Ojjeh’s BMW getting airborne after hitting the same steel barrier.

Karim was shaken by the accident, caused by a lockup on the downshift according to the telemetry. Otherwise he was OK.

There will be a ‘Reflections on Spa 24 Hours’ along later this week.

Meanwhile here is a gallery to enjoy.

Words Between the Lines of Age

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A despatch reaches DDC Towers from the Golden State, it is the latest literary output from our old friend, David Soares. He took his 911 for a spin last weekend, destination the NorCal Vintage VW and Porsche Treffen………..

During the far-off days of the mid-20th Century, the Porsche Design Bureau’s Volkswagen Type 1 Käfer became the global icon of mobility for Everyman. Ben Pon’s Dutch spin-off, the Type 2 Kombi/Microbus/Samba was the gypsy traveller van for every long-haired seeker, surfer, and acid-tripper looking to turn-on, tune-in, and drop-out. One of my own earliest memories is of being driven in an open-top ’59 Beetle cabriolet to the Joan Baez children’s concert at the Berkeley Folk Festival, held on Sproul Plaza not long before it would become Ground Zero for the Free Speech Movement and the Revolution that would be televised.

We Californians of a certain age have a special soft-spot for the lowly Volkswagen, and for Ferry Porsche’s special-bodied Käfer spin-off, the 356. Ferry wanted to market his car to the moth-eaten remains of the European aristocracy, but his former countryman Max Hoffman had a different pitch in mind. The Baron of Park Avenue asked for de-contented cars to sell to the Amerikaner as hot-rod Beetles, eventually overcoming Ferry’s initial resistance and mass-marketing thousands of Porsches such as the stripped-down Speedster to us posers. By the early ’70’s California was lousy with the rusted lace-like floors of old Bugs and Porsches being driven by anyone who had the floor-jack and bag of hand tools needed to cobble-up a motor. I looked at dozens of rusted sub-$900 356’s before my father bribed me with the promise of paid insurance cover if I bought something Japanese (I was able to get a Wankel-powered Mazda past him). I still pine for the freshly-restored ’57 Speedster that I had to pass-up because I couldn’t reach the required $4500. Today a $350K car.

With all this automotive counter-cultural history buried deep within California’s psyche, a sort of anti-Pebble Beach has grown over the past 10 years into the NorCal Vintage VW and Porsche Treffen, an informal gathering of the tribe held the first Sunday of August at Dave Brubeck Park in the blue-collar town of Concord, east of the San Francisco-Berkeley axis. There is no pre-registration, $15 per car covers the city’s park-use fee, and participants are invited to “park wherever you like.” There’s no champagne bar, but there are a couple of urns of Starbucks in the morning, and at lunchtime a local taco truck shows up.

The crowd and the cars are an eclectic bunch — a tribal meeting of old and new counter-cultures, drawn together by the anti-establishment symbolism of the cars of ’60’s revolutionaries and acid-rock icons, but attuned to both psychedelia and the hot-rodder’s innate sense of style. There were plenty of gray-beards, but the t-shirt was their uniform of the day, not the blue blazers now worn at the Lodge — ironically, their t-shirts give off much more of the vibe that I remember from my first Pebble Beach concours back in 1969 (my last was in 1991 when the vapid pretentiousness became unbearable). The youngsters sported plenty of ink beneath their flat-brim ball-caps and Pendleton shirts.

What of the cars? Enough of my own pretense. I happened to have my camera along, and remembered that my friend Brooks suffers from a similar nostalgia for that brief moment when these little German cars symbolized some sort of hope for a more peaceful and egalitarian world — before LIBOR-rigging and wars-without-end made the very notion of the People’s Car something for weepy losers and dirty hippies. If you weren’t there, let me set the mood with the words of the late Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, from his non-fiction masterpiece, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972). No captions or recitations of provenance; let’s let the cars speak for themselves.
“There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda.… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.…

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.…

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

David Soares, August 2015

Masters of Donington

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Further evidence of the strength of the Historic Racing movement in the UK was to be found at the Masters Festival held at Donington Park recently. Simon Hildrew was on hand armed with cameras and lenses………..

John Brooks August 2015

The Battle of Evermore

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I have only a few rules in this house, not reposting stuff is one, but here I am breaking it. This piece deserves a second airing……..40 odd years gone and still burning brightly………….

All things considered I have been a lucky man, perhaps not in a financial sense, I have been too slow to really make more than a buck or two, but I have met many fine folks along the highway of life and I have been enriched by them in other ways. My old friend David Soares has brightened up my (and hopefully yours) day with this peek into that lost continent, the past. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Wealth is not only measured in monetary terms………….

The title of Thomas Wolfe’s novel You Can’t Go Home Again has launched a thousand journalistic ruminations about the futility of searches for times lost but perhaps, like other ruminants, they’re simply contributing to climate change. In opposition to this popular view, the Romans saw history as man’s long downfall from a past Golden Age and they aspired to restore the past, not to dismiss it. This month I saw two tributes to our own past, which served to remind me that maybe we ought to stop re-inventing the wheel and just maybe aspire to revive our own Golden Age.

The first was the recent Kennedy Center Honors for the boys who recorded at Bron-Y-Aur cottage forty years back. After a pathetically American introduction by Jack Black, the now gray-haired Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, and John Paul Jones nodded politely at a few lame attempts at impossible covers. It seemed as if the ghost of Keith Moon was in the room and that things were going over like the lead gas-bag he famously predicted. Then Ann and Nancy Wilson (who long ago performed as a Led Zeppelin cover band before calling themselves Heart) took the stage accompanied by an orchestra and full chorus, along with the only man who can truly lay down a Bonzo percussion line, his son Jason Bonham. From Ann Wilson’s first notes, their rendition of “Stairway to Heaven” was better than perfect. By the climax of Shayne Fontaine’s note-perfect tribute to Stairway’s soaring solo, Jimmy Page was mouthing the cord changes and smiling beatifically while Robert Plant openly wept. You can go home. (See their performance here: http://youtu.be/JK_DOJa99oo)

Ten days after, I went home to 1972 once again. The proprietor of this website, Mr. Brooks, has been after me for years to purchase a decent scanner to digitize my trays of Kodachromes from the amazing early-‘70’s Laguna Seca Can-Am races that I’ve been carrying around since my boyhood. There is no sight or sound like a field of thundering Group 7 cars taking the green on the front straight at Laguna, driven by the likes of Revson, Hulme, Donohue, Follmer, Siffert, Stewart, Andretti, Oliver, Cevert, Scheckter, Elford, and Redman. I freely admit to having been warped for life by the experience by a monkey that I will never get off my back.

My neighbor down the road, Bruce Canepa, recently began fettling George Follmer’s 1972 Can-Am championship-winning Porsche 917/10, chassis -003, for the new owner after handling the $5.5M sale this past August at Mecum’s Monterey auction. The crew of his state-of-the art facility in Scotts Valley, California is handling several cars for the same enthusiast owner, including Peter Revson’s 1970 L&M Lola, Denny Hulme’s 1970 Can-Am championship McLaren M8D, and the ex-Jackie Oliver 1974 champion Shadow DN4 recently purchased from Don Nichols. Bruce is no stranger to the mighty 1000-horsepower 917/10, having owned and raced the ex-Georg Loos chassis -017 for the past decade. The car was to be rolled-out shortly after New Year’s at a private track day at Laguna Seca, where I had seen the car raced over 40 years ago.

Much has changed at what is now known as Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca in the four decades since the original Can-Am, but in many ways the start-finish straight is like it was when I was a teenager with hair hanging down below my shoulders and a borrowed range-finder camera. The day began wet, just as the weekend did back in ’72, but in the afternoon the clouds parted and the track dried. Mr. Canepa took -003 out for a few laps to warm the fluids and conduct a final systems check before turning the car over to its new owner. Bruce came around for his final lap and I stood at the pit wall as he properly opened-up the throttles the way George Follmer did back in the day. Suddenly, I was transported back in time by the whoosh of 12 air-cooled and turbocharged cylinders making a big chunk of their Metzger-designed 1000 horses. The sight and sound of a 917/10 returned to its stunning white, red, and black L&M tobacco livery literally made me weak in the knees.

What was special about those Canadian-American Challenge Cup races? The races were, after all, just races. The reason that we turned up every year was to see what was going to come off the trailers. The fields of Group 7 were incredibly diverse. Jim Hall introduced wings and sucker-cars for Hill and Elford; Gordon Coppuck’s papaya-orange Big Macs driven by Bruce, Denny, and Revvie were different every season and always better than the Trojan customer cars; Don Nichols’ AVS Shadows were truly innovative; Eric Broadly’s Lolas gave drivers like Surtees, Stewart, and Donohue something new and different; and Hans Metzger and Helmut Flegl changed the game with their 917 variants for Siffert, Donohue, and Follmer. The amazing cars were reason enough to turn up, and in those days before Led Zeppelin performed at Bill Graham’s first stadium show, thousands did.

Most pundits have wanted to place blame for the demise of the Can-Am at the feet of Roger Penske and Mark Donohue, who with Metzger and Flegl developed 1972’s 917/10 into the amazing 1200-horsepower 917/30, but I will have none of it. The year 1973 was the beginning of a long global economic crisis linked to oil. Nobody had the budget to go racing in the unlimited class, and gas-hog 8-liter Chevy’s and 5.4 turbo Panzer’s were far from politically correct when most Americans were lining-up for hours to simply pump gas into their Pintos. The result has been decades of spec and consumption-based sportscar formulae which lack the pizzaz and diversity of the Golden Age of the Can-Am.

Today, with the takeover of the ALMS by NASCAR’s Grand-Am subsidiary, we are again being fed more spec-formula pablum. Close racing is promised, between the same cars and teams year after year. No diversity. No anticipation of seeing something new, different, and better. The racing will be good, but if I want to see good racing I can watch the shit-boxes of the WTCC. This is why Rich Guys lined-up transporters at Laguna to run a bunch of old cars rather than invest in spec-racers.

As Robert Plant crooned 40 years ago in Stairway to Heaven, “Ooooh, it makes me wonder.” Why can’t we go back?

David Soares, January, 2013

Montlhéry Marvels

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The Special Correspondent and I paid a visit to L’autodrome de Linas-Montlhéry recently, the excuse being the Vintage meeting. It was a surprisingly enjoyable day, with a wide variety of cars to admire……here is a little of what I saw.

Rare and Interesting at the Techno Classica

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The Special Correspondent casts his eye around the halls of this year’s Techno Classica, as is his wont he uncovers some gems for our appreciation.

1937 Mercedes-Benz 230N
A rare Mercedes model. This beautifully preserved car has a 2.2-litre 6-cylinder side-valve engine and transverse leaf independent front suspension.

Here is its cockpit. Only 38 of these cars were made.

1925 Renault 40CV
This was Louis Renault’s attempt to compete in the luxury market with the likes of Hispano-Suiza, Maybach, Rolls-Royce and Isotta Fraschini. The basic model was introduced in 1921 and they were only made in limited numbers. This monumental car, the MN model, has the “new” losange Renault badge introduced in 1925. It was in this year that Renault took one of these cars fitted with a L’Avocat & Marsaud 4-seater open body to Montlhéry where it captured a host of records including the world’s 24 hour record at 87.65 m.p.h.

This is what it’s like to sit in, still with the fashionable right-hand drive for luxury cars.

Tatra 80
Still with luxury cars, this is the largest car made by this fascinating Czechoslovakian company, the work of the gifted Hans Ledwinka.

It is powered by this impressive 5.99-litre V-12 uncharacteristically equipped with side valves – note the unusual dynamo drive on top of the engine at the back – and the rear suspension has a massive transverse leaf spring controlling the swing-axles. Again like the Renault it was aimed at the top luxury market and a mere 25 were built from 1930-35. The President of the Czech Republic, T.G. Masaryk, used one as did the Minister for Foreign Affairs, E. Beneš.

Skoda Superb 640

We are used to regarding Skodas as excellent cars these days but before the Second World War and the subsequent onslaught of the Communist regime they made very fine cars.

This is a typical example with a type name familiar today. This version has a 2.5-litre 6-cylinder side-valve engine giving 68 m.p.h. Only 201 of them were constructed between 1934-36.

1931 DKW F1

There’s nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1 v9)! No, McLaren was not the first to name their road-car an F1 and Mini was not the first to use a transverse engine to drive the front wheels! This little DKW did both.

It had a 2-cylinder 2-stroke unit mounted across the frame driving the front wheels although it did not take advantage of the space this layout afforded. It was Europe’s first high volume series production car with fwd and it offered the first competition to the motorcycle in Germany.

1937 Lincoln Zephyr
The Zephyr was designed to fit into Ford’s model range between the Ford V8 and the up- market Lincolns. It was introduced in November 1935 for the 1936 year and was one of the first successful streamlined cars after the market failure of Chrysler’s Airflow. It had a V12 version of Ford’s flathead V8 and the car still used Ford’s transverse leaf suspension with rigid axles dating from the Model T! 15,000 were sold up to 1940.

Just what is this, I hear you say? Well, it’s a Zaporoshets, a Russian small car, built in the Ukraine, and very popular in the Soviet Union for many years.

As shown, it has a rear-mounted V4 engine of various small capacities.

Bentley used the Essen Show to launch their new Mulsanne Blue Train model to commemorate the 85th anniversary of Woolf Barnato’s race with the Blue Train from the south of France to Calais.

For much of the time since it was believed that Barnato used this elegant Gurney Nutting-bodied Speed Six but this was not the case – this car was not built until after the famous run! In fact Barnato used a Speed Six with a four-door saloon body by Mulliner.

TAILPIECE

An 1897 Malicet & Blin single-cylinder car. This company did not really make cars but they were one of France’s main suppliers of components, especially chassis and steering gear, to the fledgling industry at the dawn of motoring.

David Blumlein August 2015

Super Prix at Brands Hatch

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The HSCC Super Prix is one of the most eagerly anticipated events on the UK historic racing calendar………….Simon Hildrew popped down to his local track with cameras at the ready…………

John Brooks, July 2015

Britcar 24 Hours – Reflections from the Special Correspondent

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Our Special Correspondent trekked up to Northampton a while back for the Britcar 24…………….he shares some thoughts and a short history lesson………….

Revival of Silverstone 24
Although 24 hour races have been run since 1905, most of the established examples date from the 1920’s: the Bol d’Or in and around Paris was first run in 1922, Le Mans arrived on the calendar a year later, Spa copied this in 1924 and even Monza tried a race that year as well. Britain wanted to join in also but the only possible location at that time was Brooklands. Unfortunately, noise restrictions imposed by the neighbours’ complaints meant no night racing was allowed at the Surrey track; they resorted to splitting their race, the Double Twelve, into two parts run on consecutive days.
It is not generally realised that the first 24 hour race to be run in the UK was as recent as 1980 when the Willhire event took place at Snetterton. This was a race for production cars and fifteen such events were held at the Norfolk circuit including a 25 hour race in 1989 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the sponsor, the Willhire Vehicles Rental Company, a local car rental firm. The race’s demise was accelerated by the low level of attraction on the Group N saloons and 1994 witnessed the last of these once popular events. In 2003 a 2CV 24 Hour race was the last long–distance at Snetterton to date but the challenge of staging a full 24 hour race in Britain was taken up James Tucker’s Britcar series at Silverstone in 2005. Since then there have been seven further 24 hour races at the Northampton venue including the 2015 event. This latter was officially titled the Dunlop 24 in deference to its generous sponsor.
Here are some of the more interesting cars to tackle the round-the-clock event:

Ginetta chose to gain more experience with their new LMP3 car which had made its début at Silverstone at the recent ELMS round. It streaked away in the early laps but later suffered various problems which dropped it right down the leader board.

Martin Short’s RollCentre Team entered a potent BMW saloon with a 4-litre V8 engine but the car did not last long, alas!

The winning BEECHDEAN GT4 Aston Martin Vantage; 16 year-old Jamie Chadwick was among the successful drivers.

Good to see any Jaguar involved – this XKR Coupé failed to finish.

This works-entered Aston Martin Vantage finished 5th, driven by CEO Andy Palmer, Design Director Marek Reichmann, journalist Andrew Frankel and GP3 driver Alice Powell.

The Chevron GR8 made a welcome appearance in the race.

This Radical RXC is the original chassis. It has an RPE 3-litre V8 and uses a bespoke Quaife 7-speed gearbox. Despite some problems the car won its class.

Cor Euser’s team has achieved many successes with his Lotus Evora and this time it reached the podium for its third place.

This Diesel Jaguar once won its class in the Nϋrburgring but lacked success in this race.

Notice the Ginetta’s number 12 coming off to reveal its ELMS number.

It becomes number 2!

The car at Village Corner proving it is really number 12!
TAILPIECE

This little Ford Fiesta was the smallest car in the 24 hour field.

History Lesson at Donington

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Since it was rescued from oblivion at the hands of wannabe F1 promoters Donington Park has been restored to its former glory. It is the venue for some the finest historic racing meetings in the UK. DDC’s man with a lens or two, Simon Hildrew, was in attendance at the recent Historic Festival…………we are fortunate to share his work from that weekend.

John Brooks July 2015