The rest of my website is fairly 'exclusive' and unique, because the photos and stories are mine or those of fans who have personally sent me donations.  In this section I have collected oddments from everywhere: the InterNet, newspapers, books, magazines, etc.  

  January 2012:  A visit to Lynmouth in Devon brought back only-just-there memories of the terrible 1952 flood that came down the West and East Lyn rivers after 9 inches of rain fell on Exmoor in 24 hours.  This rare car was recovered from the sea.

   January 2012: How  wild can a 1956 Ford Zephyr family saloon get?  This wild.

  March 2011: Crazy racers: straight-line drag racers can choose to race pretty much whatever they like on whatever straight surface they like.  Here's an "altered" on sand.  Here's an incredible Australian drag bike on sand.

"Experimental" is a good word for this.  It never got further than test runs  Dynasphere 1;  Dynasphere 2.  

Old cine film (copy the url):  http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=2766

Another film clip (copy the url):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNakXjGNjIY

  September 2010: Can a dumper truck at high speed crash through a military compound wall?  Watch the video clip with sound on.

  September 2010:  Why are Turkish pedestrians and drivers so polite and obedient in the presence of police? I took this photo in Istanbul a couple of years back.  Would you give the young cop any "lip" if he stopped you?  Click through this sequence of 5 photos and see why Turkish drivers and pedestrians stop politely when the motorcycle cops say so.

Rebels racing is fun:  One, Two, Three.

Motorcycle mayhem: Four dragbikes go OUCH!  [these links were faulty before 1 Aug.2011]

 February 2010:  Low tyre pressures are common in drag racing, and they often result in noticeable  Tire distortion;  Really scary tire distortion  [photos at Santa Pod Raceway]

The late Gilles Villeneuve (here with his son, champion-to-be Jacques) remains a Canadian hero --- when he died in Belgium, the Canadian government sent a Boeing 747 to transport his coffin back, and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau attended his funeral.  Gilles was simple: he drove every car, good and bad, at and over its limit on every corner of every lap of practice, qualifying, and race, throughout his career until he was killed in the final minutes of qualifying at the Belgian Grand Prix in 1982  --- doing exactly what he loved. 

Canada Post issued a commemorative set of stamps, and here they are:    front cover; back cover; sheet of stamps.

May 2010:  Years ago at a Silverstone GP practice I snapped this lucky photo of Ricardo Patrese in a Williams F1 car as he braked for Copse corner at the end of the fast pit straight;  I understand modern F1 drivers tap the brakes for less than half a second, so this was a lucky shot -- his brakes back and front are glowing bright red.  I think they were still using steel discs back then.

  July 2009 -- Mystery motorcycle: Someone sent me a card, featuring a photo from the 1940's or 1950's, and apparently taken in France.  What on earth is the tiny motorcycle?  The tank badge says "RZ", and it is not a toy --- see the primary chain and clutch and tele shock absorbers.  Anyone?  "R.Z." may just be the name of the one-off builder.  What's the 2-stroke motor?  Drop me an e-mail.

 February 2009:  Love the North American sprint cars:

Unwinged sprint cars weigh around 1200lbs / and their 410 cu.in. motors on methanol, routinely make 750bhp but when tuned to near destruction for a high-paying race, with compression ratios raised to a scary 17:1, put out about 825bhp, which is good for an outdated pushrod two-valve design.  Wheelbase can be as short as 7 feet (84 inches), direct drive with no clutch between the engine and the rear axle.  In this photo you see the right-front wheel has no brake, only the left one ---- a hard poke is enough to snatch the car into the left-turn-only bends.   Solid beam front axle, and solid locked-diff rear axle with a single inboard disc brake.  To see fifteen of these open their throttles from a rolling start will knock you off your seat and give you a heart attack. Look at the one below trying to peel off its 15-inch wide rear tire:

March 2010:  Fancy a passenger ride in a full-blooded sprint car?  In the US and in New Zealand rides are sometimes available in two-seater sprinters --- One;  Two.   In Britain you can ride shotgun in an F1 stock-car, which includes receiving a couple of significant "taps" from another car.

January 2012:  More sprint car technology:

Rear axle "stagger" and offset.

Disc brake on solid tube axle; note, this is the left side SMALLER tire you can see!

Spare axle showing the quick-change gears --- NOT a differential, just an under-and-over arrangement like a shotgun!  The axle here has the incoming driveshaft section pointing down.

Love the old ones, too (Parnelli Jones in action)

 February 2009: Mini cars:  fifty years before the SMART car, post-war European countries, and especially Germany, were devising the smallest econo-cars imaginable. Someone passed on to me this PowerPoint slide show, thirty photos taken in a car museum, and most of these cars had single-cylinder 2-stroke motors of 200-400cc.  

January 2009: The following two scans are of a restored Indianapolis roadster from 1960, a beautiful car:  Front view.  Overhead view.  Imagine the sound of the full-race Chevy (de-stroked from 283 to 255 cu.in. and tilted 18 degrees) through that long exhaust.  Incredible as it seems to us today, in 1960 the builder used a 1939 Ford 3-speed transmission with Lincoln-Zephyr gears.

January 2009:  Big motor for a motorcycle:  the builder, C.F. Leonhardt, calls this machine Gunbus, and the air-cooled V-twin engine displaces an astounding 410 cubic inches (just under 7 litres), and puts out 523 ft/lbs of torque.  "Boom - boom - boom - boom".

Of course, you could simply intsall a BMW V-12 car engine in your bike.

But if you prefer English engines, you could slip a Jaguar V-12 into your motorbike.

While we're on Jags, why do they have to have only four wheels?  Here's a Jag with SIX wheels .

Back to more reasonable bikes:  Bad Dog Cycles has designed a V-twin of 3500cc, DOHC, 4-valve fuel-injected beauty, and is considering a larger 4500cc version.

In 1956 a wooden-boat builder tried his hand at car building, and came up with this lightweight sports car powered by a rear-mounted Aerial Square Four m'cycle engine.

If you're my age you remember when motorcycle-sidecar racing used motorcycles connected to sidecars. Here are two of today's sidecar outfits, at Brands Hatch, minus their bodywork ---- .

and another ----


"The Garlits Explosion":  Front-engined dragsters were a vicious breed that had a dozen ways of killing their drivers.  Big Daddy Don Garlits had already been burned by an exploding supercharger, but the really scary event took place on the start line at Lions drag strip in Califronia in 1970.  The clutch and flywheel exploded and the shrapnel cut the chassis in half and badly injured Don.  The entire roll-cage/cockpit parted from the frame, rotating in the air.  

Do you like "oddball" engineering?  Here are some beauties, from various internet sources:  

"Stagger" is the difference in diameter between rear tyres, and this one is pushing it to the limit. Imagine gassing it with these wheels on the ends of your locked axle.  "Stagger" at Skagit Speedway

The Modern British Stock Car:  The rest of my website is "nostalgia", so this fabulous car --- Frankie Wainman Junior's monster, photographed in April 2008 by top stocks photographer Colin Herridge, has to go in this section.  

Most of us have fantasized driving a racer on the road.  This American fan fitted the required legal accessories and had some fun:

[Photo from a Sprint Car calendar by Paul Oxman publishing in California.]

 Oddments:  In about 1962 I photographed this daring experiment: someone took a little KIEFT single-seater and stuffed in a 4.7 litre (283 cu.in) Chevrolet V-8.  Photo 1.   Photo 2.   It was running at a hill-climb at Ragley Hall in Warwickshire. Kieft cars were built in Wolverhampton.  Industrialist Cyril Kieft built and designed the single seaters, and his great-grand-daughter today, Savannah Courtenay, is an world class teenage kart racer in Spain. 

Two more Oddments:  First, the golden days of "Formula Libre" in England, when you could bring almost ANY darned thing to the track and flog it round, with "Libre" usually meaning "monster/big/outrageous". In this case Chris Summers took a tube-framed Lotus 24 and dropped in a fuel-injected Chevy V-8 that he'd got from BP Research branch.  This snapshot was taken in (approx.) 1962-64 at Silverstone.  The "ack-ack gun"-like exhausts sounded wonderful.  I saw this car launch from the front row down the straight to Cope Corner, and his tires were "hazing" all the way — something that was very rare in those days.  

Second one, which I don't know anything about, is a prototype Diva Valkyr sports car, rear-engined, aluminium-bodied, and using the then-popular alloy Hillman Imp motor.  Photo taken same time as the Summers one.  Additional facts / corrections are welcome.  Jack Reynolds has identified Mike Aired on the left, and Mike Walton in overalls, and pointed out that a Valkyr was also built, experimentally, with a honking great Coventry Climax 2.7 litre (4-cyl) motor from a Gurney-Weslake F1 car.

Holy!  In 1988 the Pope visited Ferrari's workshops and blessed one or more of their current Formula 1 Grand Prix cars.  I don't know whether some supernatural agency helped with subsequent races.  First,  Second, Third.

Glory days: when Grand Prix drivers could switch from an F1 car to a saloon to have some fun.  Here is a gaggle of three saloons in 1966 at Snetterton, four-wheel-drifting through a fast bend: a Mustang, a Galaxie, and hard on their tails the tiny Lotus Cortina of world champion Jim Clark.

Three more GT's photographed at Silverstone sometime in 1963 or 1964: Tojeiro-Buick GT :  Racing under the Ecurie Ecosse team colours, this  rear-engined car had the then-new Buick alloy V-8.  Here is the rear view.   The Tojeiro originally had a Climax 2.5 litre 4-banger engine.  A second Tojeiro was built along these lines and raced briefly by Jackie Stewart.  

2009 update:  One of the two cars still exists, and was advertised for sale in 2009; here are two InterNet photos of the nicely-restored Tojeiro:  one,  and two.   John Tojeiro was a brilliant ex-Fleet Air Arm engineer who also designed the A.C. Ace chassis --- the basis of the legendary AC Cobra.

Sleek:  This prototype Costin-bodied Lister-Jaguar was built for Le mans.  It may have been used in the racing film "The Green Helmet", as an open-bodied sports racer.  Hand-beaten aluminium bodywork.

 JULY 2009:  46 years after I took that b/w snapshot at Silverstone, i discovered that Lister Jag still exists, and is being worked hard .

Is this the biggest engine ever installed in a competition vehicle?  A German tractor-pull special called "Dragonfire" uses a massive 42-cylinder Russian submarine engine.  With seven banks of 6 cylinders each, it is 8,665 cubic inches, or 144 litres.  When the tranny locks up, Europe moves East—.

JULY 2010 UPDATE: thanks to keen-eyed Alistair Howarth, I can add this info (quoted direct):

Here's a tractor with three V-12 Allison aero engines (1,710 cu.in. each.)  

And one with an old air-cooled radial engine probably from a WW2 bomber.  

Here are some more tractor-pull engines:  Radial 1;  Radial 2;  Radial 3;  Four turbines;  "Dragonfire"

Unusual drag engine:  I took this photograph about 1983 at Seattle International Raceway.  The engine was in in Gene Snow's nitro Funny Car, and it's the only turbocharged nitro-fuel racer I've come across.  The motor was built by Nick Arias, and although the valve covers are from their 8.3 litre automotive design, this engine is actually a custom built Arias powerboat V-8 of a huge 10 litres capacity.  

Gene Snow was a typical drag-racer:  although this motor ran fine, the exhaust turbos smothered some of the noise and in Gene Snow's  opinion  --- "it didn't sound as tough as a fuel car should"  ---, so he abandoned the project.  [Arias is still building top quality race engines today.]

The "Michigan Madman", E.J.Potter had among his many weird and scary machines, a "Double-V-12" Allison aero engine, which naturally he put in a tractor.   Allison built only 150 of these prototype bomber engines, but ol' E.J. got himself one.   It has 56 litres — 24 cylinders — Turbo-and-supercharged — two crankshafts in one crankcase — Over one ton in weight.   E.J. reckoned it was one of the most beautiful engines ever made. 

How low can you get?  These karts are called "laydowns" or "enduros", and the driver peers between his feet. I took this photo in 1985, at the now-defunct Westwood circuit near Vancouver BC.

How would you like to take off the valve-train cover of your engine and see this?   It's what drives the sleeve-valves on a 14-cylinder Bristol Hercules engine.  Just don't drop a spring-clip in there —.  The beast (they built tens of thousands of them) was a two-row radial with 14 cylinders.  Until March 2010 I had labelled this a 12-cylinder, but my thanks to Fred van der Horst of the Netherlands for spotting my error.

January 2010:  Since I am now living in Canada, this little item caught my eye; listed on the back of a stock-car programme from Manchester's Belle Vue race track in 1954, are 'upcoming entertainments', one of which is called "THE STORMING OF QUEBEC".   I am guessing this refers to the battle of the Plains of Abraham (sometimes called the Heights of Abraham) in 1759, when a British force successfully occupied Quebec City, taking it from France.  At Belle Vue, this must have been a staged display accompanied by fireworks, and was performed on Saturday nights.  

That reminds me of when I was a little kid, taken to the circus in Northampton. The show included a battle with charging horses and with blazing six-guns, between "Davey Crockett and the Indians", and I was completely entranced.  Leaving the big top, at the end of the evening, I suffered a typical childhood disillusionment: I saw "Davey Crockett" getting onto his motorbike with one of the dead Indians.                                                       "Ha, they're off to the pub" laughed my dad, and I burst into tears -----.