Now for something different:
Some different auto-related items that I like:

   February 2010:  Tire distortion;  more tire distortion!

Gilles Villeneuve was and remains a Canadian hero --- so much so that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau attended his funeral.  Gilles was simple: he just drove every car, the good and the bad, very very fast, at and over its limit, on every corner of every lap of every race, throughout his career until he died in qualifying at the Belgian Grand Prix in 1982 doing exactly what he loved best. Canada Post issued a commemorative set of stamps, and here they are:    front cover; back cover; sheet of stamps.

  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 big-paying race, with compression ratios raised to a scary 17:1, put out about 825bhp, which isn't bad for a pushrod two-valve head of ancient design.  Wheelbase can be as short as 7 feet (84 inches), direct drive with no clutch.  In this photo you'll notice that a brake line goes only to the left-front wheel ---- a touch helps snatch the car into the left-turn-only bends!  Solid "beam" front axle, and solid locked-diff rear axle with a single brake disc on the axle.  To see 10 or 15 of these hit the gas on a rolling start is enough to give you a heart attack.

March 2010:  Would you like to ride in a full-blooded sprint car?  In the US and in New Zealand too, rides are sometimes available in tw-seater sprinters --- One;  Two.

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

 February 2009: Mini cars:  fifty years before clever folks thought up the SMART and other sub-compacts, 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 from an old magazine, name forgotten, of a restored Indianapolis roadster from 1960.  Recently in the UK, the people's vote for most-beautiful race car went to the legendary Maserati 250F.  Yes, it's great, but look at these photos --- is this a beautiful car, or what?  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:  the builder, C.F. Leonhardt,  calls this machine "Gunbus", and the air-cooled V-twin engine --- fuel injected -- displaces an astounding 410 cubic inches (just under 7 litres), and puts out 523 ft/lbs of torque.  Say after me, "Booom-booom-booom-booom".

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

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

While we're on Jags, have you ever wondered why they all seem to make do with only four wheels?  Here's a Jag with SIX.

Back to more "reasonable bikes:  Bad Dog Cycles has designed a V-twin of 3500cc, DOHC, 4-valve fuel-injected beauty, and is even 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 not so young, you probably remember motorcycle-sidecar racing as using motorcycles connected to sidecars.  Here are two of today's sidecar outfits, at Brands Hatch, minus their bodywork ---- high-tech, eh?

and another ----


"The Garlits Explosion":  Front-engined dragsters were a vicious breed, with a dozen different 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.  Garlits dropped the clutch on his top fuel car, and the clutch and flywheel instantly exploded --- the steel shrapnel CUT THE CAR IN HALF, and badly injured Don.  The entire roll-cage/cockpit left the car, rotating in the air.  

Don't you love "oddball" engineering?  Here are some beauties, from various internet sources:  
A V-8 engined "kart";  
Dragster with a motor-at-each-end;  
Another dragster with a motor-at-each-end;  
Monster-sized hot-rod custom pickup (GMC V-12 truck engine of 702 cu.in);  
Aero radial-engined motorbike (1);  
Aero radial-engined motorbike (2).

Have you seen BIG turbochargers?  On a Ford big-block motor, and believe it or not, this "Mustang" is technically street-legal in every way, except that the owner cannot insure it and hasn't licensed it.  It has run 202 mph in the quarter mile, and generates a wonderful "whistle" under 

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

Who is the mystery MotoGP star sneaking into the children's playground for some practice?

The Modern British Stock Car:  The rest of my website is "nostalgia", so this fabulous car, photographed in April 2008 by top stocks photographer Colin Herridge, has to go in this section.  I cannot find the website it was on. now, but Colin's credits are on the photo.

An old "star" gunning it on the 1/2 mile Terre Haute dirt, Indiana, 196—? A.J.Foyt learned racing the hard way.

Would you like to take a racer on the road? This American fan did just that, with some "legal-izing" accessories:

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

 Oddments:  In about 1962 I photographed this daring experiment: someone took a harmless KIEFT "Formula Junior" (I think, though they also built F3's) car and installed a 4.7 litre (283 cu.in) Chevrolet V-8 in the back.  It was running at a hill-climb at Ragley Hall in Warwickshire. Kieft cars were built in Wolverhampton.  Photo 1.   Photo 2.

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 actually very rare in those days.  Second one, which I don't know anything about, is a prototype Diva Valkyr sports car, rear-engined, and some memory tells me it may have had the popular alloy Hillman Imp motor.  Photo taken same time as the Summers one.  Additional facts / corrections are welcome.

Holy!!  In 1988 the then 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 and F1 car to a saloon.  Here is a gaggle of three saloons in 1966 at Snetterton, three 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:  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 (half-Portuguese) was a brilliant ex-Fleet Air Arm engineer who also designed the A.C. Ace chassis --- the basis of the legendary AC Cobra.C

Sleek, sleek, sleek:  This prototype Costin-bodied Lister-Jaguar was built for Le mans.  It may (or may not) have been used in the racing film "The Green Helmet", as an open-bodied sports racer. 

 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?  This German tractor-pull special uses a gigantic 42-cylinder Russian engine (seven banks of 6 cylinders each) totalling 8,665 cubic inches, or 144 litres.  When the transmission locks up, Europe shifts slightly East—.

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"

Big Engine:  I took this photograph about 1983 at Seattle International Raceway.  The engine is in Gene Snow's nitro Funny Car, and it was the only turbocharged fuel car I knew of.  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 very typical drag-racer:  although this motor ran fine, because of the exhaust turbos' effect he felt it simply DID NOT SOUND AS TOUGH AS A FUEL CAR SHOULD, so he abandoned the idea!  [Arias still builds 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 had to stick in a tractor.   Allison built only 150 of these prototype bomber engines, but ol' E.J. got himself one.     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.  Sure is.

How low can you get?  These karts are variously called "laydowns" or "enduros", and I imagine the driver's view is pretty poor, between his toes. I took the photo in circa 1985, at the now-defunct Westwood corcuit 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 12-cylinder Bristol Hercules engine.  Just don't drop that spring-clip in there —.

High-class French car in a stock-car race about 1958: what is it?  either a Talbot Lago T150, or a Delahaye 135?

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.  Reading this put me in mind of a memorable experience from when I was a little kid, taken to the circus in Northampton.  The show included a huge battle on charging horses and with blazing guns, between "Davey Crockett and the Indians", and I was overawed. Leaving the big top, at the end of the evening, I suffered one of my first disillusionments when leaving, and I saw Davey Crockett get on his motorbike with one of the dead Indians, "off to the pub" laughed my dad, and I burst into tears -----.