Engine Punk

I've had a lot of problems getting my cover image on Amazon. Use this link to click on the page for The Horsepower Whisperer and you will see that there still isn't one. There used to be one but it was the original cover image that has now been superseded by a spruced up revision - except that it hasn't on Amazon. Currently, you can't see anything of my book on Amazon. I removed the original naively believing that it would be simple to get the new one on there. That was back in January. I managed to upload the new image on there but the Amazon page insisted that it was a customer image uploaded by Mr R D Blackman. That last bit was true but I'm the bloody publisher. And I'm the bloody author. And the images were such pissy bloody little bloody things. I never found out why they were viewed down the wrong end of a telescope. I removed them - once I'd managed to get my mouse to rest on them in their minuteness. I'd rather no image appeared at al...

When is a Mercedes not a Mercedes? When it’s a Wartburg. You may not have heard of a Wartburg . Some of us who grew up in the seventies will remember the angular Wartburg 353s as bargain basement family saloons from East Germany. They featured front wheel drive, a freewheel transmission and had three cylinder water-cooled two-stroke engines of 993cc. They were briefly immortalised (!) in the UK thanks to a comedy sketch by Jasper Carrot – lemme take you for a ride in ma Wartburg! Nowadays, it’s not difficult to understand that the Wartburg marque had a problem with brand identity. The Carrot picked up on the unfortunate name but Anglo-Saxons have mixed feelings about two-stroke engines as well, often mixed feelings of the pre-mixed petroil variety. Many disapproved of strokers when used in motorcycles and smoky little passenger cars going “ring-ding-ding” were deemed frightfully downmarket. Some of us (not me) are still highly suspicious of front wheel drive despite Issigonis cla...