Engine Punk

At last year's Lanlivery Show, I spotted this magnificent Alvis. It's a 1937 4.3 litre sports saloon with bodywork by Vanden Plas. Only 248 of these cars were built before World war II and every one was in chassis only form. As befits a thoroughbred motor car, each customer had the opportunity to work with a coachbuilder to realise the car they wanted. Some purchasers knew exactly what they wanted, others were content to choose from what the designers had to offer. Each body was bespoke and was haute couture for automobiles, using only the finest materials and workmanship. This sort of coachbuilding didn't happen overnight. The chassis was built in 1937 in Coventry (that place again - see earlier posts about Lea-Francis )but the bodywork wasn't completed at Vanden Plas' Kingsbury factory, in north-west London until January 1938. It was then sent back to the Alvis factory for use as a demonstrator until sale to Brooklands Motors who took delivery in July 1938. The...

If you'd asked me a couple of weeks ago, I would said 1894, for most authorities cite the Paris – Rouen event as being the first motor race and with internal combustion engine engines it probably was the first. But what if the motors were steam powered? The suggestion that two road steam motors had raced each other in Manchester in 1867 came from Karl Petersen. Karl is a steam car builder in the USA . He e-mailed me to say "Hi" and to introduce himself after my website and blog had turned up on various searches that he'd conducted. He went on to say that during a visit to the Science Museum library in 1971, he'd found an old book on steam road vehicles built before 1890 - William Fletcher's The History and Development of Steam Locomotion on Common Roads. This had belonged to a relative of the legendary locomotive builder and operator Isaac Watt Boulton and contained annotated notes on various matters that subsequently proved quite accurate. Upon revisiting h...

Well, there's nothing on my playlists anymore. During the production of The Horsepower Whisperer and The Wormton Lamb , I developed a playlist of music that inspired me for each book. Either that or I could imagine certain songs contributing to the sound track to the film of the book. A new playlist is currently emerging as the soundtrack for The Grey Ones , which will be the third part of the Soul Trader Trilogy. This is very exciting - I love this process! I don't know what song or scene will happen next and the plot is evolving nicely. The social networking site Imeem enabled me to put these songs onto the net and share them - my idea was that readers could experience a multi-media event by reading the book and/or listening to the tunes. Imeem appeared to have the licensing arrangements all sussed but then it began to unravel. Instead of playing the whole samples, Imeem began to only offer samples. Often they were from the middle of the song so my playlist sounded bloody aw...

This immediately appealed to me - it's an examination of one man's vision of the future, that man being Geoffrey Hoyle and the future being here and now in 2010. Bear in mind that he wrote this children's book in 1972 and it's amazing how much about today's world he got right. Some of it is unnervingly accurate, especially with regard to telecomms, some is a little wide of the mark (like everybody wearing jumpsuits) and one thing I really wish he'd got right was that we'd all have so much leisure time. Maybe that happens in 2011. What is also engaging about this little book is that it made such an impression on a little lad called Daniel Sinker, who bought the book after it had been withdrawn from his local library and kept it all these years. And now he's put it up on the web so that we can all marvel at it and mounted a campaign to find the author, Geoffrey Hoyle, son of astronomer Fred Hoyle. So far, it's been confirmed that Geoffrey's alive b...

Back in 1984, I visited the TVR factory in Blackpool with my year of the Industrial Design/Transport course at Coventry (Lanchester) Polytechnic. TVR were undergoing something of a renaissance at the time and had just begun their long and beautiful relationship with the Rover V8. Having an official poke around the factory was fascinating but what was even better was a slightly less official poke around the yard at the back. How often do car mad design students, barely out of their adolescence, get to run around the scrap piles of prestigious manufacturers? Among the old moulds and rejected mouldings for TVR Tasmins and M series was this TVR SM, subsequently renamed the TVR Zante. And among my vast collection of old photos I recently found these photographs of it. TVR had always been an inspirational marque and I think Peter Filby got it right with the title of his TVR : Success against the odds book. As a small scale specialist manufacturer, TVR always punched well above its weight an...

Following all the hi-jinks of the previous few days, by the time race day dawned, some of us were learning to pace ourselves. Some of us weren't and probably never would but I'd already twigged that the Le Mans 24 Heures can eat you up and spit you out. (Photo by Alan Mansell) With everything else going on you could easily forget that the world’s greatest motor race was about to take place. However, the trip into the city centre for the driver’s parade the night before had helped remind us. Thanks to Sarrazin’s flying lap, the No.8 Peugeot 908 driven by Franck Montagny was on pole alongside the No.1 Audi of Alan McNish. In 3rd and 4th position on the grid were two more 908s but this didn’t mean anything – they’d started strongly last year and Audi had won in the end. In LMP2 Caspar Elgaard’s Team Essex Porsche headed the pack while in GT1 the Corvette C6R driven by Jan Magnusson had been fastest in practice – and its V8 sounded the best of all engines in the race. In GT2, witho...

I’ve just discovered that Thunderbirds explored the issues of growth hormones getting into the environment before I did with The Wormton Lamb . For Christmas my wonderful sister got me the Thunderbirds DVD boxed set and when I mentioned this to my friends a number of them said, “Oh yes, Attack of the Alligators – they were real baby crocodiles you know.” I could recall Pit of peril (walking army thing falls into a hole) , The man from MI5 (Lady Penelope helps a secret agent called Bunsen - or Bondson!)and Move and your dead (the road racing one) but Attack of the Alligators escaped me. Well, thanks to the bad weather outside I’ve now worked my way sequentially to this episode and it’s a tropical version of The Wormton Lamb with alligators and International Rescue. Apart from that there’s little resemblance and I can’t imagine Gerry Anderson taking me to court like Henry Lincoln and Michael Baigent did to Dan Brown over The Da Vinci Code . The basic plot is that a wonder chemical ...

Among my photos of the 2009 Le Mans 24 Heures (Part 3 of Endurance Spectating coming soon) I found this Lea-Francis . I've always been a bit partial to LeaFs and was fascinated to learn that they were built in penny numbers in the Coventry streets that I knew as a student. Much Park Street was just a few streets away from where I lived and Lower Ford Street was where my mates hung out for a while, in a house that had survived not only The Blitz but possibly also the plague - Coventry being a great medieval city. Two gangs of us had houses in Vine Street that backed onto a factory still known as the Singer Works and at certain times of the day and night a great whir would begin as the shifts changed over. This brought home to me what it must have been like to be in the motor city during the inter war years. I can visualise everyone making engines and bikes and cars and then staggering next door from the blackened, stone-walled foundries to crash out afterwards. The city must've ...