Engine Punk

Another great photo by Pete Brown. There's an awful lot going on here. Stuart and I are bouncing hard. (Photo : Peter Brown) Regular perusers of my ramblings will already know about my taste for Austin 7 specials. We've had the Oliver Way designed Salamanda Special , the Reliant powered Cattley 7 , a splendid MG and Austin 7 device  that wowed the crowd at Wiscombe Park, Mrs Jo-jo , Mr Jo-jo , the baby Bugatti RA special and even Simplicity itself.  There are many others I would like to have a good look at and most recently it was the Austin 7 Ulsteroid of Stuart Palmer, Professor Emeritus of Side Valve Sorcery at the University of Torbay. This little car is an MCC long distance trials machine in Class O and last year I had the chance to passenger Stuart on the Camel Vale Motor Club's  Presidents Trial  near Hessenford just off the A38. The Ulsteroid is based on a 1935 Austin Ruby long wheelbase chassis so there's enough legroom for Stuart's dad, who's taller ...

John called his series of specials Spenceley Specials. I really like the play on abbreviations for the SS JAG  (SS being the pre-war name for what became Jaguar) but he reckoned it just confused people!  In 2000, long before my first digital camera, I took some snaps of this machine at the Easter meeting at Tregrehan. The programme described it as a JAG but it didn't look like any Jaguar I knew. I was also intrigued by the SS JAG badge on the radiator. Sir William Lyons originally traded as SS before WW2 but adopted the name of Jaguar postwar for obvious reasons. Curiosity piqued, I thought it was worth taking some smudges of it. This is the same car at Wiscombe Park in 2008 but with a Riley 1496cc engine At the time this machine boasted a 2-litre Pinto engine but it subsequently turned up at Wiscombe Park in 2008 with a Riley 1496cc motor. I recently bought a superb book on RGS-Atlantas and was intrigued to find this car in it. It also appeared on a Facebook page for 50s and ...