Engine Punk

This is the official photograph of Jerry's Imp from the 1987 Land's End Trial. I am hidden by the screen but Jerry is driving and Mike Evason is bouncing furiously. I think this is Darracott - which we would've failed. This is an ongoing project, one that my old mate Jerry Goater began and one that I hope I will get to a stage where it can be used again, for projects, like cars or motorbikes, are not finished off until they are destroyed utterly, when they have no further future. The Jemp rests in a corner of my garage, dry stored and awaiting its turn. It's not finished - it has a future. It began as a standard Imp saloon in a sort of mustard grey colour and Jerry learnt to drive in it. It belonged to his parents. Sheila and Steve, but it sort of became his in 1985 when we were on our industrial placements. Y'see, we were studying Industrial Design/Transport at Coventry Polytechnic and Jerry's dad was a CDT teacher and they had this grinder and this we...

Here's the Buckingham glassfibre monococque resting on its headstock. What I'd really like to see is an image of the complete bike. From my stats page for this blog, I can see that one of the most visited posts on this blog is for the Buckingham 4 valve JAP 500, a speedway device featuring a GRP monococque frame and a DIY 4 valve conversion. It was built by Graham Buckingham who was a technician when I was a student at Coventry Polytechnic in 1985. We fell into conversation as fellow piston heads are wont to do and he brought in some parts to show me. From above you can see the recesses for the detachable tank and seat. They were held in place by rubber straps or over centre catches. I've posted all I know about this machine before and following recent erudite feedback on other automotive queries you might expect that I'd heard more about this curious machine. But no. It's as much a mystery as it ever was. Unless I hear something dreckly (good C...

A fine example of the Fiat 126's contribution to motorsport These photos spilled out of an avalanche the other day and the memory of a day during the summer of 1985 came flooding back. While I was a student of Industrial Design Transport at Coventry Lanchester Polytechnic, the UK's motor city held various motorsport events, including autotesting. I was on my industrial placement working for John Mockett the motorcycle designer and during one weekend the sounds of engines having their nuts revved off floated across the city. "I must go to it," I said to my mate Geoff and he, too, responded like some brave Ulysses as if captivated by the sound of the sirens softly singing. We followed the sound to the city centre and found an autotest going on under one of the peirs for the Coventry inner ring road, a ring road notorious for being cited by its designer as an example of how not to design a ring road. In case you didn't know, autotesting involves ragging you...

The Buckingham 4 valve JAP was built by Graham Buckingham, a technician at Coventry Polytechnic when I was a student there in the early eighties. I was making a mock up of motorcycle riding positions for a project and he took an interest in what I was doing and eventually let slip that he had designed and built a motorcycle. I was immediately fascinated and in response to my constant questions brought in what remained of it. The curious influence of the moon and tides on the flotsam and jetsam of my photographic print collection brought these snaps of it to the surface the other day so I thought I would record what I could remember of it now before these snaps disappear again. The engine was a four valve conversion of – no less – a speedway 490cc JAP engine. Graham said he had a mate who worked in the Jaguar drawing office and it was he who drew up the head. I think he said the valves were Jaguar parts. No Jaguar engine had four valves per cylinder until much later. The camshafts were ...

Designating my XR4x4 a Vintage Thing the other day reminded me of the reaction casued by the introduction of the Sierra. It was a revolution. The V&A ran an exhibition at the Boilerhouse Project called The Car Programme - 52 months to Job One or How they designed the Ford Sierra. I visited this exhibition in the first year of my Industrial Design course at Coventry Poly. At the time there were all manner of rumours circulating about the Sierra and its high profile departure from the boxy lines of the Cortina. It was said that all the design staff had been sacked and that Ford would be re-introducing the Cortina following poor sales. Of course, none of this was true but it's difficult to appreciate the shock of the new that followed the Sierra's introduction. Walter Hayes, Ford of Europe's Vice-Chairman said the introduction of the Sierra and replacement of the Cortina was "the only example in history where a company killed off a brand leader." However, I bet h...

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...

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...

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 ...

I'd never seen one of these before. I saw it on the industrial estate at Doublebois just up from Adrian Booth's workshop and didn't know what it was, so just had to find out. And after a deal of scrabbling about, I managed to identify it as a Honda S-MX. If you wanted a cube on wheels with an automatic box and fold down futon-style beds inside then this is the car for you. It's a good example of the kind of speciality cars the Japanese do so well. Any other car producing nation would never even try something like this. "Oh no they would say, there'd never be any call for something like that." So despite the slush box, I start to like it because of the odd niche that it's aimed at. There's a kind of "can-do" approach that the designers have followed and I like that. I was dropping an A series cylinder head off at Adrian's to be reconditioned and he said there was a whole set of camping gear available as standard from the factory w...

Here's another Vintage Thing that's happening today - and again in Cornwall. And that's not the designer but his mum and dad. As well as being a family affair, the Toniq R is a road legal track day car built at Trebudannon near Newquay. I’d heard of it from Peter Tuthill’s book Cornwall’s Motor Industry but never seen one until I encountered this one on show at Royal Cornwall. It’s a 21st century interpretation of the classic Lotus Seven. It’s a road legal track day car and comes in two forms. This particular example has a Honda Fireblade engine but there's another demonstrator with a Ford Duratec engine. I understand that the on paper performance is about the same but the driving experience is totally different. On this Fireblade powered example, the engine has been completely rebuilt. The red and green buttons on the steering wheel take care of gearshifts. Red goes down for first and then you frantically press green to keep changing up for the other g...