Engine Punk

If you ever doubted that the seventies were not sensational, then you probably weren't there. The first time I ever saw a Nova made a hell of an impression on me - one came into the harbourside car park in Falmouth when I was a student down there and raised its canopy to allow the driver to take his ticket from the barrier machine. No other vehicle had a "door" like this and, even after Lamborghini has popularised the scissor doors among the Max Power brigade, I think the Nova remains unique. Rolling sculpture - I think there's provision for a handle to lift the roof from the outside but electric operation looks really flash. Obviously this owner's confident her system works Of course, I knew it was a Nova - that's the original Nova, not the Vauxhall or Opel variety. they came later and I don't recall the same fuss over the name that Ford and Dutton created when both manufacturers wanted to call their cars Sierra. I'd already poured over num...

Colossus is back together again at last. I just love all that ironmogery on top of the boiler. For the last 18 months, whenever I’ve passed through South Petherwin on my way to Launceston, I’ve noticed a traction engine in a yard and workshop. One day I went slowly enough to see a nameplate on its smokebox door – Colossus . Like any steam engine, it had a certain presence, especially confined within four walls and looking over a gate. At the Great Dorset Steam Fair, I was delighted to come face to smokebox with Colossus and to find out what a remarkable engine it is. Its most striking feature is the tandem cylinders on top of the boiler behind the chimney. Most traction engines have them side by side, which makes for a more compact arrangement. I’d only ever seen tandem cylinders before on a conversion of an old single cylinder Fowler ploughing engine. The idea of souping up some great lumbering leviathan by strapping on another pot and making it more efficient, powerful and ...

Well conceived and brilliantly styled, the Toniq R is now even better It's especially good to do follow ups on Vintage Things but here's a VT that's got more of a future than a past. I first discovered the Toniq R at the Royal Cornwall Show in 2008 and was impressed in how it puts an original take on the Locaterfield type of kit car or track day car. To be honest, may of these open wheelers are getting a bit hackneyed. I like either the traditional ones or the radical ones. Most, though, fall between these extremes and seem to be neither one thing nor the other to me. The Toniq R is a fresh new interpretation of the four wheeled motorbike and I think it looks great. People ask Colin where gets his distinctive headlamp pods. The answer is he makes them. The battery and pedal boxes are pretty neat, too, certainly too good to hide under the bonnet, which fits so neatly over the brackets. Over the last two years, Colin and his dad have been developing the Toniq R and at...

I liked the Gardner Douglas T70 replica very much, especially in spider form. You can either have classic or high tech - I think a nostalgic blast gets the nod from me but the looks are timeless anyway. Depending to whom I talked at this year's show, we are either in for a long, hard winter thanks to all those cuts or kit car manufacturers offer a viable means of realising that track day/replica dream at reduced cost.  I went with Peter Tuthill, also known as Motormind, who was delivering some of his books to one of the booksellers exhibiting at the show. His books on subjects as diverse as Turner, Paramount and Kieft are selling steadily but he doesn't feel the time is right to take the financial risk of publishing any more for the immediate future. This is a terrible shame because some of them sound fascinating and explore obscure parts of motoring history nobody has examined yet. We were particularly impressed by this Ultima at the show and Peter just had to get in to ...

An Anglo-French hybrid, British Racing Green but definitely une bolide I first met Ontos at the Exeter Kit Car show. It had been widely reported in the media that Lomax were going to do something different from their 2CV powered trikes and the result was this surprising device. It was a very clever motoring joke, recreating a vintage Bentley out of a 2CV. But what really made our heads spin was the drivetrain that looked like a supercharger. Despite a great deal of publicity, it remained a one-off but Ontos cropped up at Geevor Tin Mining Museum earlier this year when I visited this fascinating site, and when it re-appeared at the Lanlivery Show this September I was able to talk to the owner, who works at the museum and instructs school children on rock breaking. If the government is seriously expecting to re-generate heavy industry, this is more important than most people think. Ontos has a standard 2CV chassis so avoids any SVA test. However, everything else is different...

Where else would you find a BSA 3 wheeler next to a Hamblin Cadet? Note yank tanks in the background and a Peerless GT Motormind, aka Peter Tuthill, talked me into going along to this event and I really enjoyed it. It was held at the Haynes Motor Museum on the Sunday after the Great Dorset Steam Fair and attracted the sorts of cars that are so obscure that no club usually exists for them. There were vintage cars, yank tanks, coachbuilt Ferraris and trialing Bucklers. The weather wasn't brilliant so we strolled around the museum and tried not to let the redness of The Red Room (where every car is red) overwhelm us. The Red Room at the Haynes Museum reminded me of that Two Ronnies where a library classified all its books by colour instead of the subject. Liskeard library actually did this once and it was a great idea because they knew what colour each title was - apparently this sketch is world famous among Cornish librarians. I'm not so sure classifying cars by colou...

What sort of art can you race? This sort The Salamanda Special is for sale here . Of course, I would like to own it but the price is POA and I'm fresh out of POAs. What this car is, though, (and sorry if I go on about this) is the best example of steam punk as applied to the internal combustion engine that I can think of. It doesn't look Victorian but is sort of Victorian-plus-in-a-good-way. I read somewhere that steam pink was the celebration of the joy of making and this little car has that in shed loads. You can use it or just gaze at it. Designed and built by Oliver Way and his team, it's one of those rare cars where I don't think I'd want to change anything about its looks. It's art but not in the way culture vultures might know it - to their loss of course. It's the detailing that sets the Salamanda special apart. Look at this distressed strip of leather or canvas (or something) that protects the plywood laminate bodywork from drips of fuel T...