Journals314
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Relatively minor misfortune
1 min read
Of late I've only been passing by once or twice a week. Something happened last week that might make me a more frequent visitor.
I broke my right leg in a motorcycle accident. Despite the incapacitation, the expense, the burden on my family, and the burden on my employers, I am thankful for the outcome. I could have been killed, or in a coma, or otherwise unable to move at all.
Until I'm able to use my computer (I can't even get to the room with the computer right now, I'm typing this from a tablet) I can't submit any drawings, but all this time on my hands might cause me to draw some.
I broke my right leg in a motorcycle accident. Despite the incapacitation, the expense, the burden on my family, and the burden on my employers, I am thankful for the outcome. I could have been killed, or in a coma, or otherwise unable to move at all.
Until I'm able to use my computer (I can't even get to the room with the computer right now, I'm typing this from a tablet) I can't submit any drawings, but all this time on my hands might cause me to draw some.
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Ten Great British Cars
14 min read
Taking a break from ugly cars (the next one will probably be a Citroën... but which one? 
) to celebrate the British automobile... actually the English automobile because all of these were designed and built in England.
This is a list of ten great British cars. It is not called the "Ten Greatest British Cars" because there are people who would find it a sacrilege that such a list would not have the "Blower Bentley" (more correctly the Bentley 4 1/2-Litre Supercharged), the Bentley 3-litre, Lotus Elite, Lotus Elan, Morgan Plus 4, Morgan Plus 8, or the Standard Vanguard. Or any Aston Martins, Lagondas, Daimlers, MGs, or Austin-Healeys for that matter.
So what are my ten selections of Great British Cars?
Glad you asked:
Rolls-Royce 40/50, a.k.a. Silver Ghost
The car seen above is THE Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost; all other "Silver Ghosts" are actually 1906-1926 Rolls-Royce 40/50s. There's a plate on the outside of the dashboard under the windscreen that says "THE SILVER GHOST". This car, licence number AX201, was a demonstrator car built for the sales department of the company to give test rides to potential customers. One demonstration in particular was of widespread notability: the London to Edinburgh Reliability Run, where it not only went from London to Edinburgh and back but did so without any significant breakdowns, costing less than three pounds in maintenance along the way. This performance, which was observed by the Royal Automobile Club (RAC), earned Rolls-Royce the Dewar Trophy and the title "The best car in the world."
The 40/50 model lasted from 1906 to 1926 and established Rolls-Royce's reputation for being, well, the Rolls-Royce of motor cars.
Morgan Three-Wheeler
Around 1907 a young engineer named Henry Frederick Stanley Morgan acquired a Peugeot V-twin engine with the vague idea of building himself a motorcycle. What he ended up with in 1909, with the assistance of some of the professors at his alma mater, was a vehicle with independent suspension at all three wheels. By 1911 he was in business making two-seat versions of his personal vehicle. He beat most of his competition into the cyclecar market, which boomed just after the First World War, and he survived the collapse of that market in the 1920s (which was due to another car on this list). Despite entering the four-wheel market in 1936 with the 4-4 (which would be renumbered 4/4 after the Second World War), Morgan would not leave the three-wheeler market until 1953.
Morgan re-entered the three-wheeler market in 2011, expecting the new car to be a novelty to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the company. They did not expect it to catch on like wildfire and become half of their production, which it has.
Austin Seven
Cyclecars were at the peak of their market just after the end of the First World War. While some were well engineered like the Morgan and the Amilcar, some were shockingly crude like the Bedelia, or worse!
The first indigenous assembly-line manufacturer in Britain was Morris, but Austin one-upped Morris by mass-producing a very small, very simple car. The Seven was designed to compete with cyclecars and sidecar combinations, and it pretty much drove the cyclecar off the road, although the sidecar combination persisted for quite some time (as did the Morgan, of course). The Seven was developed and continued until the beginning of the Second World War.
The Austin Seven was copied by the DAT partnership of Japan to create the Datsun and was licenced to American Austin in the United States, Rosengart in France, and Dixi in Germany. About a year after Dixi began producing Sevens under licence, they were bought by an aircraft engine manufacturer named Bayerische Motoren Werke, or BMW for short.
Bentley 6 1/2-Litre / Bentley Speed Six
Walter Owen "W.O." Bentley built his cars from 1919 to 1931. He began with his 3-litre four-cylinder cars which competed at Indianapolis in 1922 and at Le Mans from the beginning in 1923 to their last victory in 1927. He went on to a luxury-oriented 6 1/2-litre six-cylinder car that challenged the Rolls-Royce Phantom.
The six-cylinder Bentleys were built to challenge Rolls-Royce and Daimler in the luxury market. To keep his overhead camshaft with four valves per cylinder but lose the noise of the 3-litre's bevel shaft, Bentley used an auxiliary shaft, geared to one half of crankshaft speed, to drive the camshaft with three pairs of eccentrics connected by thin rods. This form of "triple throw drive" for the camshaft had been pioneered by J.G. Parry Thomas with the highly innovative Leyland Eight luxury car, whose high-tech specification at the Olympia motor show of 1920 gave it the title "the Lion of Olympia" but which went out of production after only eighteen chassis were sold.
Power, tractability and quietness were quite good for carrying the gentry and captains of industry in heavy car bodies but, initially at least, Bentley developed a larger four-cylinder engine for his endurance racing ambitions. The 4 1/2-litre was developed from the 3-litre and the 6 1/2-litre and was victorious at Le Mans in 1928 after a gigantic crash put it, and almost all of the other top contenders, out of the running in 1927. All the Bentleys were damaged in the crash and all but the 3-litre of Dr. Dudley Benjafield and S .C .H. "Sammy" Davis were out of the running. Davis, who had been part of a team to bring a damaged Sunbeam to second place in 1925, became part of a team to bring a damaged Bentley to victory in 1927.
There was dissent within Bentley as to where to go after 1928. Chief engineer W.O. Bentley, who had given up ownership of his company in exchange for the finance needed to keep it running, believed that increased displacement was the only reliable route to more power. Henry "Tim" Birkin, a racing driver among the notorious "Bentley Boys", championed a supercharged 4 1/2-litre. Woolf Barnato, chairman of Bentley and chief of the Bentley Boys, played both ends against the middle. Barnato had fifty-five 4 1/2-litre chassis shipped to the workshop of Amherst-Villiers to be supercharged; fifty for homologation and five for racing. He also authorized Bentley to develop a sports version of the 6 1/2-litre luxury chassis.
Public sentiment may have immortalized the 4 1/2-litre supercharged Bentley as the "Blower Bentley" in its green livery and Union Jack, but it was the relatively slow and steady Speed Six that won the races. Barnato may have allowed both developments to continue, but he showed where his confidence lay by getting behind the wheel of a Speed Six in the 1929 Le Mans; where he and his co-driver would take it to victory. Barnato cast his lot with the Speed Six again in the 1930 Le Mans, with the same result.
The Speed Six embodied both the style and elegance of the six-cylinder Bentleys, which the rip-snorting 3-litre and 4 1/2 litre four-cylinder cars don't, and the Bentley tradition of speed and racing excellence, which the more powerful and more elegant 8-litre never got a chance to show. It therefore advances beyond its siblings into this list, and brings its Dr. Jekyll origin, the 6 1/2-litre, with it.
Land Rover
There are untold numbers of SUVs, but to my thinking there are only three legends of off-road travel. The first is Jeep, the last is Land Cruiser (by Toyota). In between, there is this: Land Rover.
Land Rover began with Jeep origins, literally. The first Land Rover prototype was built on a modified Jeep chassis. The first Land Rovers were made of aluminium because steel was in short supply, later Land Rovers were made of aluminium to maintain their rust-free reputation.
No revolution here, no tales of racing glory; the Land Rover is legendary because it *worked*. Explorers and naturalists were seen in Land Rovers because Land Rovers would get them there, wherever "there" was. Land Rover ambulances? Cranes? Rail locomotives? Aircraft tugs? Yes, because they could.
So could Jeeps, and so, later, could Land Cruisers. The British one had to be on the British list.
Jaguar XK120
Bugatti Veyron. Ferrari F40. Ferrari 410 Superamerica. What about them? The fastest production car in the world. In 1949, that was the XK120.
The XK120 was beautiful, advanced, and fast. Good streamlining plus good chassis balance plus a double overhead camshaft straight-six equals a phenomenal sports car. The engine was not just powerful, it was reliable and tractable, too. It began its career in this fast sports car in 1948 and ended it in a Daimler limousine in 1993.
If the regular XK120 was fast, though, the XK120 Competition, or C-Type, was even faster, winning Le Mans in 1951 and 1953
Triumph TR2
After coming up with the florid and not very sporting Roadster and the stillborn TR-X, Triumph brought out the 20TS, a parts-bin special, at the 1951 Earls Court Motor Show. Reviews were mixed, with complaints about a cramped interior and lack of boot (trunk) space. Development driver Ken Richardson was contracted to test drive it and his review was not mixed; it included such terms as "death trap" and "bloody awful". The chairman of Triumph's parent company, Standard, then contracted Richardson to help develop the car, while some length was added to enlarge the interior and add a boot. A new, simpler and more rigid frame and a lot of other improvements later, the TR2 was introduced at the Geneva Motor Show in 1952 to rave reviews.
The TR series fit nicely between MG and Jaguar in the sports car market. The engine got bigger with the TR3B and TR4, Michelotti styling with external door handles and wind-up windows appeared on the TR4, a swing-arm independent rear suspension replaced the live axle on the TR4A, a new Triumph six replaced the old Standard four with the fuel-injected world-market TR5 and the carburetted US-market TR250, and Karmann restyled the front and rear of the aging Michelotti design for the TR6 (again with carburettors on the US model and fuel injection for the rest of the world).
I will not spoil things by mentioning any TRs after the TR6.
Lotus Seven
Colin Chapman, the man behind Lotus sports cars, was noted for making fast, lightweight, great handling, terribly flimsy cars. This is most likely the car that established his reputation for all of these. While the Elite was renowned for its fibreglass monocoque (and the strut towers that punched through it) and the Elan for making the fibreglass body more practical by including a steel backbone chassis, the Seven is remembered for having nothing a car didn't need to go fast. Lotus stopped making the Seven in 1973, which annoyed Graham Nearn, owner of a Lotus dealer named Caterham Cars that sold lots of Sevens. Caterham bought the design and tooling from Lotus, contracted frame manufacturer Arch Motors to make the frames for them instead of for Lotus (but with thicker gauge steel in the tubes for rigidity and longer life), and became a manufacturer. Caterham still makes the Seven.
By the way, the Seven does not mean seven RAC horsepower, as it did with the Austin Seven, it means there were six Lotus designs before that one.
Mini - the greatest car ever to be made by a British company
History repeats itself here: The spiritual successors to the cyclecars that emerged after the First World War were the "bubble cars" after the Second World War, and where Herbert Austin designed the Seven himself to get rid of the cyclecars, his successor, Leonard Lord, assigned engineer Alec Issigonis to design a proper car to drive the bubble cars off the road.
What he ended up with was the prototype for the small car as we know it today. Compact power units had been done before both at the front (Citroen 2CV, Panhard Dyna, DKW F series) and at the rear (Hanomag Kommissbrot, Volkswagen Type 1, Fiat 500, BMW 600, NSU Prinz, countless others), it had never really been done this well before. It was an immediate sensation when it debuted in 1959.
About a year or two later, John Cooper started making high-performance versions with bigger (1275 cc vs the 850 cc originals) and more highly-tuned engines. A Mini Cooper won the Monte Carlo Rally and competition Minis have been in motorsport ever since. An entire industry was based on Mini performance parts.
So it was a family car and it could be a performance car. But what if you needed a van? No problem (unless you needed a really big van). They had long-wheelbase vans available, based on the Mini Traveller estate car.
The Mini was versatile enough to last in its original form from 1959 to 2000. It outlived the Morris and Austin brands it was originally brought out under, gained its own marque and lost it, and ended up being sold as a Rover, as odd as that sounds.
The Mini marque has been revived by BMW, but it's not the same...
Jaguar E-Type
"The greatest crumpet collector known to man." - Henry N. Manney III
"A horizontal expression of man's intent." - some unknown wag
Apart from being utterly beautiful and quite fast, the E-Type was rather inexpensive compared to the Ferraris it was as fast as and looked better than.
The E-Type also introduced Jaguar's independent rear suspension (irs), a technology Ferrari didn't really take hold of yet. Mercedes-Benz had swing-axle rear suspension, which didn't work as well as Jaguar's irs and was a lot scarier at the limit.
The E-type lasted from 1961 to 1973, but the later ones were bloated and grilled.
The packaging was a bit tight, and the engine had to be removed in order to change the clutch. This led to a lot of bargain-basement used E-Types with clutch problems...
<da:thumb id="403794642"/>Isn't it just groovy, baby?
) to celebrate the British automobile... actually the English automobile because all of these were designed and built in England.This is a list of ten great British cars. It is not called the "Ten Greatest British Cars" because there are people who would find it a sacrilege that such a list would not have the "Blower Bentley" (more correctly the Bentley 4 1/2-Litre Supercharged), the Bentley 3-litre, Lotus Elite, Lotus Elan, Morgan Plus 4, Morgan Plus 8, or the Standard Vanguard. Or any Aston Martins, Lagondas, Daimlers, MGs, or Austin-Healeys for that matter.
So what are my ten selections of Great British Cars?
Glad you asked:
Rolls-Royce 40/50, a.k.a. Silver Ghost
The car seen above is THE Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost; all other "Silver Ghosts" are actually 1906-1926 Rolls-Royce 40/50s. There's a plate on the outside of the dashboard under the windscreen that says "THE SILVER GHOST". This car, licence number AX201, was a demonstrator car built for the sales department of the company to give test rides to potential customers. One demonstration in particular was of widespread notability: the London to Edinburgh Reliability Run, where it not only went from London to Edinburgh and back but did so without any significant breakdowns, costing less than three pounds in maintenance along the way. This performance, which was observed by the Royal Automobile Club (RAC), earned Rolls-Royce the Dewar Trophy and the title "The best car in the world."
The 40/50 model lasted from 1906 to 1926 and established Rolls-Royce's reputation for being, well, the Rolls-Royce of motor cars.
Morgan Three-Wheeler
Around 1907 a young engineer named Henry Frederick Stanley Morgan acquired a Peugeot V-twin engine with the vague idea of building himself a motorcycle. What he ended up with in 1909, with the assistance of some of the professors at his alma mater, was a vehicle with independent suspension at all three wheels. By 1911 he was in business making two-seat versions of his personal vehicle. He beat most of his competition into the cyclecar market, which boomed just after the First World War, and he survived the collapse of that market in the 1920s (which was due to another car on this list). Despite entering the four-wheel market in 1936 with the 4-4 (which would be renumbered 4/4 after the Second World War), Morgan would not leave the three-wheeler market until 1953.
Morgan re-entered the three-wheeler market in 2011, expecting the new car to be a novelty to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the company. They did not expect it to catch on like wildfire and become half of their production, which it has.Austin Seven
Cyclecars were at the peak of their market just after the end of the First World War. While some were well engineered like the Morgan and the Amilcar, some were shockingly crude like the Bedelia, or worse!
The first indigenous assembly-line manufacturer in Britain was Morris, but Austin one-upped Morris by mass-producing a very small, very simple car. The Seven was designed to compete with cyclecars and sidecar combinations, and it pretty much drove the cyclecar off the road, although the sidecar combination persisted for quite some time (as did the Morgan, of course). The Seven was developed and continued until the beginning of the Second World War.
The Austin Seven was copied by the DAT partnership of Japan to create the Datsun and was licenced to American Austin in the United States, Rosengart in France, and Dixi in Germany. About a year after Dixi began producing Sevens under licence, they were bought by an aircraft engine manufacturer named Bayerische Motoren Werke, or BMW for short.
Bentley 6 1/2-Litre / Bentley Speed Six
Walter Owen "W.O." Bentley built his cars from 1919 to 1931. He began with his 3-litre four-cylinder cars which competed at Indianapolis in 1922 and at Le Mans from the beginning in 1923 to their last victory in 1927. He went on to a luxury-oriented 6 1/2-litre six-cylinder car that challenged the Rolls-Royce Phantom.
The six-cylinder Bentleys were built to challenge Rolls-Royce and Daimler in the luxury market. To keep his overhead camshaft with four valves per cylinder but lose the noise of the 3-litre's bevel shaft, Bentley used an auxiliary shaft, geared to one half of crankshaft speed, to drive the camshaft with three pairs of eccentrics connected by thin rods. This form of "triple throw drive" for the camshaft had been pioneered by J.G. Parry Thomas with the highly innovative Leyland Eight luxury car, whose high-tech specification at the Olympia motor show of 1920 gave it the title "the Lion of Olympia" but which went out of production after only eighteen chassis were sold.
Power, tractability and quietness were quite good for carrying the gentry and captains of industry in heavy car bodies but, initially at least, Bentley developed a larger four-cylinder engine for his endurance racing ambitions. The 4 1/2-litre was developed from the 3-litre and the 6 1/2-litre and was victorious at Le Mans in 1928 after a gigantic crash put it, and almost all of the other top contenders, out of the running in 1927. All the Bentleys were damaged in the crash and all but the 3-litre of Dr. Dudley Benjafield and S .C .H. "Sammy" Davis were out of the running. Davis, who had been part of a team to bring a damaged Sunbeam to second place in 1925, became part of a team to bring a damaged Bentley to victory in 1927.
There was dissent within Bentley as to where to go after 1928. Chief engineer W.O. Bentley, who had given up ownership of his company in exchange for the finance needed to keep it running, believed that increased displacement was the only reliable route to more power. Henry "Tim" Birkin, a racing driver among the notorious "Bentley Boys", championed a supercharged 4 1/2-litre. Woolf Barnato, chairman of Bentley and chief of the Bentley Boys, played both ends against the middle. Barnato had fifty-five 4 1/2-litre chassis shipped to the workshop of Amherst-Villiers to be supercharged; fifty for homologation and five for racing. He also authorized Bentley to develop a sports version of the 6 1/2-litre luxury chassis.
Public sentiment may have immortalized the 4 1/2-litre supercharged Bentley as the "Blower Bentley" in its green livery and Union Jack, but it was the relatively slow and steady Speed Six that won the races. Barnato may have allowed both developments to continue, but he showed where his confidence lay by getting behind the wheel of a Speed Six in the 1929 Le Mans; where he and his co-driver would take it to victory. Barnato cast his lot with the Speed Six again in the 1930 Le Mans, with the same result.
The Speed Six embodied both the style and elegance of the six-cylinder Bentleys, which the rip-snorting 3-litre and 4 1/2 litre four-cylinder cars don't, and the Bentley tradition of speed and racing excellence, which the more powerful and more elegant 8-litre never got a chance to show. It therefore advances beyond its siblings into this list, and brings its Dr. Jekyll origin, the 6 1/2-litre, with it.
Land Rover
There are untold numbers of SUVs, but to my thinking there are only three legends of off-road travel. The first is Jeep, the last is Land Cruiser (by Toyota). In between, there is this: Land Rover.
Land Rover began with Jeep origins, literally. The first Land Rover prototype was built on a modified Jeep chassis. The first Land Rovers were made of aluminium because steel was in short supply, later Land Rovers were made of aluminium to maintain their rust-free reputation.
No revolution here, no tales of racing glory; the Land Rover is legendary because it *worked*. Explorers and naturalists were seen in Land Rovers because Land Rovers would get them there, wherever "there" was. Land Rover ambulances? Cranes? Rail locomotives? Aircraft tugs? Yes, because they could.
So could Jeeps, and so, later, could Land Cruisers. The British one had to be on the British list.
Jaguar XK120
Bugatti Veyron. Ferrari F40. Ferrari 410 Superamerica. What about them? The fastest production car in the world. In 1949, that was the XK120.
The XK120 was beautiful, advanced, and fast. Good streamlining plus good chassis balance plus a double overhead camshaft straight-six equals a phenomenal sports car. The engine was not just powerful, it was reliable and tractable, too. It began its career in this fast sports car in 1948 and ended it in a Daimler limousine in 1993.
If the regular XK120 was fast, though, the XK120 Competition, or C-Type, was even faster, winning Le Mans in 1951 and 1953
Triumph TR2
After coming up with the florid and not very sporting Roadster and the stillborn TR-X, Triumph brought out the 20TS, a parts-bin special, at the 1951 Earls Court Motor Show. Reviews were mixed, with complaints about a cramped interior and lack of boot (trunk) space. Development driver Ken Richardson was contracted to test drive it and his review was not mixed; it included such terms as "death trap" and "bloody awful". The chairman of Triumph's parent company, Standard, then contracted Richardson to help develop the car, while some length was added to enlarge the interior and add a boot. A new, simpler and more rigid frame and a lot of other improvements later, the TR2 was introduced at the Geneva Motor Show in 1952 to rave reviews.
The TR series fit nicely between MG and Jaguar in the sports car market. The engine got bigger with the TR3B and TR4, Michelotti styling with external door handles and wind-up windows appeared on the TR4, a swing-arm independent rear suspension replaced the live axle on the TR4A, a new Triumph six replaced the old Standard four with the fuel-injected world-market TR5 and the carburetted US-market TR250, and Karmann restyled the front and rear of the aging Michelotti design for the TR6 (again with carburettors on the US model and fuel injection for the rest of the world).
I will not spoil things by mentioning any TRs after the TR6.
Lotus Seven
Colin Chapman, the man behind Lotus sports cars, was noted for making fast, lightweight, great handling, terribly flimsy cars. This is most likely the car that established his reputation for all of these. While the Elite was renowned for its fibreglass monocoque (and the strut towers that punched through it) and the Elan for making the fibreglass body more practical by including a steel backbone chassis, the Seven is remembered for having nothing a car didn't need to go fast. Lotus stopped making the Seven in 1973, which annoyed Graham Nearn, owner of a Lotus dealer named Caterham Cars that sold lots of Sevens. Caterham bought the design and tooling from Lotus, contracted frame manufacturer Arch Motors to make the frames for them instead of for Lotus (but with thicker gauge steel in the tubes for rigidity and longer life), and became a manufacturer. Caterham still makes the Seven.
By the way, the Seven does not mean seven RAC horsepower, as it did with the Austin Seven, it means there were six Lotus designs before that one.
Mini - the greatest car ever to be made by a British company
History repeats itself here: The spiritual successors to the cyclecars that emerged after the First World War were the "bubble cars" after the Second World War, and where Herbert Austin designed the Seven himself to get rid of the cyclecars, his successor, Leonard Lord, assigned engineer Alec Issigonis to design a proper car to drive the bubble cars off the road.
What he ended up with was the prototype for the small car as we know it today. Compact power units had been done before both at the front (Citroen 2CV, Panhard Dyna, DKW F series) and at the rear (Hanomag Kommissbrot, Volkswagen Type 1, Fiat 500, BMW 600, NSU Prinz, countless others), it had never really been done this well before. It was an immediate sensation when it debuted in 1959.
About a year or two later, John Cooper started making high-performance versions with bigger (1275 cc vs the 850 cc originals) and more highly-tuned engines. A Mini Cooper won the Monte Carlo Rally and competition Minis have been in motorsport ever since. An entire industry was based on Mini performance parts.So it was a family car and it could be a performance car. But what if you needed a van? No problem (unless you needed a really big van). They had long-wheelbase vans available, based on the Mini Traveller estate car.The Mini was versatile enough to last in its original form from 1959 to 2000. It outlived the Morris and Austin brands it was originally brought out under, gained its own marque and lost it, and ended up being sold as a Rover, as odd as that sounds.
The Mini marque has been revived by BMW, but it's not the same...
Jaguar E-Type
"The greatest crumpet collector known to man." - Henry N. Manney III
"A horizontal expression of man's intent." - some unknown wag
Apart from being utterly beautiful and quite fast, the E-Type was rather inexpensive compared to the Ferraris it was as fast as and looked better than.
The E-Type also introduced Jaguar's independent rear suspension (irs), a technology Ferrari didn't really take hold of yet. Mercedes-Benz had swing-axle rear suspension, which didn't work as well as Jaguar's irs and was a lot scarier at the limit.
The E-type lasted from 1961 to 1973, but the later ones were bloated and grilled.
The packaging was a bit tight, and the engine had to be removed in order to change the clutch. This led to a lot of bargain-basement used E-Types with clutch problems...
<da:thumb id="403794642"/>Isn't it just groovy, baby?
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Ugly Cars #2 - 1957-1960 Dodge
3 min read
SUDDENLY IT'S HIDEOUS!
The Chrysler Corporation speeded up development of their 1960 models and released them in 1957 with the tagline "Suddenly it's 1960!" These designs were the work of Virgil Exner, an automotive designer who is widely admired for reasons completely beyond my comprehension. To my thinking, Exner's greatest contribution to automotive style was to make terrible stuff suitable mostly for scaring small children. He designed the most abominably screw-faced cars the world had ever seen, and most of these were done for the "Suddenly it's 1960!" Mopars.
Just look at the car at the top of this journal. Doesn't it look like a monster from outer space? At least one wouldn't have to worry about getting eaten because it seems to have a gigantic radio stuck in its mouth.
Probably the most apt tribute to the styling of the '58-60 Mopars was by Stephen King, who turned a '57 Plymouth Fury into one of his most memorable monsters, Christine. It really does look monstrous, but the Dodges seen here look even more monstrous.
One might look at the hideous monstrosities pictured here and think that the pressures of bringing out the 1960 lineup in 1957 was too much for Exner and he snapped. Considering the crimes against good taste that Exner and Ghia committed on a Ferrari SuperAmerica and the last road chassis to be built by the original Bugatti concern in Mulhouse, I more think he had started believing his own press and was rather much up his own backside. It seems to me that karmic justice has been delivered to Ghia, whose badge was last seen on the sides of Ford Escorts and Granadas in Europe.
What amazes me is that this stuff, and the awful '58 and '59 GM cars brought out to counter these, were actually popular! Did all the taste in the United States suddenly disappear? Then again, car sales did fall in 1958; maybe there was nothing worthwhile to buy.
<da:thumb id="279299736"/>Exner went on to style cars like this Stutz Bearcat, which shows that he lost none of his vulgarity.
P.S.:
Ferrari 410 Superamerica, styling by Exner, body by Ghia:
The Chrysler Corporation speeded up development of their 1960 models and released them in 1957 with the tagline "Suddenly it's 1960!" These designs were the work of Virgil Exner, an automotive designer who is widely admired for reasons completely beyond my comprehension. To my thinking, Exner's greatest contribution to automotive style was to make terrible stuff suitable mostly for scaring small children. He designed the most abominably screw-faced cars the world had ever seen, and most of these were done for the "Suddenly it's 1960!" Mopars.
Just look at the car at the top of this journal. Doesn't it look like a monster from outer space? At least one wouldn't have to worry about getting eaten because it seems to have a gigantic radio stuck in its mouth.
Probably the most apt tribute to the styling of the '58-60 Mopars was by Stephen King, who turned a '57 Plymouth Fury into one of his most memorable monsters, Christine. It really does look monstrous, but the Dodges seen here look even more monstrous.One might look at the hideous monstrosities pictured here and think that the pressures of bringing out the 1960 lineup in 1957 was too much for Exner and he snapped. Considering the crimes against good taste that Exner and Ghia committed on a Ferrari SuperAmerica and the last road chassis to be built by the original Bugatti concern in Mulhouse, I more think he had started believing his own press and was rather much up his own backside. It seems to me that karmic justice has been delivered to Ghia, whose badge was last seen on the sides of Ford Escorts and Granadas in Europe.What amazes me is that this stuff, and the awful '58 and '59 GM cars brought out to counter these, were actually popular! Did all the taste in the United States suddenly disappear? Then again, car sales did fall in 1958; maybe there was nothing worthwhile to buy.<da:thumb id="279299736"/>Exner went on to style cars like this Stutz Bearcat, which shows that he lost none of his vulgarity.
P.S.:
Ferrari 410 Superamerica, styling by Exner, body by Ghia:
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Ugly Cars #1 - Daimler SP250 (Dart)
4 min read
I have recently been editing articles on 1960s Daimlers. These were not products of Daimler-Benz, DaimlerChrysler, or Daimler AG, but of The Daimler Company, which was Britain's oldest car manufacturer.
Between 1956, when the stockholders ousted Sir Bernard Docker and his wife, the notorious "Naughty Norah", from the boards of BSA and their subsidiaries, and 1960, when BSA sold Daimler to Jaguar, the Managing Director of Daimler was Edward Turner. Turner was a legendary motorcycle designer and manager of the Triumph Engineering Company, which BSA had bought in 1951.
Turner was tasked with designing a 2 1/2 - litre saloon car (which is English for "sedan") and decided that it should have a V-8. He took his general design inspiration for the V8 engine from Cadillac but he took the hemi head design from his legendary Speed Twin motorcycles.
Somewhere along the line it was decided that a sports car would be made with the 2 1/2-litre saloon engine and Turner led that design too. The chassis was reverse-engineered from the TR series by the Triumph Motor Company, which had sold their motorcycle division in 1936 to what became the Triumph Engineering Company and no longer had anything to do with Triumph motorcycles.
The result was a car with a strong, reliable engine in a dodgy chassis. This was somewhat standard Turner style; Triumph engines were often installed into competitors' frames to get bikes with good power and good handling (Triumph/Nortons were called "Tritons" while Triumph/BSAs were called "Tribsas").
<da:thumb id="208836266"/> However, Triumph motorcycles were also renowned for being beautiful, and it is here that Turner's two-wheeled magic failed to translate into the four-wheeled world. The thing is hideous. It is usually compared with a carp or a catfish, which is generally not a good look.
The terrible styling was enough to destroy Daimler's hopes of selling 1500 of them in the first year and 3000 a year thereafter, with two-thirds of the sales to go to the United States, which had not really ever heard of Daimler. So was enough chassis flex to pop the doors open on rough roads. They might have sold well at Thanksgiving, but not much otherwise.
This was a make or break car for Daimler, and it broke them. In the aftermath, BSA just wanted out. Jaguar, on the other hand, wanted more factory space, and bought Daimler from BSA mainly to expand their production facilities.
In addition to the extra car factory space, Jaguar got Daimler's bus, truck, and AFV factories, a decent big luxury car called the Majestic, a really fast version of the Majestic called the Majestic Major with a 4.5 litre V8, and the really ugly SP250. They also got the DP250 prototype; a really small saloon on the SP250 chassis. Jaguar founder and chairman William Lyons took one look at the DP250 and cancelled it immediately. (I've seen photos of it. It looks better than the SP250, IMHO)
Just as immediately, Lyons put engineers to work on stiffening the chassis, which changed the SP250 from an ugly flimsy car to an ugly solid car. He even had a prototype for a replacement prepared. The SP252 was stiffer, stronger, and far better looking than the SP250. It also cost more to make the Jaguar's gorgeous E-Type, which sold in a higher price bracket and which they couldn't make enough of. No-brainer: goodbye, SP252.
In four years of production fewer than 3000 SP250s were sold.
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Dishonesty does not pay
3 min read
To do:
+ Azumanga '80s movies pictures for Yomi and Sakaki
+ #60 - Rejection
+ an idea I have for fanart of VanHeist's Gogo Bomango, and maybe for Didi, Andy, and Hector too (in which case I'll start with Andy)
+ the third instalment of "Charles June on Bubble Cars"
...can't think of anything else right now...
_______________________________________
NOTE: According to www.xe.com/currencyconverter/c… , at the time of this writing, a Jamaican dollar (J$) is about 0.8885 of a US cent, and it takes J$112.55 to buy a US dollar.
Having just got paid, I decided to pig out and buy a pizza. I was told that the pizza cost J$1950, so I figured that 10% was a fair tip so I'd give the delivery man J$200. To deal with the matter of the fifty dollars change, I wrapped together two thousand dollar bills and a fifty dollar bill to pay for the pizza and I kept a hundred dollars separately to add to the hundred I figured I would get as change so I would have $J200 to give as the tip.
The delivery man took my J$2050 and did not give me any change.
"Fair enough," I thought, while saying (and giving) nothing. "You just salt yourself out of a hundred dollars!"
_______________________________________
GRAYT COMICS:
The definitive Joe Bar Team comic (3 pages)
Next Era comics (does this still exist?)
Felinia va a Paris by momo81 (English translation)
XDRAGOON by yuski - arc 1 complete
Housepets! by RickGriffin
Sequential Art by jollyjack
Interesting artists and works featured here: Ten Featured Artists
If you want me to feature your work, there's space on this one! TWENTY FEATURED ARTISTS
My friends' anthro characters with cars!
100 THEMES ART CHALLENGE!
Policy on requests, trades, commissions and kiribans
Anthromanga Daioh/Azumanga Dogs
My InsaneJournal
My Back Pages, which will probably be going further and further back...
The Jamaican Postal Code system has been scrapped.
CSS help: news.deviantart.com/article/22… www.icyworlds.net/about/css
Clubs
+ Azumanga '80s movies pictures for Yomi and Sakaki
+ #60 - Rejection
+ an idea I have for fanart of VanHeist's Gogo Bomango, and maybe for Didi, Andy, and Hector too (in which case I'll start with Andy)
+ the third instalment of "Charles June on Bubble Cars"
...can't think of anything else right now...
_______________________________________
NOTE: According to www.xe.com/currencyconverter/c… , at the time of this writing, a Jamaican dollar (J$) is about 0.8885 of a US cent, and it takes J$112.55 to buy a US dollar.
Having just got paid, I decided to pig out and buy a pizza. I was told that the pizza cost J$1950, so I figured that 10% was a fair tip so I'd give the delivery man J$200. To deal with the matter of the fifty dollars change, I wrapped together two thousand dollar bills and a fifty dollar bill to pay for the pizza and I kept a hundred dollars separately to add to the hundred I figured I would get as change so I would have $J200 to give as the tip.
The delivery man took my J$2050 and did not give me any change.
"Fair enough," I thought, while saying (and giving) nothing. "You just salt yourself out of a hundred dollars!"
_______________________________________
GRAYT COMICS:
The definitive Joe Bar Team comic (3 pages)
Next Era comics (does this still exist?)
Felinia va a Paris by momo81 (English translation)
XDRAGOON by yuski - arc 1 complete
Housepets! by RickGriffin
Sequential Art by jollyjack
Interesting artists and works featured here: Ten Featured Artists
If you want me to feature your work, there's space on this one! TWENTY FEATURED ARTISTS
My friends' anthro characters with cars!
100 THEMES ART CHALLENGE!
Policy on requests, trades, commissions and kiribans
Anthromanga Daioh/Azumanga Dogs
My InsaneJournal
My Back Pages, which will probably be going further and further back...
The Jamaican Postal Code system has been scrapped.
CSS help: news.deviantart.com/article/22… www.icyworlds.net/about/css
Clubs
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In