Hello? Is That Morgan?
I'd like for you to build me a special car with an iPad in the dashboard, please.
Oh, and an ironing board. Yes, that's correct. An ironing board.
Hello? Hello?
There is a joke which runs along the lines of "Sainsburys exists to keep the riff-raff out of Waitrose". In car events, the amazing, upmarket Goodwood festival of Speed is Sainsburys... and Salon Privé is Waitrose. And it isn't just the rival events which filter out those who might sully the place. It's the ticket prices, …
Money and taste often don't go together. If you spend your entire life playing with numbers in an effort to earn an enormous bonus, when do you get the time to do that degree in car design?
That motorcycle though...just no. Motorcycles benefit from removing complication and adding lightness (ask KTM). Wrestling a V10 down a motorway seems an utterly pointless exercise, and on a racetrack it would be doubly so due to bends.
That motorcycle though...just no. Motorcycles benefit from removing complication and adding lightness
There was something a few years back called the Boss Hoss. It was basically a Harley Davidson frame with a Chevrolet V8 crowbarred inb the middle.
It performed rather well in a *very* straight line, but the first hint of a side-wind meant a lean into it - with a resulting loss of the read end :-(
There comes a point, in motorcycles, where lots of torque is simply a liability.
Vic.
How does one get a half-ton bike vertical again when one leg of the prop-stand lands on a bit of ground that can't support a quarter of a ton?
PS: If the author thinks a £75 ticket is pricey for a motoring event, then he obviously hasn't seen the admission prices for the British GP at Silverstone.
Not sure why nobody mentioned it yet but, while that's a custom third party built Viper engine bike, Dodge also made and sold a first party one briefly. Google Dodge Tomahawk. It had two part wheels to lean it into turns gracefully and the same engine. Never demonstrated its top speed but was projected to be unreal.
> Wrestling a V10 down a motorway seems an utterly pointless exercise, and on a racetrack it would be doubly so due to bends.
The bike was build by Adam Millyard a few years back. As with all his bikes, it's a real road-going bike, not a design freak. I've seen him ride it down single track road to the West Hagbourne bike night. It's a lot more practical than the donor Viper car. The fact that it does 207mph is neither here not there.
You'd probably prefer his latest creation, the Flying Millyard, a 5L V-twin minimally based on a big aircraft radial. It's hard-tailed, has manual mixture and advance/retard, and requires kick-starting - which I've seen him do. Or is that removing too much complication and weight for your taste?
Jay Leno was interviewed in connection with his motorcycle collection. His favorite was the Y2K gas-turbine powered 325hp machine made by MTT, which last I checked was the world's most powerful production motorcycle and actually - as the TV show demonstrated - quite rideable. But hey it actually had fewer moving parts I guess, so was indeed simpler than the V10, and probably lighter too.
Even so, the Viper-engined is far from the worst-looking or worst idea along those lines. Old fogeys might remember another TV show forty years ago in which an idiot aircraft mechanic shoehorned a V12 Rolls-Royce Merlin inside a mini and periodically ran it up and down the runway of his airport. The engine occupied the entire interior of the mini. He had to sit on a seat cantilevered out the rear window and steer (!) it via an elongated steering wheel column also poking out the rear window.
Slightly more practical variants of Merlin or Meteor-powered ground vehicles included "The Beast" which was an awesome looking long-bonnet custom car which at one point was in the Guinness Book of Records as fastest road-legal vehicle. If I recall correctly, the first version was totalled and a second variant built. It was held to be an excellent autobahn vehicle.
This has been going on for a long time. Back in the sixties there was a V8-powered drag bike which had a helicopter direct-drive linkage for a transmission...
V12 Rolls-Royce Merlin inside a mini
Not quite as extreme, but I saw a Mini with a Landrover V8 (3.5l I think...) at a Mini Show 10-12 years ago. The guy built it for hillclimb racing, then found it to be completely unusable for that.
His words to me were "It's OK to drive, as long as the road is completely dry, and you drive it like you are on ice."
I've seen one Japanese nutjob that cut-pasted two 750cc Hondas together or something like that. It became a V8 or a V12, and it didn't look strange or unpractical at all. This was back in the 70's. Two bad I can't remember further details.
And yes, the Y2K bike had a Bell JetRanger III turbine. It has only 3 moving parts, only 1 of them is the engine, and Jay Leno said himself it melted the fender of the car parked behind him on the red lights. To top it off, it sounded like you were taxiing a F-16 down the road...
Back in 2003 at the last "Coupes Moto Legende" to be held at Montlhery, some bloke brought along his modified Kawasaki Z1300. The original is a 6-cylinder beast, but he decided it wasn't quite enough and doubled it up to a 2.6 litre V12. Had proper Z2600 badges too.
-A.
To top it off, it sounded like you were taxiing a F-16 down the road...
I'm after one of these
There used to be a rather better video of it, with less "inspirational" music and more swearing - but that seems to have gone AWOL...
Vic.
They're not all ugly.
I'm sure thats an E-Type Jag in the line-up. Lovely car, I just wish I'd had longer the one time I got to play with one. First thing I was told on getting into it was that it didn't have traction control, ABS or anything else I might be used to - suits me just fine :)
True the jag does looks nice, but it seems that the modern cars are a little, how do I say it, well designed mechanically but dreadfully designed otherwise. Perhaps it's me liking the older lines or perhaps selection bias - the old ugly cars just aren't kept and loved? Perhaps after a few years the ugly current ones will fall to bits and be forgotten. One can hope.
They're not all ugly.
Indeed. Along with an old Porche and a "Phantomas" issue Citroen (forgot the exact model - first on the right). All are lovely cars and a demonstration of how what used to be art degenerated over the years. Not surprising - they were built in the days when the overall design was done by engineers not artists sticking a shell on a piece of engineering. As a result you got either utilitarian hideously fugly wagons (with some bells and whistles added as an afterthought) or true pieces of engineering as art (like the original Porche or the E-series).
The hideous ones are all long scrapped and recycled. The really beautiful "hits" of this approach look better than anything coming off the factory line today.
Ever see the old Sunbeam with inline crankshaft in action? Every time the rider changed gear the bike rocked from side to side, so I reckon that you'd need to open the throttle really carefully on this monster or the bike would end up sliding down the road on its side with you perched on top burning your bum on the exhaust.
Sensible bikes all have transverse crankshafts to avoid this problem.
I used to have a BMW R90S. The longitudinal crank is no problem at all unless you get moderately serious air in which case you can feel the bike twist a little in flight. That is a 1970s bike with about 70hp - vastly more than a Sunbeam. BM, of course, still make boxers with longitudinal cranks. The HP2 Sport puts out about 130hp (see also Moto-Guzzi, especially MGS-01). I do agree, however, that the V10 thing looked awful, was a ridiculous bike and would probably burn you.
You haven't seen a large 8-inline longitudinal engine on a car with soft suspension, have you? (Pontiac - GTO size).
The whole car bends on the slightest throttle, as most grandpa-cars (Didn't you love your grandpa Cadillac?). Even the engine cushions are reinforced on the right side. Perhaps it would spin if it ever got airborne.
The old (1946-'50s) Sunbeams, with a parallel twin engine, suffered badly from the inherent engine vibration. After the prototypes fell apart, mounting the engine on flexible rubber bushes in the frame was the only solution which made riding the thing tenable. If the engine is suddenly revved, then the engine would be expected to rock on its mountings. Such was the design brilliance of the British motorcycle industry in the post-war years, that Sunbeam retained the rigid mounting for the silencer...... Guess what? Rather than design the dratted thing properly, they introduced a length of flexible pipe between the exhaust pipe and the silencer. And that's ignoring the use of a worm-gear at the rear wheel which couldn't handle anything more than the modest torque of the original engine. Was it pride or stubborness that blinded them to all the benefits of the transverse-mounted flat-twin as demonstrated by Douglas, BMW, etc? At least Velocette a few years later showed how to do the job properly with the little LE; unfortunately, the market for which is was specifically designed disappeared with the availability of low-cost secondhand cars and the production the BMC Mini.
One of the most impressive things I've seen recently in boat engines is this guy. who is building a rotary beast out of mazda engine parts:
http://www.12rotor.com/
Something about a rotary engine that is awesome, it is like the evolutionary missing link between a piston engine and a jet turbine. This one has 12 rotors, and supposedly a single engine will generate 5400HP when finished (in highest state of tune).
I'm sure the whole ordering and waiting process for a top of the line supercar is great.
But then you get it and I bet actual ownership is a total nightmare. If you just take it out on a journey somewhere you must have to go into some advanced logistical planning to make sure it arrives there and back in one piece.
Speed bumps, kerbs, decent parking, parking with wide enough bays, ramps, narrow lanes, security, gravel drives etc. etc.
Damn just clonked an alloy! Thats £4000 to fix and a 3 months wait!
One of those situations where the dreaming is better than reality perhaps.
Totally the wrong kind of mindset for supercar ownership.
£4K for an alloy replacement? Pay it and not even notice it, and somewhere along the line it becomes tax deductible. Three month wait? No problem, drive one of your other 4 supercars in the meantime.
You even underwrite your own insurance based on your assets so you pay very little for the admin of that (as long as you don't stuff one in).
Easy option, join a supercar club, buy 90 days of driving per year and pick a different one each week.
Totally the wrong kind of mindset for supercar ownership.
Yup. I remember seeing a little piece on TV. Can't remember what program it was, not something earth-shatteringly interesting. But they'd persuaded a chap who'd just bought a McLaren MPC-12-whatever to take their presenter out for a spin in it.
This turned out to be rather more literally than planned. It had snowed, but they went to some track or other, and were whizzing round doing laps, on the rather damp tarmac between plowed snowbanks. She was alternately going "wheeee" and "eek". Then he spun it, and stuffed it into a solid waist high snowbank at about 50. With a rather sad crunching noise.
The presenter was standing there looking like she was going to burst into tears, as they surveyed the sad wreckage of the front wing and bonnet. Commiserating about how terrible it was. And he just laughed and said that was what sportscars were for, and why you raced them on tracks. He was now a couple of mid-sized family cars poorer, but he'd got to play with his new toy for a bit, and such was life.
The ones who terrify me, as the guys who spend years lovingly restoring unique 1930s classics and racing cars. Spending hours, and thousands, sourcing parts, or getting new ones hand-made. Then taking them off to the track and racing them, often in the rain, at full pelt and competitively. And what they'll probably say, as they're interviewed over the smoking wreckage of their pride-and-joy is "that's racing". Then go back and do it all again. Loonies.
Those are not real pictures. That is the Project Cars game, with anti-aliasing turned off, and a color pallete swap, the game still in beta. There isn't such a thing as a lime-green Lamborghini.
Otherwise you'd have to beat the crap out the schmuck that did that to a Lambo.