This designer’s legacy can be summed up by those immortal words from Enzo Ferrari about the Jaguar E-Type: “The most beautiful car in the world”. Malcolm Sayer was an aerodynamicist at a time when aircraft knowledge was flowing straight to racing cars. Ask many people who he is and they probably won’t know his name, yet his design work lives on in the industry. Born on the … [Read more...]
Variable Valve Timing
Engineers and designers have spent decades trying to figure out ways to get more power out of an engine. One question that all engineers have is what the motor will be used for - will it be for an economical commuting car, will it go into a supercar or will it be used in a wagon where torque is more important than raw power. Subsequently, the design of the motor will differ … [Read more...]
Bristol Cars
If you are eccentric or fully loaded with pots of money you may be in the market for a Bristol – a very rare supercar that most people will never have seen! Like many car companies around the world, they came out of aircraft manufacturing – think about my history articles on Cord and Duesenberg, they used Lycoming who developed aircraft engines and there would have been a lot … [Read more...]
Gullwing Doors
Gullwing doors first hit the market in the 1950s thanks to Mercedes-Benz. They had developed the 300SL (the W194) for sports car racing from the 1952 season and the design required non-standard doors as the tubular chassis was very high – in fact it was next to the drivers seat as a safety precaution. This meant that either they had very small doors or the doors were hinged … [Read more...]
AC Cars
If you mention AC to most enthusiasts they immediately think of the Cobra – of which many fibreglass replicas exist. This car was the quintessential high performance sports car and was created at a time when many manufacturers were building similar vehicles. More on this later but let’s start at the beginning back in 1903. It was in 1903 that the forerunner of AC was founded … [Read more...]