Over the past few years I have described several engines that have had long successful lives and we now add to the list an engine that started in the US and branched out into a Formula 1 winning motor and a source for some of the best sports cars produced in the UK. The engine in question started life in 1961 as the Buick 215, an all aluminium motor of 3.5 litres capacity … [Read more...]
Automatic Transmissions
Did you know that the original version of the modern type of automatic transmission is nearly 100 years old? This is true, however it took about 20 years to reach the automobile! The first automatic transmission that we would recognise today was developed in the early 1920s by Alfred Horner Munro, a Canadian engineer, who developed his to use compressed air to act as the … [Read more...]
Torque Converters
Torque Converters are a way to transfer power from an internal combustion engine to the driving wheels without using a mechanical clutch. Many automatic transmissions use them and most are fluid couplings. To confuse the topic further, vehicles have used fluid couplings to connect an engine to a transmission before the torque converter was invented! Fluid couplings as their … [Read more...]
Ken Costello
Ken Costello was one of those breed of men who could make a car perform better than the manufacturer could - possibly helped by the fact that many vehicles come out of their respective factories with a medium tune for general consumption. Not many people would know him, however many would know about his creation: the first commercial MGB V8. It wasn’t the first - during the … [Read more...]
Traction Control – The Basics
Traction Control is as it says – to control traction, as best as it can in the conditions it encounters! It must be said that traction control won’t save you if you run out of talent at higher speeds and it will probably scare some drivers when it kicks in at low speeds that makes them react suddenly that causes an accident anyway! For this article, I'm going to concentrate … [Read more...]