Late last year I met the Australian author, Barry Farr, who has followed Ferrari since his primary school days and has been a member of the Australian Ferrari Club for the past 33 years. This passion for the marque has lead him to spend the last five years comprehensively researching all the Ferraris that came into the land down under during the 1950s and 1960s. The result of … [Read more...]
Cunningham
This article is about a specialist car company that developed pure racing machines and was a huge success in the States. The company is Cunningham – the creator of the racing stripe at a time when teams used national racing colours. This Cunningham is not related to the luxury Cunningham cars of the 1920s and 1930s. The company was founded by Briggs Cunningham II in the US … [Read more...]
Transaxles
A transaxle is the combination of a differential and gearbox in one unit. What this does is to reduce the packaging of the components into one unit rather than two. So in effect it is a transmission axle or "transaxle". In a traditional rear drive car, the engine is at the front with the gearbox connected at the rear of the block converting the power delivery through a prop … [Read more...]
Ferrari V12 Engine
This week’s article is about a range of fabulous engines - the Ferrari V12s. It has been known for decades that a V12 configuration is a smooth number of cylinders and manufacturers like Jaguar, Aston, Ferrari and Lamborghini have all had V12 motors in their sports cars. Ferrari distinguish their engines by name and number and we'll start the article with a description of … [Read more...]
Space Frame Chassis
A while back I described the use of the monocoque to produce a very strong but heavy chassis that probably 90% of the world's mass produced cars use. As a follow on, I’ll talk about the space frame chassis that really took off after World War 2, however like many technologies had it’s birth closer to the start of the industry. A space frame is a truss – multi interconnecting … [Read more...]
