This article is a description of one of the few Swiss car makers: Monteverdi. The marque was formally founded by Peter Monteverdi in 1967 after he turned the family business, a car dealership, into a specialist manufacturer. Prior to founding the manufacturing company, Monteverdi had been building specials for road and racing which included MBM (Monteverdi Binnigen Motors) … [Read more...]
Jensen Motors
This week's history article is about a coachbuilder that became a manufacturer and survived the low volume manufacturing by being a supplier to other major manufacturers. The company is Jensen Motors based in the middle of the UK and was founded in 1934 by Richard and Alan Jensen who worked for WJ Smith, a commercial truck manufacturer. Prior to being with WJ Smith, the two … [Read more...]
Jaguar XK Engine
This week’s technical article follows on from the last few weeks articles on great engines. So this week we have one of the all time greats – the 6-cylinder Jaguar XK double overhead cam. Developed by Jaguar after the war, it first appeared in one of the most iconic sports cars – the XK120. This engine is a favourite of mine thanks to my family owning several Jaguars … [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...]
Sidevalve Engines
The sidevalve engine was manufactured from the early days of the motor industry right up to the 1960s for cars and is still used in smaller applications. Many of the early engines were sidevalve as the internal combustion engine evolved from steam through gas to oil burners to petrol. Sidevalve engines are also known as L-Heads or flatheads. This latter name was because … [Read more...]