BMW: My footnote in the history of motor racing.
Read MoreBRISTOL AFN and BMW
At the end of World War 2 the Americans got Werner von Braun and the V2 rocket, the British Fritz Fiedler and the BMW 327. NASA made the most of von Braun and his rocketry, and now after 75 years as Bristol Cars goes into administration, the last vestige of Archie Frazer-Nash’s (AFN-Islewortth) 1930s connections with the Bayerische Motoren Werke passes into history.
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Turnberry before Trump
The President likes golf. I like cars. He liked golf so much he bought the Club at Turnberry rather like Auric Goldfinger “bought” Royal St George’s where he played James Bond. I liked Turnberry not so much for golf as family outings and car things. I watched my first motor race there on what had been the runways of a hundred year old airfield. I saw the V16 BRM win, so rare an event that not long after it the BRM Trust put the team up for sale.
Read MoreBarry Lyndon: And the History of MG cars
Alfred Edgar Frederick Higgs could always tell a good story. A motoring writer in the 1930s he affected a pseudonym, Barré Lyndon after the eponymous hero of William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1844 The Luck of Barry Lyndon. Maybe Barry was not imposing enough so he changed y to e acute and fitted Thackeray’s plot about breaking into the aristocracy in books Combat (1933) and Circuit Dust (1934). They brought MG into motoring aristocracy by slightly embellishing the myths and legends of motor racing, elevating it beyond anything so prosaic as a car. Circuit Dust savoured MG success in the 1934 Mille Miglia with a respectful caption and a picture of the team’s reception by Signor Mussolini. Now there is a new account of MG in MG Classics for the digital age, out today.
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