Automatics

"No thanks. I prefer to change gear myself." Some people still look down on automatic transmissions. They probably prefer a dishwasher and a vacuum cleaner to standing over a sink or beating carpets with a stick. Yet there is something about being clever enough to select one's own gear. It's manly to change gear. Automatics are for girls or the elderly.
E-Type Jaguar started with a crunchy difficult gearbox.
Now no car with sporting pretensions can afford to miss out on little paddles beside the rim of the steering wheel so you can change gear looking like a racing driver. How pretentious can you get? This is only an automatic with manual over-ride. Leave the thing to itself. It probably knows better than the driver.
This year marks 70 years since the introduction of the automatic. I wrote this Sunday Times motoring column in December 1990.FIFTY YEARS OF AUTOMATICS
The first mass-produced fully automatic transmission was introduced fifty years ago for the 1941 Oldsmobile and Cadillac. General Motors called it Hydra-matic (the hyphen kept quips about Hi-dramatic at bay).
It was an innovative era. As America entered the Second World War, production cars were furnished with air conditioning for the first time. The first two-speed windscreen wipers appeared and the first Jeep, and the first large-scale production four wheel drive car, a Russian GAZ-61.
The hydra of Hydra-matic stood for hydraulic. The heart of the automatic transmission was an oil-filled turbine pump rather like the "fluid flywheel" used by Daimler in 1930 with a preselector gearbox. General Motors used a gearbox with the gear trains in-line so that they could be changed by means of internal clutches, activated by the speed of the car and the position of the accelerator pedal.
The first automatics were jerky and tended to leak oil, but they were better than the self-changing electric and mechanical systems they replaced. General Motors added another element to the pump to make it more responsive, and the hydraulic gearchanges have been augmented by electronics, which take account of gradients and fuel flow.
The original Hydra-matic cost only 57 dollars and by the 1950s, automatics were the rule rather than the exception in America. They still absorbed too much power to make them viable for small European cars and no practical alternative has ever emerged with the smooth running of the torque converter which evolved from the early "fluid flywheel".
Semi-automatics such as the short-lived Manumatic which had a gear-lever actuated electric clutch and appeared on Hillmans and Wolseleys of the 1950s were short-lived. The Daf Variomatic and its descendents on Fiats and Fords have not caught on. The AP Mini automatic in the sump of the engine was a masterpiece of miniaturisation, but was deeply flawed.
Despite its shortcomings, the manual gearchange will be with us for some time. Its sliding pinions and clashing gears was an arrangement of which the 19th century pioneer Rene Panhard once remarked, "C'est brutal, mais ça marche."

A Car Fit For a King

The Palace bought a La Salle in 1938, but where is it?
Mystery of the ‘missing’ royal car

BUCKINGHAM PALACE is tight-lipped about a beautiful coupe it bought from Czechoslovakia in 1938, writes Eric Dymock. It was discovered during research into a new book on Skoda by the authors Ivan Margolius and Charles Meisl, but their requests for information from the royal mews met with no response. The car was ordered from Carrosserie Sodomka in Czechoslovakia, but its recipient and subsequent history remain a mystery.
“It is possible that it was bought for the Duke of Windsor,” Meisl said. “Or it may have been a gift for another royal family. Either way the palace isn’t saying.”
Sodomka constructed bodies for other makes besides Skoda, and the stylish royal convertible was built on an American La Salle chassis. The shape followed contemporary French coachbuilders’ style with faired-in headlights, flowing wings and chrome “streamline” decoration.
The Windsors’ preference for large American cars, instead of the rather staid Daimlers in which the royal family had ridden since the turn of the century, may explain the palace’s reticence. As Edward VIII, the duke took delivery of two Buicks, built in a Canadian factory, within a month of George V’s death. The break with Daimler was explained by the king’s wish to encourage empire trade.
Skoda Laurin & Klement, by Ivan Margolius and Charles Meisl. Osprey Publishing, £25.
The Sunday Times 15 November 1992

Speed Limits: Other drivers should stick to them

Either there was little support for any change in the 70mph speed limit, or the 1,519drivers in the MORI sample for the 1995 Lex Report on Motoring were a self-righteous lot. My Sunday Times motoring column of 22 January 16 years ago noted about a third enjoyed driving fast, two-thirds did not, yet scarcely any wanted the limit raised to 80mph, as the 2011 Minister of Transport is broadly hinting. The 1995 survey showed strong opposition, among the surveyed, to lowering the limit, yet two months earlier anonymous magazine readers voted nine to one in favour of raising it to 80mph with stricter policing. It looks as though there is a dichotomy about speed limits; Everybody Else should slow down.

A strong majority (nearly two drivers out of three according to the Lex survey) believed driving too fast the second most frequent cause of accidents after drink-driving. There was support for speed cameras although respondents declared these made no difference to their own driving - presumably beyond reproach - but were useful for slowing others.

Drunks, speeders, the over-tired, and ,'driving too close to the vehicle in front' were blamed for accidents, disregarding bad weather, congestion, faulty road design, vehicle defects and practically everything else.

Surveys, however reliable and illuminating on facts, suffer from respondents telling interrogators not so much what they think, but what they feel they ought to think. Pollsters try to take this into account by 'weighting' results, yet blaming drinking and driving as the most frequent cause of road accidents shows how strong the social pressure on it has become. The real figure is less than one-fifth. The popular view that 'accidents happen to other people' now reads, 'accidents happen to other people who have been drinking too much and driving too fast.'

Speed has always been a target for safety propagandists. The 70mph limit was imposed in 1965 by a Labour Minister of Transport, Tom Fraser, in response to a spate of accidents on foggy motorways. It was scarcely a measured reaction, but gave the impression of determination to do something. Fraser called it an experiment and asked the Transport and Road Research Laboratory (TRRL) to look into it.

The results were at best inconclusive, at worst deceitful. The TRRL knew on which side its bread was buttered and to accommodate the new incumbent, the non-driving Barbara Castle, reached a suitably equivocal conclusion. Mrs Castle made the limit permanent. It made no difference to the fog accidents, of course, and enforcement was patchy. Motorways remained the safest roads in the country accounting for just 3 per cent of the casualties, 11 injury accidents per hundred million kilometres compared with 108 in built-up areas and 33 in non-built-up areas.

Modern technology has made enforcement easier. Cameras, Vascar, unmarked cars, and radar guns make motorway speeders more likely to be caught. The AA supports the 70mph limit and says two-thirdsof its members agree. The RAC advocates a review. 'We have the worst of both worlds,' it says. 'We have a limit that is ignored by the majority, including the police. We ought to ask why we have a 70mph limit. If it is right then it should be enforced, if it isn't, what should it be?'

Aston Martin power point

Aston I tested in 2007, photographed Isle of Bute
There seems no point in bigger engines in bigger cars, which do 200mph, or would if there was anyplace to do it and anybody brave enough to try. I’ve managed 185 (electrically timed) on a test track and I can not think of a road where I would care to. Neil Lyndon, articulate as ever in The Sunday Telegraph, admits to being enamoured with Aston Martin for 50 years, but says it, “…must be rather like being a fan of Manchester City. Occasional eruptions of fervently inventive world-beating creativity interspersed with ages of miserable underachievement.”

Prompted by the Duke of Cambridge’s appearance in the Prince of Wales’s DB6, Lyndon ruminates on a make Ford acquired in 1994. “It seemed (Aston’s) ship had finally come in. At last it was in the care of indulgent patrons who wanted exactly what all Aston lovers longed for. Ford built a factory at Gaydon the equal of Ferrari’s at Modena They seconded top designers, wrote them a blank cheque and said they were to achieve nothing less than their best work.”

Beautiful proportions, the DB7, even though cobbled from Jaguar parts.
Ford backed away, leaving Aston looking for new backers but, “Cars in the last four years have, at bottom, been variants on existing models. The Virage Coupé is a kind of genetic extrusion from the DB9, which appeared in 2004 and was a rethink of the DB7 of 1994.” It’s all too true. Like Lamborghinis, Astons have become bigger, more powerful, more complicated, faster, and more expensive. At £160,000 they begin to look faintly absurd. Owners no longer appear macho or even sportif so much as profligate. It’s even worse with Bugattis.

The traditional Aston radiator shape has been preserved - just.Aston’s 6 litres and 500 horse power is fine for a toy you use on a track day, or even real racing, yet it is excessive for a road car.

They should get back to high-efficiency smaller cars, exquisitely engineered. There were great 2 litre Aston Martins.

There was a memorable 1750cc Alfa Romeo of the 1930s, of watch-making precision that made fierce mechanical noise. Ferrari’s first masterpiece was a 2 litre V12. The DB 2 Aston was a modest 6-cylinder of 2½ litres designed by WO Bentley. The DB4 of 1958 was 3.7 litres. Jim Clark’s DB4GT Zagato, of cherished memory, had 314 horse power. In 1969 the DBSV8 was 5.3 litres.

Aston Martin DB2/4, engine design by WO Bentley
There is a hint of desperation among supercar manufacturers, announcing ever more extravagant cars at ever more ridiculous prices. Jaguar has said it will sell 250 CX-75s in 2012 at £700,000. Its engineers’ flights of fancy were once D-types, which won Le Mans. Now, it seems, they are just flights of fancy.

Borrowed plumes. The late Victor Gauntlett, who owned the company, lent me his personal DB2/4 for the RAC Golden Fifty Rally.

Wolseley Fourteen

I grew up with a Wolseley 14 like this. It was very smart in grey and blue. Most parents’ cars were black. Ours looked splendid. The little Wolseley badge on the radiator lit up, or at least it did for a time. Dad didn’t replace the festoon bulb when it failed as most of them did. This 14/56 cost £265 when it was new and we kept it throughout the war, so the chrome bumper was painted white to show up in the blackout. I wonder the chrome didn’t show up better, but white paint was the rule. In 1944 or so, when the blackout was relaxed, I scraped the paint off with a penny. It took ages but I was so keen, as a ten year old, for the car to look its best that I scraped till my hands were sore. I still like cars to look their best. The headlamps had wartime black hoods in case German bombers spotted father coming home after dark. Even the yellow Trafficators (the signal arms that popped out and lit up to show he was turning into the front gate) were painted over. You’d have thought Heinkel pilots would have more to do at 10,000 feet than spot Trafficators, but there you are. I stripped the paint off them as well. Father eventually snapped a Trafficator off on the gatepost.

I can still see the Wolseley’s art-deco facia, like a mantelpiece clock, with a speedometer needle that jiggled through 30 degrees whenever the car moved. Father didn’t drive very fast so it didn’t much matter. You got into the boot through the back of the rear seat, which I did sometimes when the car was moving and pretended I was in a boat. Father got a special “supplementary” petrol ration because he used the Wolseley for war work so I got dropped off at school. The Wolseley, VD6829 replaced a Vauxhall Light Six, a Twelve I would guess, HS8635. I thought the Wolseley much smarter although I was badly put out to find Norma Marshall’s father’s Morris, only a 10 as I recall, had much the same Pressed Steel bodywork even down to the curvy lines on the side. A blatant copy, I concluded, of our upper-crust Wolseley. At ten I hadn’t heard of badge engineering. Mr Martin, the plumber next door, always had Rovers with real wood facia and a freewheel which, even then, I could see was more up-market. Not that I was class conscious…

Winning Jaguars

I met Peter Lindner in 1962. As part of its sponsorship of a six-hour saloon car race at Brands Hatch, The Motor arranged to test the winning cars afterwards and Lindner had driven one of the leading Jaguars. That’s me in the lower picture (below), in a white shirt, talking to him and co-driver Peter Nöcker as we prepared to take the cars away. Lindner was already a successful racing driver. I was a new member of the road test staff yet I recall him as genial and understanding, not a bit aloof or patronising, even handing over his precious Jaguar to a callow journalist.

I see from Octane magazine that an immensely painstaking restoration of Lindner’s Low Drag Lightweight E-type has been accomplished. This was the car he crashed fatally at Montlhéry in 1964 and it has been rebuilt from the original wreckage, Classic Motor Cars in Bridgnorth taking 5000 hours bending every bit straight again. A magnificent tribute worthy of the gentle German.

Roger Bell, Charles Bulmer and I took the cars to the MIRA test track for performance testing that included hours on the banked track, measuring their steady-speed fuel consumption. That was the dreary bit. Driving them on the circuit let you feel what a car prepared for racing was like. Driving them back and parking outside my small bachelor pad in South Kensington was thrilling. Taking them out at night on to a still incomplete M4 might explain why we didn’t get any Jaguars to test after the following year’s race.

TEXT:

The Motor Six Hours THE MOTOR October 17 1962
This select load consists of the Lindner/Nocker Jaguar and the class winning MG. and Mini-Cooper. The transporter (for getting the cars to the M.I.R.A. test track) was used purely for convenience all the cars tested were subsequently driven on the road.
TESTING the WINNERS
Five of the fastest cars were tested by “The Motor” shortly after the race • They were the two leoding Jaguars and the class winning Sunbeam Rapier, MG 1101 and Mini-Cooper. • David Piper’s inipressions of the other class winner—the Lancia Flaminia — appear on page 474
THE only people barely moved h the drama on the day following the Six Hours Race were members of The Motor Road Test staff. They found themselves with not one but two 3.8 Jaguars to test, since it now appeals likely that the issue will he decided in favour of one of them. The two Jaguars (the blue Equipe Endeavour-entered 3.8, No 1 in the race, and given as winner on race day driven by Mike Parkes and Jimmy Blumer, and No. 4. the green Peter Lindner/Peter Nocker 3.8. placed second overall) differed in their preparation. The British car is starker and seemed to have undergone the six-hour ordeal more successfully than the German one. Weight reduction is noticeably more ruthless, all the trim, headlining, carpets, sound-damping, and even draught-excluding material having been removed. The wooden facia on the passenger’s side has been taken away and replaced with a stiff board. The result, with a dual, unsilenced exhaust is not unexpectedly a very noisy car. There is very little difference in the noise level outside or in, occupants having not only the yowl from the exhaust, but the screech of wind passing outside the body and also through it by holes in the bulkhead and the gaps round the doors. Winding mechanism has been discarded in three Perspex side windows (the driver can wind his glass one down and watch the mechanism, there being no trim panel( and Perspex is used also for the rear window.
Power as well as noise is supplied in great lumps by the 3.8-litre engine with two 2-in. S.U. carburetters instead of the two 1¾-in. units fitted as standard. Air cleaners are banished, but the engine, apart from being air-flowed internally and balanced, is completely standard, Stock inlet and exhaust systems are maintained together with the optional “ blue top” high compression cylinder head.
Other obvious modifications under the bonnet are an improved oil breather system at the front of the two cam boxes, a large crankcase oil filler with a snap-action cap, removal of the heater installation, and the substitution of a lightweight battery. There are additional oil breathers for the gearbox, and the car is distinguished at the rear by an enormous fuel filler cap supplying three tanks, and by two small breathers for the rear axle.
The Endeavour Jaguar used 7.00-15 Dunlop racing tyres which had their 50-odd-lb. pressure educed to 40 for our use on the road. The racing tyres, high-geared steering (2.9 turns lock to lock) and the Jaguar competition seats combine to give this saloon a completely different character, The handling is improved out of all recognition and the car can be guided with precision whether complete adhesion between the tyres and the road has been maintained or not. The throttle pedal is used to commit the car to a line and keep it there, although inevitably, the result is a rather extravagant consumption of
tyre, a great deal of which seems to adhere to the road.
THE LINDNER JAGUAR
The Lindner car is a little less stark; the cloth headlining, complete wood facia and door trim (non-standard and rather sketchy) by comparison giving an impression almost of opulence. The interior heater had not even been taken out. Most of the modifications undertaken on the Endeavour ear had also been applied to the German one, but important differences lay in standard 1¾ in. S.U. carburetters, 6.50-15 tyres and the use of a normal heavy battery. A well-made cool air duct has been run from the left hand horn grille over the top of the engine to the intake side, and an oil cooler fitted.
Registered in Weisbaden. West Germany, where its owner sells Jaguars, the Lindncr car has left-hand drive, which must be a handicap on racing circuits where most corners are right handed. Steering and handling were vastly improved, like those of the Endeavour Jaguar, but noise seemed little subdued by leaving some of the trim in place.
Both cars have overdrive, and both had new pads fitted to the disc brakes immediately after the race as a safety precaution. The seat harness in the Endeavour car looks immensely strong, the shoulder straps anchoring behind the back seat.
Performance of both cars was affected by clutches which had suffered somewhat during the race. Racing starts with either were impossible although they performed satisfactorily during the other testing and when the cars were used in all their grandeur on the road. Both could he used in traffic but were much more at ease on fast roads, far from disturbable public and policemen with ready ears for a racing exhaust. But they could be (and were) used on the road and only the Endeavour car showed signs of distress during the 30 m.p.h. constant-speed fuel consumption tests.
Proof that both cars remain close to each other’s (and standard) specifications can he obtained by reference to the data panel. This shows how closely matched their performances are with the balance fractionally in favour of the Endeavour entry, which finished four laps ahead. While substantially ‘same-as-you-can-buy.’ these are nonetheless exciting racers.
[caption] Firm suspension of the leading Parkes/Blumer 3.8 counters body roll at Southbank bend. Racing tyres at high pressures also helped to give the car a harsh ride on the road. Below: Lindner (in car) briefs The Motor. Nocker is on the right.
Endeavour Jaguar, 27½ cwt. Standard 3.8, 30 cwt.