Weep for a Wolseley

When a serious commentator like Martin Buckley contemplates a Wolseley Six Eighty you are obliged to help. We were a Wolseley family, and while I wouldn’t put the 6/80 among his allegedly rubbish cars, it did have shortcomings. Valves. Wolseley’s obsession with shaft-driven overhead camshafts stemmed from copying Hispano Suiza aero engines during the First World War. It continued as Nuffield Morris Engines in the 1930s, so when a post-Second World War Wolseley was contemplated ohc seemed just the thing. There were two. The 4/50 and the 6/80, essentially Minor monocoque masterworks, developed under Alec Issigonis into cars not so much badge engineered, as family resembled. Torsion bar sprung, with decent ride and handling the 6-cylinder was 7in longer, had bigger brakes and fatter tyres. The middle bit with the doors and boot was pure Morris Oxford with not much room in the back.

Alas, the valves. The 2214.8cc produced 72bhp @ 4,700rpm and you could do over 80mph, but to an 18 year old a 0-60 of about 21sec probably seemed lacklustre, and 6/80s didn’t have a rev counter. Taggart’s service manager grew weary of warranty claims and mentioned, unkindly I thought, to father that the trouble was over-revving. In fact the valves and guides were made from poor materials and overheating was endemic. 6/80s had no temperature gauge. By 1952 the cylinder head and cooling system were redesigned, starting with engine number 20,301. I have no idea if ours was before or after, but it certainly burned a lot of valves. Owners nowadays use Stellite. Father replaced it with an Armstrong Siddeley. So, blemished rather than rubbished for Classic & Sports Car readers. I liked the 6/80, steering column gearshift notwithstanding. Ours was metallic green (top at Dunure, Ayrshire). I was into photographing cars even then – I thought you had to if you wanted to be a motoring writer. Mother had the Wolseley tricked out with trendy tartan seat covers over the fine leather seats; they were as good as new when it was sold.

Pity it didn’t have rack and pinion, like the Minor. They didn’t think R&P would work in a big car and it had low-geared Bishop cam steering. Four and three quarter turns lock to lock meant a lot of wheel-twirling when you were in a hurry. Nice wood facia. Mother liked that. Two big SUs and although there was 57 per cent of the weight on the front I don't remember too much understeer. Didn't really know what understeer was. Got the 6/80 stuck in a sand dune at Troon late one night. Girl involved. I was 18.

Nothing new about a London Grand Prix

There’s nothing new about a London Grand Prix. Sunday Magazine in 1981 wasn’t first to suggest it and now, apparently, Bernie is encouraging the idea of one round the Olympic Stadium. Thirty years ago I revived a 1930s proposal. Innes Ireland came to lunch and agreed a Hyde Park Grand Prix course with racing cars tearing down Park Lane at 180mph, braking hard for a sharp right hander at the Hilton, flat-out in fifth past the Serpentine.

Grand Prix cars only had five gears then and were racing round some unlikely places, like the Caesar’s Palace car park, Las Vegas, and street courses in Montreal, Long Beach and Detroit. Lunch with Innes was always entertaining.

Maybe Whitehall, Birdcage Walk and The Mall was a bit ambitious. Hyde Park was probably more practical; Grosvenor House and The Dorchester would have been good viewing points. Decent breakfast and all-day bar. Parliament Square was a product of artist Geoff Hunt’s imagination.

On Wednesday Telegraph Sport revealed that a bid, tabled by Intelligent Transport Solutions Ltd, was among the shortlist of four accepted. According to the formal documentation, it was listed as being “on behalf of Formula One”, though Ecclestone said on Thursday he “had not put his name to it”.

The plan is thought to propose a track running into the stadium and then around the Olympic Park, which has considerable wide-open spaces, though designed for pedestrians rather than F1 cars. Intelligent Transport Solutions Ltd was founded last year, with headquarters listed as Wanstead, east London.

Santander is sponsoring a competition to envisage a London grand prix circuit. Nothing’s new.

Silent Travel

Cars that cancelled out their own noise by playing it back in stereo was not sci-fi fantasy. I heard it working. Yet little has been done with Adaptive Noise Control developed 20 years ago at Lotus. Cars have become so quiet, it seems, there is no need.
Quietude by technical mastery. Crewe. Assembling a 12-cylinder Bentley engine (above).
Lotus's invention consisted of a computer, four loudspeakers some microphones, and sound sensors for tyre and exhaust noise. Development engineers chose a small Citroën AX for experiments because it was lightweight and noisy, and demonstrated it to me on the runways at Hethel.
Unitary small saloons tend to be boisterous inside. Layers of sound-damping materials would only cancel out the advantages of weight-saving for economy. The engineers decided the most annoying noises were low-frequency booming, which reverberated through the body shell from what they described as, “an acoustically complex mix of tyre swish, suspension rumble, engine vibration, and exhaust resonance.”
They had worked with Southampton University's Institute of Sound and Vibration Research since 1986 on a system they claimed was ready for a production car. There were four tiny microphones in the headlining, costing about 35p each, connected to a microprocessor control unit linked into the ignition to sense engine speed.
Detecting sound pressure levels inside the car through the microphones, the control unit matched them with changes in engine speed and played them back through an amplifier with 40 Watts RMS per channel. The effect was astonishing. You could switch the system in and out, making it easy to hear a 20dB reduction in noise in the lower-frequency sounds below about 100HZ.
It didn’t make the car silent. Tackling higher frequencies, the sort of buzz that comes from engine valvegear, or whine from gears, demanded more microphones and loudspeakers, as well as sensors in each seat to localise noise levels to each occupant. It could have been incorporated into a stereo system relatively cheaply for about the cost of the microprocessor Lotus used, under £100 then and probably a lot less now.
Anti-noise would have permitted softer engine mountings which, it was claimed, could make cars almost vibrationless. What high hopes. Adaptive noise control turned out difficult to engineer, much like active suspension Lotus and Volvo tried out in the 1990s. Noisy and heavy, it was overtaken by simpler computer controlled oleo and air springing.

Gaydon, cutaway MGB GT

Silver Arrows land on Goodwood

So, the Second World War is really over. Goodwood welcomes the Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union grand prix cars to the Revival in September. It is really about time. Westhampnett, satellite to Tangmere during the Battle of Britain, will echo to the noise of engines made by its adversaries and 75 years after their first appearance in the UK, it promises to be one of the most spectacular historic vehicle events ever.
(Top, Nick Mason drives the V12 Auto Union, above and below, W 125 Mercedes-Benz of 1937-1938)
It is 75 years since their first time in Britain and 74 since their second. This was 1938 for a Donington Grand Prix arranged on 2 October, but the teams had to pack their cars back into their transporters and retreat to Harwich for a ferry back to Germany as the Munich Crisis deepened. Only after Mr Chamberlain brought back his piece of paper was the race rescheduled for 22 October.

Although effectively British Grands Prix the 1937 and 1938 races were called the Donington Grand Prix. Dear old RAC, member of the Association Internationale des Automobile Clubs Reconnus (AIACR founded 1904), was chary about allowing provincial Donington to use the title. Even though Fred Craner, of the Derby and District Motor Club, and JG Shields, landowner, managed to persuade Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union to race against what were essentially local amateurs, the RAC couldn’t quite persuade itself that it should be a British Grand Prix.

Auto Union won both races, Bernd Rosemeyer in 1937, Tazio Nuvolari in 1938 after some disarray in the Mercedes camp.

D-type Auto Union, reconstruction of Nuvolari's winner.
There could be ten Silver Arrows at Goodwood. There were only six at Donington in 1937, eight in 1938 and they will compete with some of the also-rans, ERAs, Maseratis, Rileys, Bugattis and MGs. They will overwhelm them just as they did three quarters of a century ago. The German cars have appeared occasionally in Britain since then, John Surtees drove an Auto Union at Silverstone in 1990, along with Neil Corner in a Mercedes-Benz, but the prospect of seeing - and hearing – them all together is a heady one. Mercedes-Benz W25, W125, W154 and W165, plus the extravagantly rebuilt Auto Union Types C and D will take part

Perhaps it will make the Revival a touch less jingoistic. Motor racing at Goodwood was, essentially, a creation of the 1950s; it was only happenstance that it took place on a wartime airfield. Douglas Bader (below) and his brave contemporaries would be agreeably entertained by the most spectacular grand prix cars of all time on their old “perry track”.

The Great Aluminium Car

New Year Resolution for car designers - reduce weight. Craftsmen coachbuilders knew how. They used aluminium. One of Rover's pioneering cars of 1903 had an aluminium backbone. After the Second World War, Rover turned again to aluminium although only under duress.

Rover's big Solihull factory started with steel car production, the first saloons off the production line in December 1946 made under strict government controls. In order to repay Britain’s war debts emergency legislation had been imposed forcing industry to earn money abroad. Steel rationing was strict, allocations were decided according to a company’s success in export markets, particularly North America. Spencer Wilks, Rover managing director since 1933, “strongly advised” the board in January 1945, “…that we should aim to expand our output, and that to achieve this we should not look primarily to our prewar models, but that we should add to our range by the introduction of a 6HP model.” An anomaly of the scarcity in materials and resources was that although steel was in short supply, aluminium remained plentiful, so Rover’s first post-war new car project was the M-type or M1 (above), a small 2-seat coupe made largely of aluminium. It had a 57mm x 68.5mm 4-cylinder 699cc 28bhp (21kW) engine that was a replica of the larger saloons’, with overhead inlet and side exhaust valves. It was thought that Solihull might make 15,000 fullsized cars and a further 5,000 M-types, so work began on an aluminium chassis, with a strong box-shaped scuttle for a car with a 77in (195.6cm) wheelbase and only 160in (406.4cm) long. Three prototypes were built and ran before the end of 1946, well-proportioned coupes with a distinctive Rover style, but by 1947 changes in car taxation and government pressure to adopt a one-model policy conspired against it. The M-type seemed unlikely to be sold in sufficient numbers to fill the vast factory acquired during the war so it was abandoned. It left a gap in Rover’s strategy, later filled by the Land Rover, and consigned the aluminium car to history for 50 years. Even the M-type’s spiritual successor, the inspirational Audi A1, found the going hard and its production life short.

Bentley, Jaguar meet on the Stairs

Jaguar going upstairs will soon meet Bentley coming down. The price ladder is becoming congested around £100,000 and next year’s bottom Bentley will cost not much more (relatively) than a top Jaguar. In 1960 a Bentley Continental was £8,000; a special equipment Jaguar XK150 £2,000. Next spring’s V8 Continental will be about £120,000. Jaguars are edging towards £100,000 - more if you add on all the add-ons.
Sleek Continental (above) XK150 (below)


It’s no surprise. They have been shadowing one another for 75 years. In 1937 Rolls-Royce and Bentley chief development engineer WA Robotham was deeply impressed with a 3½ Litre SS Jaguar. He reported to Robert Harvey-Bailey, chief engineer of the chassis division in Derby, that the engine was almost exactly like one proposed for a still secret Bentley. “The crankshaft has 2½in journals and 2in pins, exactly the dimensions we have in the (Rolls-Royce) Wraith.” It was also more compact and lighter than the Bentley and, “appeared appreciably smoother. In order to pick up 10 horse power at the peak of the power curve Jaguar has gone to the trouble of fitting two entirely independent exhaust systems.”

Jaguars looked like Bentleys. William Lyons styled them so that they earned the soubriquet “Bentleys of Wardour Street.” It was not meant to be a compliment. Buyers could not believe how Jaguar managed it at the price. The secret was William Lyons’ parsimony. Robotham bought an SS for assessment, describing it as “disconcertingly good, better than a 3½ Litre Bentley for acceleration and within 1mph of the 4¼ Bentley in top speed.” Its duplex exhaust had less back pressure than the Bentley’s, cost more to make and was so quiet Robotham instructed his engineers to match it. The chassis was not as stiff as the huge Rolls-Royce Phantom but better than a Wraith. The Jaguar was dismantled, Rolls-Royce praising every component save the fuel tank, which it thought flimsy. There was nothing to show that low cost had been achieved by, “abbreviated specification, simplification, or poor quality materials”.

Bentleys had a brake servo, one-shot chassis lubrication and gaitered and lubricated road springs, de luxe items accounting for less than 2 per cent of its chassis price. The question was why a Bentley should cost twice as much as a Jaguar. * “We have so far accounted for less than 30 per cent of the difference. We are of the opinion that the remaining 70 per cent can be accounted for by good manufacturing (and) sound purchasing of parts.”

A lot has happened since 1937 but over the years Jaguar made great efforts to give itself the air of a Bentley. Under Ford it also tried to make itself a large-volume manufacturer in the mould of BMW or Audi. It failed, even with perfectly good products, like the Mondeo-based X-type. If Detroit hadn’t meddled with the styling it might have been better. Now, with Indian investment, Jaguar is on an engineering-led endeavour for quality and exclusiveness. Spiralling prices are taking it, along with Land Rover, to profit that has eluded it for years.

Up-market crinkly net grille on Jaguar
At the same time Bentley, now Audi-inspired, is wisely widening its range from the heady heights of the £226,000 Mulsanne and £150,000-ish W12 Continental, downwards to something people can afford. £120,000 is still a lot but it is no more than the price of a modest saloon for one of the family. Bentley is unlikely to compromise quality and this new twin-turbo of 500bhp places it firmly in Jaguar territory. The XK Coupe Portfolio I tested the other week was a V8 of 515bhp at £70,860. The supercharged XJ Supersports I had the week before was £94,000 with a piano black interior that could have graced a Bentley. At £91,050 the XK Supersport will be in Bentley V8 territory.

Up-market grikly net grille on Bentley.
Rather like Robotham some three quarters of a century ago, you would be hard-pressed to make a distinction in driving quality. Speed, refinement, gadgetry and handling were beyond reproach. The Jaguars were disappointing in road noise; press departments invariably equip demonstrators with stupid low-profile tyres that make them all sound like cars of half the price – see the previous Audi blog for the difference well proportioned tyres make. Assuming that the approaching V8 is in the same idiom as my last test W12 Bentley the two must, at last, be chasing the same customers.
* Robotham was thinking chassis prices. 1937 Jaguar 3½ Litre saloon £445. Bentley 4¼ Litre chassis £1,150; 4-door saloon £1,510, nearly the 1:4 proportional difference of 1960.