The 1968 BOAC 500 sports car race at Brands Hatch was cheerless. As news filtered in from Hockenheim a generation came to realise motor racing would never be the same again. It was more than the death of a driver; it was the end of an era. It was more than a squall following a storm. When Jim Clark died the whole of motor racing changed.
Read MoreWriting for The Guardian 1966-1980
Right place. Right Time. Strokes of luck punctuate any freelance career. To their credit, beyond informal suggestions that it might be nice if I was a member of a trade union neither left-of-centre newspapers ever pressed the point. Nor did any left, right, or centre editor and after a brush with trade union tyrants as a young engineer on Clydeside, I never was. Guardian readers had their say.
Read MoreVauxhall History Classic Archive 009
Vauxhall.: Thames tug, Moscow railway station. Always more than a car. A London district since the Middle Ages. In French, Dutch, Swedish, German and Danish it meant pleasure garden. In Russian Vokzal (Вокзал) is a railway station Moskovsky Vokzal, Vitebsky Vokzal terminus for trains to Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova and the Baltic States. In 1917 Lenin steamed into Finlyandski Vokzal from exile in Germany via Helsinki.
Read MoreJIMMY AND JACKIE STEWART 1989 Archive 008
Jackie Stewart pontificated and name-dropped when he was selling Jaguars from the family garage in Dumbarton. Then it was his brother Jimmy, not he, who was the local hero racing driver. Jimmy Stewart cut short a promising career after crashing heavily at Le Mans. His mother worried until Jimmy, a gentle, unaggressive son, hung up his helmet. Jaguar E-typre FSN1 Dumbuck demonstrator at Turnberry Eric Dymock picture.
Read MoreDavid Begg: Integrated Transport. Archive 007
Professor David Begg was resigned to an unkind reception. The chairman of the Commission for Integrated Transport was ranged against ten motoring correspondents, whose views on integrated transport varied from profound scepticism to downright opposition. Yet by the time the banana soufflé arrived, each side had a cogent understanding of the other’s point of view. David Begg was even listening to what the despised “motoring lobby” had to say.
Read MoreElectric Car California: Classic Archive 006
Electric Car California: Audi Classic Archive 006: Camille Jenatzy and milkmen discovered, electric vehicles can go a long way slowly or a short way fast, but not both. Jenatzy’s Jamais Contente had to have its batteries re-charged before it could do another Kilometre.. In 1990 California demanded 1.5m electric cars by 2000, seven in every ten by 2010. Faced with not selling cars there you would have thought the world’s car industry would have managed something by now. Alas, laws of physics and chemistry don’t allow electricity to be stored by the tankful. Audi’s response to California’s wish list, detailed in The Sunday Times of 14 January 1990
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