Liberty Belle

Found this marvellous beautiful engine when I went to Duxford for my birthday treat. Aviation writer Bill Gunston says no aircraft engine equals the Liberty V12’s record of quick design, quick qualification and quick mass production. It had a long active life in aeroplanes up to 1935. One is still going, revised a bit, in Babs the exhumed Land Speed Record car of John Godfrey Parry Thomas, who died in it at Pendine Sands.

Produced in a hurry to meet a wartime emergency, the Liberty was designed by Jesse Vincent of Packard and EJ Hall of Hall-Scott in a Washington hotel between 30 May and 4 June 1917. One says ‘designed’ but of course it used features such as the water cooled separate 5x7 inch cylinders from Hall-Scott’s existing San Francisco engines as well as bits of Packard. The Vee was set at 45deg to fit narrow aircraft and the valve gear was exposed. By November 1918 20,478 had been made of the 27 litre engine which, coincidentally, was the same capacity as the 5.4x6in Rolls-Royce Merlin designed in 1933. Not many people know that. Surprise your friends.

Coil ignition was unusual for a 1917 engine

Engines had to be narrow to fit in slim aircraft

Valve gear lived outside
Babs was dug up in 1969 by engineering lecturer Owen Wyn Owen from what had become a military firing range and restored as a tribute to the brave Parry Thomas. The original Liberty, damaged in the crash had rusted over the years and was replaced by one built by Lincoln Cars, its twelve separate cylinders mounted on a Packard-Liberty crankcase.

Pictured at Brooklands in 2007, Babs was being worked up for a demonstration run. The chassis is braced by strut and wire, much as contemporary Bentleys were, to improve stiffness. Lots of batteries were needed to crank the enormous V12. What a noise history makes.

GIORGETTO GIUGIARO: Motoring Mozart

Who remembers the VW Porsche Tapiro? Prototype on the basis of a 914-6, with engine enlarged by Bonomell Tuning to 2.4 litre and 220bhp @ 7800rpm, quite a lot for 1970.
Giorgetto Giugiaro, motoring Mozart, a talented prodigy. I met him for a one-to-one interview in the early days of Italdesign. He wanted to show journalists his studios and establish himself as Giugiaro, not just an ex-Bertone freelance stylist. He liked to be called Giorgetto, a sort of diminutive of Giorgio. “I was baptized Giorgetto,” he told me. What a charmer, not much English at the time but a highly expressive Italian.
Gullwing doors for the passengers and the engine room.
He already had an impressive portfolio of cars, yet you could tell that he was really more pleased with his real art, his strongly coloured impressionist paintings. His grandfather painted church frescoes and his father did decorative religious art. Guigiaro grew up near Cuneo in north west Italy, polishing his natural artistic talent with studies of technical design. He was ambitious. He loved his rural roots but wanted commercial success.
Styling sketch for Tapiro
Born in 1938, his car sketches in a school exhibition were brought to the attention of Dante Giacosa, Fiat’s great technical director, who hired him at once. Giugiaro was just 17. Talent shows. It was a story Ian Callum of Jaguar would re-write years later.
Made for a motor show. Luggage room over the engine.
Giugiaro didn’t seem to be making progress at Fiat’s Special Vehicle Design Study Department so after three years he went to Bertone. Bert One as Autocar colleagues used to call it. Nuccio Bertone had his 21 year old genius produce the memorable BMW 3200CS in 1961, the Fiat 850 Spider and the Dino Coupe of 1965. After six years there Giugiaro went to Ghia, where his Maserati Ghibli and De Tomaso Mangusto were shown at Turin in 1966. I remember the show. Everybody thought them too fantastic yet they set a standard in sports car design for ten years and more. Ghia-Giugiaro designs were bought by Japan, where cars still looked stodgy, and encouraged he set up on his own in 1968.
Perhaps less of a success. The 1971 VW Karmann Cheetah. Longitudinal rear flat-4 of 1584cc and 50bhp.You almost forget how much he has influenced the shape of cars. I came across an Italdesign archive of 2000, which has long lists, some surprises, yet shows how Giugiaro remained true to the crisp brushwork of his early oils to which, he told me, he would return when he grew up.

Toyota and John Cobb

Loch Ness. The John Cobb Memorial. It is opposite the site of his accident on 29 September 1952 attempting the world water speed record in jet-powered Crusader. This photograph, taken later in the 1950s is of drivers on a Scottish rally, including brother Craig (in dark jacket) and John (middle facing left) as well as two whom I used to navigate. Jimmy Murray (facing camera in front of Craig) rallied an MG TD with some success. Directly in front of him, Bill Cleland. They said I was brave sitting alongside Bill in his Ford Zephyr but it wasn’t like that. I was never a good passenger. All the serious accidents I ever had were as a passenger. But I had no qualms with Bill. It was like sitting beside Stirling Moss on the Mille Miglia. It was a lesson in car control. He was very quick. No surprise young John Cleland won two British Touring Car Championships. Toyota has noticed Loch Ness is famous for more than John Cobb.

Magnificent Minis

Discovering Western governments earned more from a gallon of petrol than they did, OPEC turned off the taps in the 1970s. British taxation hasn’t changed. We are now in another and more complicated oil crisis where a litre of petrol costs 42p to make. But 82p goes in fuel duty and VAT, so the imbalance remains. Prices are high and likely to remain so.
The first oil crisis was in 1956, when the Suez adventure led to bubble cars and inspired the Mini. Rumours have resurfaced about BMW going back to basics with a real mini, smaller than the premium-priced quirky, big Mini it has been making since 2001. As I speculated in The Sunday Times in 1991 this would not be easy. Well-intentioned safety laws might make it impossible, unless a great deal has been learned in the last twenty years about crash-engineering small cars.
Click to enlarge, or read original copy below

You can understand why Leonard Percy Lord (1896-1967, 1st Baron Lambury), the rough-tongued BMC executive prompted Alexander Arnold Constantine Issigonis (1906-1988) to create the shortest practical 4-seater of all time.
It is tempting to restore a Mark I Mini, not one of the later ones with wind-up windows and soft furnishings but a sliding-window one, with elbow room and huge door pockets. Even with an old engine, perhaps amended with fuel injection instead of a carburettor, it would use very little fuel. The old Mini was surely the most space-efficient car ever. BMC used to sell little wicker baskets, shaped as the vacant cavities, like the one under the rear seat in Gaydon’s cutaway. Of course early Minis were badly made; mine leaked terribly on account of the underbody seams facing the direction of travel, scooping up rainwater and soaking the carpets.

Never mind the charm, the astonishing cornering power, and the pert appearance a born-again Mini would be noisy without a lot of sound-deadening and not very quick. The driving position was truly awful. Issigonis believed it was good, keeping drivers alert and awake. Yet for sheer practicality the BMC Mini was, and remains, matchless. Four seats, generous legroom, a decent boot and large door pockets. Issy maintained one held the ingredients for perfect picnic cocktails – four bottle of gin and one of Vermouth. What more do you need?
Sunday Times 1991
Safety Laws Trap the Mini.
Well-meaning safety laws are making cars bigger than they need be and inhibiting improvements to one of Britain's best-loved cars. Rover cannot tamper with the design of the Mini, even to make it safer, without invoking rules which would reclassify it as a new model and subject to a fresh bout of crash-testing which it could not pass.
Instead, the car which provided economical transport to generations of British motorists, remains noisy unrefined and relatively expensive.
Sir Alec Issigonis's formula for the smallest car with four practical seats is as good now as it was when it came out thirty-two years ago. The Mini is ten feet long, four and a half feet tall and four and a half feet wide, on a wheelbase of exactly 80 inches. Eighty per cent of the space is given over to the occupants and their luggage, and the mechanical bits are squeezed into a compartment only two feet long.
Never was a car packaged better. The 120 inch long Mini remains the shortest realistic four seat car made; the Lancia Y10 is over a foot longer, the Metro more than a foot and a half, while the most recent Japanese city car the Mazda 121 is a giant of 150 inches.
The Mini already meets emission control laws and thanks to astute work by Rover technicians, fuel injection will be announced in October for the Mini Cooper. This will allow it a catalytic converter to comply with legislation due at the end of 1992. Yet the safety regulation hurdle remains.
Every major manufacturer in the world followed Issigonis's example, adopting front wheel drive and sideways-mounted engines, with an alacrity that surprised even him. Yet the Mini was almost allowed to wither on the bough; it was neither properly developed nor commercially exploited, and although Rover still makes 40,000 a year and production recently passed 5,250,000, it is now technically in arrears. At £5,395 for the basic model, and £6,470 for the plush Mayfair, it is a poor bargain.
Four seated people take up much the same space now as they did thirty years ago and the advantages of a small easily parked car remain convincing. The small-car market must expand as pressure on road space grows and demand for fuel economy increases. Yet it remains dominated by large super-minis, many of them oriental, and none a match for the Mini in compactness.
An old motor industry aphorism that mini cars generate mini profits inhibited European manufacturers. Certainly small cars cost almost as much to make as large cars; they are not made in small factories, by small numbers of people or cheap machines, and cost much the same in materials and energy.
Yet Mini sales remain healthy enough to sustain production, even though the car has not had a development programme such as the Volkswagen Beetle enjoyed. A strong demand remains for an updated 1990s Mini which retaining the 10 x 4.5 x 4.5 packaging, would be in a unique position in the second-car market, as well as providing the same entry-level motoring that the original did in 1959.
The Volkswagen, still being produced in Mexico after a production run of over 20 million, maintains the shape and size and broad specification of the car that Hitler sanctioned sixty years ago. The rear-engined air-cooled philosophy may be the same but there is not a single interchangeable component.
A 1990s Mini would keep Issigonis's ideals intact and would not need to be altered much beyond a quieter engine. Computer-aided design, which was not available to Issigonis who briefed his draughtsmen by means of free-hand sketches, could make the Mini lighter and keep it cheap. Perhaps the turned-out body seams could be smoothed off and the rear opened up to make a hatchback. But any important alteration would spring the trap of legislation which allows Rover to go on producing the old car, but prevents it being brought it up to date.
Caption
Minis have had the roof chopped off and been made into convertibles before, but it has taken thirty two years for one to be officially approved. Only 75 of the new Mini Cabriolets will be offered for sale at £12,250. If there is sufficient demand the manufacturer, LAMM Autohaus in Germany, could make more. Once the roof is removed the body needs reinforcement under the floor to make sure it does not sag in the middle.

"One Professional Driver"

Grand plans invite scepticism. There is invariably something déjà-vu about large co-operative projects promising to save lives. Take today’s announcement that in ten years we’ll be running nose-to-tail on motorways while drivers relax and read a newspaper. See The Sunday Times of 30 April 1989 in which I quoted no less than Sir Clive Sinclair predicting much the same. There is no doubt that the technology is available to make better use of motorways than we do, but I do not much care for a “professional” driver to lead a platoon of trucks near me, thank you. Sounds like a recipe, when he falls asleep or wants to read his own newspaper, of an accident like a train crash.
Click to enlarge, or read original copy below
Wednesday, April 26, 1989 09:00
An automatic pilot for cars is practical. Prometheus, a pan European research and development programme now in its third year looks like getting into the driving seat by the end of the Century. "Driving along motorways without electronic controls will be seen, in years to come, as savage and dangerous," according to Sir Clive Sinclair in a report on traffic published last week by the Adam Smith Institute. "Fighter aircraft perform in ways which would be inconceivable if a human brain had to regulate them. Cars under electronic control could travel at 100 miles per hour, closer together and in great safety. I envisage motorways where the control of the vehicles is taken over by the road," says the inventive Sir Clive. One of the pioneers of Prometheus (PROgramme for a European Traffic with Highest Efficiency and Unprecedented Safety, not a catchy title), Dr Ferdinand Panik of Daimler Benz agrees. "Present day traffic with individual elements will evolve into an integral system of co operating partners." He regards the electronic revolution in cars as analogous to typewriters. "Twenty years ago, as a purely mechanical product, the typewriter had reached a very advanced state of development. Everyone was satisfied with it. Yet within a short time, computers and communication systems had brought about a change from independent typewriters to interlinked word processors, and conquered the market." Jerome Rivard, former chief of electronics at Ford, now Vice President of Bendix Electronics in the United States believes we are entering the final phase of handing over control of the car to electronics. "Phase 1 was from the mid 60s to the late 70s, when we saw the solid state radio, electronic ignition, and digital clocks. Phase 2 brought integrated circuits and microprocessors which started to link components together. This included electronic engine controls, instruments, and anti lock brakes, now familiar to many drivers. Phase 3 began in the mid 1980s, in which we will see the total integration of vehicle electrical and electronic systems." What this means is that with developments such as anti lock brakes, and its corollary, electronic traction control for preventing loss of grip through wheelspin, coming into use, the stage is set for electronics to take the wheel. "We shall drive on to motorways, but once we are there, control of the vehicle will be taken over by the road," says Sir Clive. Rivard puts it another way, "The skills required in handling an automobile are, in some cases, beyond the capacity of the average driver. The advances in steering, braking, and suspension technology during Phase 3 will allow him to employ the full performance potential of the vehicle even in exceptional situations like avoiding accidents." The immediate safety related task of the new systems will be to create an electronic field round the car with ultrasonic, radar, or infrared beams, to measure the distances and speeds to other vehicles. Approaching a parked lorry at night or in fog, the driver will be alerted to the danger of collision. Before the invention of anti lock brakes (ABS) he would have put the brakes on, or swerved by himself. Now the car can do the job better than the most skilled driver, and on the Sinclair motorway, will apply its own brakes. The same applies to unwise overtaking. On board computers calculate the speed of the lorry ahead, the speed of the car overtaking, decide there is danger of an accident, and over rule the driver's decision to pull out. Research chiefs such as Professor Dr Ing. Ulrich Seiffert of VW see measures of this sort as a solution to the problem of congestion on motorways. "With electronic controls regulating the cars, you could double or treble the capacity of a motorway," he told me during a meeting at this year's Geneva Motor Show. "And automatic traffic will also be more fuel efficient, and so less polluting." At the inception of Prometheus in 1986, Professor Werner Breitschwerdt, Chairman of the Daimler Benz board of management defined its target as cutting road traffic casualties by half before the year 2000. At a meeting in Munich earlier this year by the participating companies which include most of Europe's principal car manufacturers (Jaguar, Rolls Royce, Renault, Peugeot Citroën, Fiat, Volvo, Saab Scania, VW, BMW, Volkswagen Audi, and Daimler Benz), the research and development phase of the programme was officially inaugurated. "It was a meeting to provide the project's board of management with a progress report," according to Daimler Benz, the prime mover and still the principal co ordinator of Prometheus. "The first year, 1987, was taken up with defining the programme, in 1988 the participating companies were discussing how to do it, and research proper starts this year."

VOLVO: Announcement Jan 17 2011
First demonstration of SARTRE vehicle platooning
Platooning may be the new way of travelling on motorways in as little as ten years time - and the EU-financed SARTRE project has carried out the first successful demonstration of its technology at the Volvo Proving Ground close to Gothenburg, Sweden. This is the first time the EU-financed development teams in SARTRE try their systems together outside their simulators.
"We are very pleased to see that the various systems work so well together already the first time," says Erik Coelingh, engineering specialist at Volvo Cars. "After all, the systems come from seven SARTRE-member companies in four countries. The winter weather provided some extra testing of cameras and communication equipment."

"This is a major milestone for this important European research programme," says Tom Robinson, SARTRE project coordinator, of Ricardo UK Ltd. "Platooning offers the prospect of improved road safety, better road space utilisation, improved driver comfort on long journeys and reduced fuel consumption and hence CO2 emissions. With the combined skills of its participating companies, SARTRE is making tangible progress towards the realisation of safe and effective road train technology".
Safer and more convenient
Vehicle platooning, as envisaged by the SARTRE project, is a convoy of vehicles where a professional driver in a lead vehicle drives a line of other vehicles. Each car measures the distance, speed and direction and adjusts to the car in front. All vehicles are totally detached and can leave the procession at any time. But once in the platoon, drivers can relax and do other things while the platoon proceeds towards its long haul destination.
The Sunday Times headline about a new function for radio, by the way, was for a system that switched car radios, without warning, from the national network or frivolous entertainment to local traffic information. Radio Data System (RDS) was a project of the BBC Travel Unit, whose manager Irene Mallis assured me that by the time the scheme was working nationwide, it could have expanded beyond the BBC’s resources. “Travel news should be funded, like the Met Office, as a public service, with the users – the BBC, the AA, RAC or the Freight Transport Association – paying for the information, she said. “We are hoping to press for such a change at a meeting with Peter Bottomley, the transport minister, this summer.”
One Professional Driver - no thanks.

Renault Grand Prix

Renault engines seem to be everywhere in F1. It is hard to believe Renault has been in it for the best part of three decades although, as this item (below, click image to read) from May 1995 shows, it was in motor sport even before grand prix racing.

Renault set up a commemorative expedition to Le Mans in 2006 with “Agatha”, the closest thing to the 1906 racers, all of which have been lost. One of ten built, at $8,500 each for William Kissam Vanderbilt Jr to compete in the Vanderbilt Cup races on Long Island in 1908, Agatha is only 7.4litres but as I discovered aboard the venerable racer leaps off the line with astonishing vigour. With pistons the size of biggish teapots, the crankshaft turns at between 1,200rpm and 1,800rpm, yet pulls with the low-speed strength of a steam engine. Changing gear is ponderous, accomplished with a certain amount of clunking and heaving of the big lever, even in the practised hands of owner German Renault dealer Wolfgang Auge.

Renault Director of PR Tim Jackson lends a hand
The great car’s first owner was Harry Payne Whitney, Vanderbilt’s cousin and heir to a cotton gin fortune. It then passed to mining millionaire Robert Guggenheim, before coming to Britain before the first world war for Lord Kimberley, famous surgeon Sir Harold Gillies, then collector Marcus Chambers of Clapham. The value of all old racing cars collapses when they are no longer eligible for competition, and Chambers, later motor sport manager of the British Motor Corporation (BMC), bought it at the bottom of its cycle. He advertised it in Motor Sport of August 1935 under Veteran Cars as: “1907 Sports Renault, £30 or offer.”

Brothers Anthony and John Mills, named it Agatha, and when Anthony a Royal Air Force squadron leader was killed soon after D-Day it was sold to Charles Dunn until auctioned in 1992 to Wolfgang Auge. It is now almost priceless.

Newly created Renault Sport F1 will supply engines and technology again for 2011. As well as engines it will research transmissions and kinetic energy recovery systems (KERS). The new division is Renault’s response to changing engine regulations, operating from Viry-Châtillon and will supply engines to Red Bull Racing. The 2010 drivers’ and constructors’ world champions has used Renault engines for four seasons and has extended the partnership for a further two. Renault will equip Lotus Renault GP, previously the Renault F1 Team that won world championships in 2005 and 2006 and 1 Malaysia Racing Team (UK) Ltd, a new customer, which made its F1 debut this year. It will have Renault engines and Red Bull Technology transmission.
Renault took part in 29 Formula 1 World Championship seasons, winning nine Constructors’ world champion titles including Red Bull’s this year. Renault engines achieved 23 podium finishes in 2010, including the first three at Monaco and they have won three of the last six world championships.

MAZDA MX-5

I had one like this once. Austin-Healey Sprite Mark 1. photo: Culzean 2008


Little booklet arrived the other day, a jubilee magazine celebrating 20 years of the Mazda MX-5. Jeffrey H Guyton, President and CEO of Mazda Motor Europe wrote the introduction. He saw his first MX-5 when a graduate student in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at about the time, 18 March 1990, that I wrote the attached Sunday Times motoring column, on what he rightly calls an automotive milestone. The MX-5 recreated the delights of the classic British sports car, Austin-Healey Sprite, MG Midget, even the ill-handling Triumph Spitfire, without the unreliability and the aggro that went with owning one. Mazda Motor Europe GmbH has not quite re-written history. I never knew the story, of which it makes much, about an American journalist I never heard of, who gets the credit for inventing the idea, together with Kenichi Yamamoto Mazda’s head of development. It would have been nice for Mazda Motor not to dismiss the role played by the late John Shute, of International Automotive Design (IAD) in Worthing. An MG enthusiast and collector, Shute created prototypes in 1984-1985, which he tested at MIRA, bequeathing a lot of MG style and character into the well proportioned 2-seater that became MX-5. After working with Austin in Australia, Shute set up IAD in 1975 certain that companies in the Far East in particular Japan, which did not have the experience to develop specialist models, such as sports cars would consult him. IAD prospered, at one time it was three times the size of Giugiaro’s Ital Design, it had a turnover of £40million, employed 800 and won two Queen’s Awards to Industry. IAD was consulted by manufacturers in a dozen countries on accessories and equipment, as well as complete cars, up until the 1990s recession. South Korean bankruptcies, notably of Daewoo, led to defaults on major contracts. IAD was consigned to the pages of automotive history, although in the MX-5’s jubilee magazine alas, scarcely even a footnote.

Four Wheel Steer

Four wheel steering has been reinvented for the BMW 5-series. Below 60kph (37mph) the rear wheels turn the opposite way to the fronts, making parking easier. Going faster they turn in the same direction, which makes the car turn in quicker. What Car? was lukewarm about “active” steering, although felt it had quite a profound effect. There was, “rarely a corner or roundabout that requires more than a quarter turn of the wheel. The 5-series remains utterly stable throughout. However we found that the car fitted with the standard electrically powered steering rack offered significantly more feedback, and although requiring a bit more arm-twirling more satisfying. We’d forgo the option of active steering.”

Nothing new about four wheel steering for cars. See my feature from The Sunday Times magazine of 8 December 1985. I liked Honda’s described in The Sunday Times column of 6 September 1987. Honda did a slalom test at the press launch I thought convincing.