> He's got the right idea, but some of the dates wrong - sfisher will
> correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the Skinner brothers fashioned
> their first carburetter from a leather sack just after WWI.
Before, actually; 1909 is the accepted initial date for the Skinner's
Union. And I wish he'd known how to spell Healey...
> And I know that the Morris Minor, which was designed starting in 1942
> or 43, has rack and pinion steering, which is much earlier than the TR
> sports cars had them (the earlier roadsters all seem to have used screw
> and nut or cam and roller steering).
Multivalve engines, unfortunately, we have to credit to the French.
The 1911 Grand Prix Peugeot is generally considered the first car to
use the "modern" four-valve-per-cylinder design, complete with dual
cams and pent-roof combustion chambers. Of course, it probably had
a 5:1 compression ratio...
> (The Morris Minor, staid as it may seem, was the source of running gear
> for an awful lot of cars, including the Spridget family...)
Also for most of the serious sports-racers of the Fifties, such as
the Lister in the UK and Lance Reventlow's beautiful and very very
fast Scarab racers here in the States. There's bound to be a good
showing of Scarabs at Monterey this weekend, as Don Orosco has a
few of them. The steering is light, simple, precise, and easily
modified by playing with the ratios of the tie rods and the end
links coming off the kingpins to make it faster or slower than
the actual gear ratio, a fascinating thought indeed. The Sprite,
for example, achieved its remarkable steering when the Healeys'
chassis engineer (DStone, can *you* remember his name? I've
forgotten it) cobbled up a couple of links that "looked about right."
Which reminds me, I'll be at the Monterey Historic Auto Races tomorrow
and Saturday, taking pictures and chatting people up. Lots of great
weird old cars there, as always. This year the honored marque is Miller,
another famous twin-cam multivalve manufacturer from before WWII. It'll
be amazing to watch these tall-geared Brickyard beasts being flogged
through the Corkscrew. At least most of the hardest turns at Laguna
are left-handers.
It's always just fascinating to watch the morning practice and see
(better yet, *hear*) a hundred years of automotive design pass by
during the course of a few hours. Between breakfast and lunch on
Saturday, the practice runs from Touring Cars before 1920 or thereabouts
through FIA Makes Championship Cars Over 3000 CC, 1962-1966. So you
see ten classes of cars beginning with what look like horseless
carriages and end with the unbelievable Ford GT-40s.
Then at the lunch break, they bring out a ten- or fifteen-year-old
Formula 1 car -- usually a 1980 or so Williams in white-and-green
British (P) Leyland trim. And the impossible power and thrust of
the GT40 pales before the barely controlled fury of that 500-kg
piloted missile.
--Scott
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