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Bespoke is the TACCOC club magazine for its members. It is
printed roughly four times a year, and John Holmes has been
the Editor since the club began in 1976. From time to time,
various extracts of interest will appear on this site.
Spring 2011
MotorSport New Zealand recently released the following notification
of a change to
the regulations:
“The amendment 34083 to Schedule A provides for the reintroduction
of leaded
Racegas / Avgas purchased in New Zealand.
“The Council, at its meeting in May considered and passed a
remit, to allow all
competition vehicles manufactured prior to 1 January 1986 to
continue to use this fuel.
“Due to the lack of supply of both unleaded and ethanol blended
fuels in some parts of
the country, coupled with the fact that ethanol blended fuels
were found to be
unacceptable as a leaded fuel replacement in some engines meant
that the Executive
has decided to allow all competition vehicles to continue to
use leaded Racegas /
Avgas purchased in New Zealand until a viable alternative is
available.
“As it is still the Sport's policy to achieve use of unleaded
fuels in all competition
cars in the future, the decision to use leaded Racegas / Avgas
will be reviewed on a
regular basis, and the Sport strongly encourages all competitors
to convert to
unleaded or ethanol blended fuels when next rebuilding their
engines.
Good luck with that. I’ve blathered on about this often enough
before, most recently in
the Bespoke Winter 2010 issue:
“If it was, as some claim, as simple as just rebuilding
an engine to cope with
unleaded fuel, why hasn’t the aviation industry done this? Their
engines are subject to
much more stringent maintenance and rebuild regimes than ours,
so there would be
ample opportunity for such conversions to be done. Why hasn’t
this happened?
There has to be more to the problem than that.”
I still have not heard any answers to those questions. Certainly
the catastrophic
consequences of using ethanol-based race fuels in ancient engines
not designed to
cope were made clearly and expensively evident after the first
Festival of Motor Racing
at Hampton Downs two years ago. At the recent annual MotorSport
NZ conference in
Wellington, and seemingly against the preferences of the executive,
the meeting voted
overwhelmingly in favour of continuing to use Avgas. But, whatever
the personal
feelings or bias of the individuals on the MNZ Executive might
be, it is embedded in the
MNZ Constitution that they must be seen: “at all times to
act on behalf of, and in the
interests of, the member clubs and motorsport.” If the member
clubs, many of them
with no interest in Avgas one way or the other, vote to retain
its use, the officials are not empowered to overrule that democratic
choice.
It was going to happen anyway, with or without MNZ approval,
but it was good to see
commonsense prevail. The alternative would mean that many wonderful
cars would
become museum pieces, locked away in sheds. That doesn’t make
any kind of sense
to me. And it now appears that the large majority of competitors
in our sport agree.
The death on July 7th of the man always referred to as Motor
Sport’s Founder Editor
came as a shock to many across the world. Even at 98 years of
age, people seemedto expect Bill Boddy, or 'WB' as he was known
in the magazine, to go on forever. He wasn't the original editor
either, as Gordon Cruickshank explained in his tribute to WB
in the September issue, "...nine or ten men had sat
in the Editor's rickety chair before him. But if the title had
a meaning, it was that he, along with Denis Jenkinson, changed
the character of the publication from polite reportage to arguably,
in the Sixties, Europe's most influential motor magazine. Forthright,
sometimes fiery, rarely even-handed, Motor Sport could, and
did, damn a Grand Prix driver or a new road car if Boddy or
Jenks thought they deserved it. At a time when others pulled
punches to protect their advertising revenue, WB was immensely
proud of 'The Bishop Ban', when he was the only journalist to
criticise the Austin A70, causing BMC to withdraw all advertising
and test cars from Motor Sport."
Boddy stumbled across the magazine as a schoolboy in 1924 when
it was published as the 'Brooklands Gazette', and immediately
started writing letters to the editor. His first
story was published in March 1930 and carried no byline, but
he was soon a regular contributor, often defending the aging
and much-criticised Brooklands track in print and already concerned
about safeguarding motoring history. In 1932 he suggested a
club for vintage sports cars and the VSCC was founded a year
later. Also in 1933 his perfect job arrived when he was asked
to write the car side of "Brooklands - Track and
Spring 2011 Air", which required him to be based at the
track, his own particular heaven on earth. He didn't get his
driving licence until 1935. so he wrote all his road tests from
the passenger's seat, riding with anybody who would take him
round the track. This included 130 mph laps beside Forrest Lycett
in his 8-litre Bentley. and a spin in the ex-Birkin Maserati
8CM.
It all nearly came to an end in 1939 when the war started,
but Bill persuaded the owner of Motor Sport that he could fill
the pages. And so it continued, by re-using old picture blocks
and writing mostly about history, as there was no motor racing
and very little motoring of any kind Readers, many of them in
the armed forces, supplied unpaid contributions, and WB supplemented
his income by writing technical manuals for the RAF He famously
arrived at work at Hawkers one day to be told that he owed them
£1000.000. as the Hurricane manuals were late and the
planes would not be paid for without them.
While outspoken in print, he was initially reticent with strangers
But when off-duty and with friends he knew well, he had a fund
of scandalous stories about racing figures One of his favourites
was a tale of Earl Howe. who won the Le Mans 24 Hours in 1931.
in his Alfa Romeo 8C. sharing the drive with Henry "Tim"
Birkin Howe was strolling round the paddock at an event and
spotted Freddie Dixon's feet sticking out from under
a car "Hello Freddie" called Howe. "F***off."
replied Freddie. Scandalised, Early Howe informed Freddie who
he was "Well. F*** off. Your Lordship", said Freddie...
Even at 98 years of age. WB was still contributing each month
to Motor Sport magazine. His final pages were submitted just
before he died, and printed in the September issue.
There is considerable excitement in the Porsche fraternity
about the soon-to-be-released new 911. As reported in Andrew
Frankel‘s pages in “Motor Sport” magazine, this new car is only
the second time since the 911 first appeared on the scene in
1963 that the car has been replaced, rather than revised. Or
face-lifted. Or updated.
The last time was in 1998, when the last of the air-cooled
cars, code-named the 993, was replaced by the first of the water-cooled
cars, the 996. And now this latest generation of the 911 series,
code-named the 991, has been changed in three fundamental ways.
Individually, none of them are as major as the shift from air-
to water-cooling, but collectively the effect is at least as
significant.
The first change is an increase in the car’s wheelbase. This
is not a first, Porsche having lengthened the 911’s wheelbase
three times in the past, but this time the change is described
by Frankel as huge, even if the car’s overall length is almost
unchanged.
The second difference is that “the steering is now powered
by electricity, not hydraulics.” Frankel continues; “This brings
surprisingly substantial benefits to fuel consumption and therefore
CO² emissions, but I’ve yet to drive any car that, dynamically
at least, has been improved by it.” He says this because, although
the new car was demonstrated to the press some six months ago,
it has been under a press embargo, which is why details are
only now being revealed. And even now, no outsiders have been
allowed to sit in anything other than the passenger’s seat.
A frustrated Frankel has yet to drive the car.
The third major departure for Porsche is that, while previously
even the whizziest of 911s have been built largely from steel
(with aluminium and other materials used sparingly as necessary),
the new car is constructed almost entirely from aluminium. In
the 991, steel is now relegated to a supporting role, employed
mainly for safety purposes along the crash paths up and over
the A-pillars. This makes the new car significantly lighter
than the model it replaces – built in steel, the new cars would
have gained some 50kg over the model being replaced. This will
give useful performance gains, and, even though the standard
991 Carerra’s capacity has been reduced from 3.6- to 3.4-litres,
the power goes up to 350bhp. The Carrera S version remains at
3.8 litres but now makes it up to 400bhp.
Even in the unlikely event that the reality doesn’t live up
to the promise, all of this will matter little to the majority
of the car’s buyers. And the specification alone is more than
enough to make your averagely rabid Porsche enthusiast out-drool
Homer Simpson…
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