Only two Gilbys were ever built, an 1,100 cc sports car and a 1½-litre F1 car. Both were well designed, attractive, and prepared to the highest standards, yet in terms of absolute success, they merit no more than a footnote in motor racing history. What the project represented, though, is much more important. They were among the very last cars to be built and raced by a privateer with the object...
RACING CARS ARE BIG BUSINESS
THERE WAS a time when anyone who wanted to buy a racing car went along to see a designer laid down the general principles of the car he wanted, paid over a large sum of money, and his car (if he was lucky) was delivered to him in due course.
As in so many other aspects of racing, things are different now and buying a racing car is very little more complicated than...
—a Gearbox for Every Racing Car
Monopoly is a word which is sometimes over-worked, and it often has pejorative overtones. Yet in the space of eight years, the name of Hewland Engineering Ltd. and the winged cog which is the Company's trademark have become associated with literally every type of British racing car, from the humblest Formula Ford to the 3-litre Formula Ford which is Formula One....
I read Doug Nye's piece on Bob Robinson and was sorry to learn of his passing. He was very helpful to me over the years. When the Gemini FJ team folded at the end of 1963 (and my drive with it), I went to work for a bloke I had come to know during my time at Falcon — Ernie Barrett, a motorcycle racer from the '50s.
He had a little company based in Tottenham, called Phoenix Scooters, and gave me...
Stirling Moss, Tony Brooks and Vanwall will be reunited at Aintree on July 19-20, exactly 40 years after Moss recorded the first all-British World Championship Grand Prix victory at the Liverpool circuit in one of Tony Vandervell's can, chassis VW 10.
Moss and Brooks are also due to share Aintree memories in a Saturday evening event in the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Hall which will be worth...
Last summer saw a surprise turn at Lotus when Colin Chapman announced the departure from the main board, and from his position as Managing Director of Lotus Racing Ltd, of Mike Warner. Exactly two years ago Motor Sport published an article about Warner and the subsidiary, then known as Lotus Components Ltd, which told of a happy future for Lotus as a manufacturer of customer racing cars. Things...
Things happen quickly, quietly and efficiently at Lola Cars, and since the firm's move from the Slough to the Huntingdon Trading Estate just over a year ago, Eric Broadley and his team have achieved a good deal, and further enhanced their already strongly established reputation. Yet Lola do not court publicity to any extent, they prefer to let success and the customer service they offer speak for...
For fast, four-wheel fun at a modest price very few cars, if any, could claim to beat the old Lotus Seven, particularly in the days before kit cars were taxed. With Lotus's changing image and the streamlining of production, there was no place for the Seven at Hethel. Thankfully for hardy enthusiasts, Graham Nearn, of Caterham Cars Ltd., then distributors for the Seven, and now sole spares...
One category of racing that rarely merits much more than the passing mention in the pages of motoring magazines yet provides, in its current state of the art, technically interesting and close and shatteringly fast racing is Clubmans Formula, one of the backbone classes of club competition. In those balmy days of racing ten years ago so many people wanted to race Lotus 7s, and a few similar cars...
On Friday May 18, 1962, at Zandvoort, Formula One changed forever. In the blink of an eye, chassis design went from tubes to tub, courtesy of the radical Lotus 25. John Tipler recounts its story - from sketch on a napkin to ground-breaking debut
Think of Anthony Colin Bruce Chapman and automatically you conjure up groundbreaking cars: the ubiquitous Seven, the wedge-shaped 72, the ground-effect...