Red Underwear, Cheap Fiats and Other Moto Stuff

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I have always been fond of the Mazda 1800, to look at - the body, designed in Italy, has always struck me as being "just right".

 

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So, you want to have fun with cars ...

 

 

🙂

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Bit of proper racing ... like it used to be, 😉

 

 

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A more interesting view of a road mentioned earlier ...

 

 

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11 minutes ago, sphinxsix said:

 

Still tempted by an one wheel drive option.. Some cool roads and cool driving skills as well.. (is this sport really more dangerous for drivers than for spectators.?)

 

 

 

Yes ... I wonder what the injury, etc, count is per season, drivers versus spectators ... 🙃.

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How about a change of pace ... ?

 

 

 

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My idea of a fun car ... 😉

 

 

 

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Adrenaline hit for the day ...

 

 

 

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7 hours ago, accwai said:

 

The video below is from the AMG GT Black Series' new Nordschleife production/street-legal lap time record run beginning of November:

 

 

It's obviously much faster than an M3, but the actual amazing part is the apparent lack of eventfulness. The nonchalance is downright eerie...

 

Yes, the AMG run is almost a computer game sequence; I lost interest very quickly - in the M3 clip, the perspective is everything; you see the driver working the vehicle, at the same time, and in the same view, as the reactions of the passenger, and the broad vista of flow of the track and vehicles in front - everything is connected, and keeps one fully focused.

 

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F1 is probably pushing every aspect of both machine and people to the outer edge. One example of such extreme is the pitting sequence for tire change. The change itself is like a little more than 2 sec. The mechanism and procedure for doing this reliably is obviously impressive. But to take full advantage of this, the car needs to come from the pit lane speed limit down to a full stop no more than like an inch off where the team is expecting the wheels to be. If you threshold brake to stop for a traffic light, where would your wheels be at the end?

 

 

When the technology works so fluently, and almost invisibly, it takes a lot of the buzz out of watching it, to me - the robot like appearance of much of F1 leaves me a bit cold, I just don't tune into watching it, these days ...

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Note what they don't have in sim's ... bug splats, on the windscreen ! 😁

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Gotta get the sound happening ... this is an old favourite of mine - for some reason, current laptop doesn't do it justice,

 

 

 

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Which reminds me ...

 

 

 

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This is my current, 'travel' interest ...

 

 

 

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Another bit of drivin' ...

 

 

 

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5 hours ago, accwai said:

 

Hmm... That doesn't look like a very serious run. In any case, I'm quite partial to the gravel stages of Turkey myself:

 

 

And looks like the road version 2021 Yaris GR is all the rage now. But apparently like the previous Yaris 4WD, it won't be coming to North America. Too bad!

 

It was testing of the car run - what I liked was the ability of the driver to handle such borderline adhesion conditions, where there is close to zero chance of being able to recover from the slightest error ...

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When technology, and tweaking, makes it look effortless - note, the end escapade is because of a tyre blowout ...

 

 

 

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There are people who fiddle with motors to make them go better ... and then there's,

 

 

😁

 

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To me, just stuffing an enormous engine pulled out of a vehicle into the frame of a motorcycle is not very interesting ... it's just a variation of what's been done forever - my father had one of these,

 

 

and he built a very large caravan to live in, while working on properties in country NSW. The 4 cylinder engine didn't have the grunt to pull it, so he dropped a V8 in, which did the job nicely. The big downside was that the cooling system was not up to it, and there was an  ongoing need to give the vehicle a rest over hilly terrain; otherwise the radiator would boil over.

 

I posted the video because of the incredible job of building a completely different engine from the bits of a standard engine - with no "here's how to do this", paint by numbers guide to help him.

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Now, this is what a motosikal should sound like ...

 

 

 

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3 hours ago, bluesman said:

The owner of the tree service we used for decades was an old hot rodder (not old like me - old like Methuselah).  His biggest project was to stuff a rat motor into the back seat of a Renault R8, which he did "because I could".  He welded up a perimeter frame from 2x4 box tubing and fabricated an entire 4 corner independent suspension.  When his oldest child was approaching legal driving age, he cut it up into tiny pieces and never did it again.

 

Note, what my dad did was not in the era of hot-rodding! That Ford was just a work vehicle, of the time, and he did the exercise just after WWII, I believe - there was a need, and he was a practical man; and got the job done.

 

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My first hot rod project was stuffing a Volvo B18 drivetrain in an MG-TD when Iwas in high school (1962).  A good friend's older brother fancied himself an auto guru and started a few very nice projects, none of which he could complete.  He got the TD with a very crudely done Ford 60 flatty in it.  Whoever did it couldn't mate the TD radiator to the Ford, so he "secured" a bare Ford core in front of the stock radiator with clothes hangars.  When he pushed it into the backyard and moved on, I talked Billy's brother into giving it to us when we were 16 (a year before legal driving age in New Jersey).  We bought an old Volvo (444 or 544 - I don't remember which) for $100 from Stucker's junkyard on Staten Island. Billy's dad towed it back for us, and we managed to transplant the drive train and make it work. Neither of us had the equipment or experience to narrow the Volvo rear, so the back wheels protruded a bit.  So it looked a little funny, but it passed NJ inspection and ran great!  We sold it for enough to buy the parts we needed to make his brother's next abandoned project (an XK-120MC coupe) roadworthy enough to get him through 5 years of architecture school at MIT.

 

My biggest project to date has been a '48 Ford F1 street rod with a small block Chevy, an aluminum Powerglide, and a Jag XJ-S rear (for which I welded up a tube cage mounting system).   I wanted to rod the flathead that came with it, but it turned out to have a crack in the block.  I'd gotten a pair of 283 blocks and the P'glide for $100 from the local "recycling center" where I obtained most of my used parts.  I'd planned to stuff one into the MG-TD I eventually turned into a vintage racer (not the same one that got the B18), so I decided to use it in the F1 rather than spend thousands building up a flattie.

 

For me, the challenge in mating disparate assemblies like a V8 and a vintage car or bike are both exciting and stimulating.  I never would have figured out a lot of the engineering and fabrication techiniques I've developed over the years without those challenges.  For interest, here's the TD racer referred to above:

 

 

Very impressive... but I'm afraid I never tuned into the whole fiddling with cars thing - I just did, still do, what's necessary to keep them going. The most ambitious job I tackled was just dropping the engine out of a Beetle, my first car, in the backyard, and replacing the piston rings - as a teenager.

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If you want bonkers, you can't do much better than this,

 

 

Reaches 261 mph in 1,000 feet ...

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In the good ol' days they also had splendid fun on the water - when too many engines are still not enough, 🙂.

 

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We should talk more of the cute end of the market ... things like a Fiat 500 ...

 

 

 

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Just became aware of this beast,

 

 

Ticks a lot of boxes for me ... 🙂