Archives

Over 40 years of racing and writing... More than 30 years of flying.

Great Corners

For the best part of six years between 2009 and 2015, I wrote a whole series for Octane Magazine, first on Driving Techniques in general, then more recently about great corners at the world’s tracks. All of it was from personal experience, so in the case of the latter that tended to mean predominantly tracks in Europe, but there were one or two in America as well, so I can get away with “World”...

The idea was to bring a snapshot to the reader, why the corner was great, what it was like to drive whatever it was on that piece of road. Even what had happened at a particular event. It kept the account short – which magazines like – and wasn’t too heavy on the technique although there was room for that if necessary. They are reproduced here, not in alphabetical order, or in any sequence, but just as I find them.

We’ll start with Silverstone and the glorious Maggots, Becketts and Chapel sequence. An up to date Grand Prix track, but one that grew out of a previous iteration and was mostly, all the better for it...

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Aviation and engineering

My first race was in 1973, in a left hand drive Sunbeam Tiger, registered 5393 KV. It was one of the handful of cars that Rootes Group shipped to Carroll Shelby in the US for him to insert a 260 cubic inch V8 borrowed from a Ford Falcon – presumably the management were impressed by the transformation he wrought on the AC Ace to create the Cobra. Someone had later installed a lightly modified 289 in the car and it was so blindingly quick on the road (compared with everything else) I thought it would be an obvious race winner. Which only shows how much I still had to learn about engineering, not to mention driving...

       Arithmetic says that is now 44 years ago, which is a long time, and a great deal of learning which is still not complete. My pilot’s log book says my first flying lesson took place in a Cessna 150 in November 1988. That’s not quite so long ago, but the learning is still nowhere near complete in that regime either, and never will be. Meanwhile though, I had discovered a freedom which I didn’t know existed in a regulated world, and the possibility to have an adventure on a weekly basis. Nearly 30 years later, that part still holds true, and there aren’t many adventures left nowadays. I’ve owned a lot of aeroplanes since, mainly because finding something unusual which few people were prepared to take on, fixing it up and flying it about, then selling it to fund the next one, was the only way to experience different types. Would like to have kept almost all of them, but obviously the arithmetic doesn’t work.

       More recently, I designed and built a diesel aviation engine conversion, as much for the engineering challenge as the prospect of lower operational expense. I still have to find something in which I can put it – some areas of aviation are still regulated by people who have no interest in the subject – but it’s running nicely on the test stand. The “Aviation and Engineering” section of Archives starts with the story of its development that I wrote recently for Flyer Magazine. Just like the cars, there’s a lot more from whence it came...   

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