Category: Cars

I am a “car guy”… I love old cars.

Missing Christopher

As much as NOT having an incredibly tall, usually grumpy teenager around the house should be refreshing, I find myself really missing Christopher. I was wandering around the house after dinner and stopped in front of a bookcase, looking at a shelf full of his collection of history books. I saw his two books by British historian Antony Beevor and recalled discussing them with him on a similar evening after dinner. I picked one up to read. Maybe it will keep my mind of his absence.

I received the flyer for the local MG car club’s “Tulip Rallye” in April. Chris & I have done this run every year since 2004. I’ll have to find a new navigator for this year’s event. 🙁

Above is Chris biding his time on a Tulip Rallye segment with minimal navigation somewhere on Whidbey Island a few years back.

Reflections …on a Bonnet.

The end of Day Two of the Colorado Grand back in 2005, saw all the cars collected in one spot behind a hotel. I wandered around that parking lot and shot probably 200 photographs. It was in a lot of ways, overstimulating. I look at my pictures now and think… “I should have shot that car a different way” or whatever. In reality I had maybe 30 minutes of good light, and 3 hours worth of subject matter to capture! A few gems were uncovered however, this being one of them.

It is a race-prepped and British Racing Green Jaguar XK-120, with a louvered bonnet. I have a few photos of it, from several different angles. I love how this one is abstracted to the point of near cubism… with the peek of car-porn through the louvers, the refelected sky and building, the dust-drops on the paint, and of course Sir William’s curvaceous panels… all at different depths and layers. It all adds up to a nice image.

A New Jag!

Thanks to friend and client David Kingsbury I now have an FHC to make a matched pair with my OTS. OK, so it isn’t the same scale as my other Jag, but who cares? 😉

I actually have a nice collection of toy cars in my office… a D-type Jaguar, a Ford GT 40, a Cunningham C4R, a Jaguar XJ220, a Lancia Stratos, and a Chaparral 2. Now I have an E-type too!

Thanks David! You made my day!

Name that car.

Again, this could be really easy, or very hard… who knows.

Of course I hesitate to post a new one, when you guys haven’t finished the last one… but here we go.

Speaking of “Name that car”… I had an enjoyable email conversation with an new reader of the blog. He’s seeking a photograph of a specific old car and must have found this site via a google search for it, as it was a “name that car” star not too long ago. We discussed old cars a bit and I suggested that he join in our little game here. He admitted that he was once a PROFESSIONAL car spotter, having been an archivist at the British National Motor Museum. He was frequently tasked with naming “parts of cars in tiny blurry snapshots”… so Roger and Paul be warned, there’s a ringer here!

Roger got it on the first guess. Oh well. Too easy.

I do love the purposeful yet elegant lines expressed in this engine compartment. The inline six was slanted over to lower the bonnet and provide better forward visibility. The bonnet had two thin bulges that run up it longitudinally, to provide clearance for the cam cover and intake plenum; and they became a stylistic touchstone for the car. So many other cars copied that look, without having anything purposeful beneath the bulges to justify it, and it continues to be replicated to this day.