Driven to disaster: the Andrea Moda story

A new Formula 1 season has just begun, and to be quite honest I won't be bothering to follow it as I have long since lost interest in this now very clinical and costly sport. Instead, I'm looking back 25 years to a time when there were so many drivers competing that a pre-qualifying session was necessary just to trim down the numbers in qualifying proper, and all sorts of hopeless outfits wasted their time and money getting nowhere. Against some very stiff competition, the particular team I'm looking at are widely regarded as the worst ever to grace the sport. Life may have had the worst car, but did at least manage to turn up at every meeting with it in working order, something this team had difficulty with, although unlike Life they did actually once start a race. I'm talking about Andrea Moda, an outfit so staggeringly inept they have the dubious distinction of ending up getting banned after less than a season for bringing the sport into disrepute.

Andrea Moda really didn't belong in F1

From Unexceptional beginnings

Hagerty Insurance's annual Festival of the Unexceptional has already become one of my unmissable highlights of the car show season in its short existence, and I reported on the 2015 and 2016 events at the time. Its history goes back one more year though, as the very first Festival took place in 2014 before I started this blog, so here I'm going to look back at that inaugural 'Concours de l'Ordinaire'. Held at Whittlebury Park on Saturday 26th July 2014, the same weekend as the nearby Silverstone Classic, it appears to have originated from a realisation that there are so many shows for valuable and exotic classic cars but nothing for the bread-and-butter cars of yesterday that in many cases are actually now much rarer than the exotica.

A rare and exotic classic car. And a Porsche.

Unsung heroes: Nissan March Super Turbo

For the month of March, what could be more appropriate than a car called March? Everyone must know the Nissan Micra (or March as it's named in Japan) and it's definitely not an obscure car, but I must admit to being totally unaware of this particular version and have my friend Matt to thank for telling me about it. As soon as he mentioned what was under the bonnet, something you really wouldn't expect from such a car, I knew it was worthy of inclusion in the unsung heroes series, so here's the story.

It may look like a barried up Micra but there's something very unusual under the bonnet (image: Nissan)

The Volkswagen Group may be making headlines with their twincharged TSI engine range featuring both a turbocharger and a supercharger and claiming this to be a 21st century innovation, but this technology's first use in a production car was actually three decades ago in a limited-run and largely unknown high-performance version of the Nissan March. Here in the UK the Micra has an unglamorous reputation as the car of choice for pensioners, driving instructors and pizza delivery boys, so the Super Turbo will make you look at it in a more exciting way, but sadly it was sold only on the Japanese domestic market and is virtually unheard of in Europe.

Modelling the holy grey grille

Bringing the Hornby Sierra up to scratch

I haven't written about model vehicles on this blog for some time, so here's the story of a recent project that has kept me busy for a few hours and turned a piece of rubbish that most people wouldn't give a second glance into an accurate scale model. I work exclusively in 1/76 scale, the same as OO gauge model railways, which is well-served for bus and lorry models but not so much for cars until recently, and the subject of this piece may be nostalgic for those who modelled modern-image railways in the 1990s.

The old plastic Ford Sierra made by Hornby was just about all you could get at the time but doesn't seem to have much potential to make a decent model from first impressions and is now all but ignored as it is so inferior to the model cars now available. Don't write it off completely though: with a bit of hard work, as I have proved here, it can be transformed into something that wouldn't look out of place alongside the new generation of diecast cars. The car I have chosen to model is well-known in certain circles and its fascinating story has already been told here, so read on to find out how I replicated it in this small scale... 

A Hornby Sierra that actually looks like a Sierra, and the all-important grey grille is in place

Unsung heroes: Bedford JJL

Most of the unsung heroes I have featured so far are cars, but the very first one was a bus and today I return to that theme. It's fair to say the Dennis Dart is one of the major success stories of the bus industry, bridging the gap between minibuses and full-size single-deckers and creating a whole new class of vehicle, but a similar bus could have appeared on the market over a decade before the Dart's 1989 launch. This was the Bedford JJL, an innovative rear-engined purpose-built minibus that was first revealed in prototype form back in 1976 but never reached production, and in many ways was a Dart before its time.

Bedford's biggest missed opportunity or the right product at the wrong time?

Making more of the Maxi

British Leyland's alternative reality

 

As a fan and owner of the Austin Maxi, I have spent some time thinking about why it didn't achieve the success it deserved. BL didn't really know what to do with the Maxi and basically pushed it to the sidelines, but with a different attitude it could easily have formed the very heart of the range and spawned many more variants. One of the biggest reasons I came up with for its failure was the simultaneous existence of both the Maxi 1750 and the 1800 Landcrab, which seemed to be a pointless duplication that did nothing other than create internal competition, as the latter was basically the same car but with an older engine and without the benefit of the fifth gear or hatchback. This realisation provided the starting point for an entire train of thought that could have changed the course of British Leyland's history for the better!

The Maxi could have been so much more than this dumpy unloved hatchback

Had the Maxi been used as a direct replacement for the Landcrab, the Princess would then become redundant and extending this thought a little opens up the possibility of its place being taken by a whole series of Maxi-based cars using all of the E-series engine variations that existed in reality, from 1500 right up to 2600cc. The existence of these additional Maxis would then cause other models to develop in a more logical way to fit around them, rationalising the range and providing full market coverage that was equivalent to Ford, with the Allegro and Escort, Maxi and Cortina, and SD1 and Granada pairings all being direct competitors. Here's how things might have turned out in this alternative reality... 

Dream cars: Panther Six

Four wheels good, six wheels better?

How many wheels should a car have? Most of you would agree that four is the right number but there have always been those people who think differently. There was never a more extreme expression of this idea than the absurd six-wheeled Panther Six, the closest thing ever made to a real-life version of Lady Penelope's FAB1 and something that wouldn't look at all out of place in a Gerry Anderson show. Normally I like subtlety and understatement in my favourite cars and don't go for showy types, but I can't help admiring the Panther Six for its sheer audacity: it is unashamedly vulgar and designed purely to attract attention, and is a magnificent monument to 1970s excess so I would find a place for one in my dream garage.

What do you do when four wheels just aren't enough? (Panther press photo via AROnline)

Public transport, the Equality Act and the Supreme Court

A bad combination?

 

I have previously discussed my feelings towards the Equality Act as it applies to buses on this blog, and a recent development has reinforced my concerns about the appropriateness of the rules when it comes to achieving proper and justified equality. It relates to the shared bay on modern low-floor buses that can be used both by wheelchair users and those with babies in pushchairs and reached all the way to the Supreme Court. While not making it a legal requirement to give wheelchair users priority use of this bay, the court's guidance strongly implies they have a greater right to it than any other group by indicating that bus drivers must do more to persuade other users to vacate it than simply asking them, for instance by rephrasing their request as a mandatory requirement or refusing to drive on until they have complied.

As long as this remains a shared space that multiple groups have equal entitlement in law to use I can see no possible way to resolve a dispute such as this in a fair manner that doesn't discriminate against either party, so true equality cannot therefore be achieved and the result of this case seems inappropriate and poorly thought out with insufficient clarity and not enough legal substance. While bus operators claim to welcome the new guidance, in reality they have no choice as any public criticism of it would itself cause them to be labelled as prejudiced against the disabled, but as an observer outside the industry I have a number of serious misgivings: it sets a dangerous precedent that implies the disabled are entitled to greater rights than others and is likely to have far-reaching consequences to wider society, not just within the bus industry. 

Unsung heroes: Jensen FF

Four-wheel-drive isn't just for off-roaders anymore and its use in road cars is now commonplace.
Everybody knows this idea began in 1980 with the Audi Quattro, which was the world's first four-wheel-drive performance car and is hailed as one of the biggest revolutions in automotive history, right? Wrong! That honour actually belongs to something rather less famous that was introduced some fourteen years earlier by a small-scale British manufacturer and is both an unsung hero and a dream car to me.

I'm talking about the Jensen FF, which was not only the first four-wheel-drive production road car but also the first to be fitted with anti-lock brakes and traction control, and introduced all this technology more than fifty years ago. If it was so impressively innovative, why isn't the FF better known and more revered in the annals of history? Read on to find out why this remarkable car just didn't make the impact it deserved and left Audi to lap up the applause over a decade later...

An all-wheel-drive performance car 14 years before the Quattro

Dream cars: MG ZT 385

One genre of car that fascinates me is the 'sleeper' or 'Q car'. I just love the concept of a subtle and understated performance car that looks for all the world like an ordinary bread-and-butter model and doesn't shout about its power but can give other drivers quite a shock. A great example of such a sleeper is the V8-engined MG ZT 260 and I certainly wouldn't mind owning one of those, but since we're talking ultimate dream cars and don't have to be realistic, I'll go for the full-on but sadly stillborn supercharged ZT 385 to put in my fantasy garage instead.

It looks nothing special but appearances can be deceptive