Touring Car Research Articles

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The British Touring Car Championship Is Embracing Hybrid Power For The First Time From 2022, Which Sees Cosworth And Delta Motorsport Lead The Race Series Evolution With The Development Of A Hybrid Kit And Specially-Created Battery System

The American Ambulance in Paris, 1914-1917 Part III: The American Ambulance Field Service.

As the war progressed, the American Ambulance in Paris evolved. In 1915, it opened the Convalescent Home, an 80-bed rehabilitation unit at nearby Saint Cloud. Most of the patients admitted had gunshot-induced single or multiple fractures of the extremities, which often required long-term rehabilitation. The standard treatments were “mechanotherapy (early mobilization), massage, and electricity (electrical stimulation).” That same year, two smaller military hospitals were set up closer to the front lines: a mobile field hospital and another Ambulance. The 108-bed mobile hospital, purchased from the American War Department, was intended for a much different type of warfare than encountered on the Western Front. Early in the war, the battles of movement turned into battles of position. Trench warfare became the norm, and although the equipment of the hospital could be carried on 4 trucks and erected in several hours, it remained stationary at Pagny-sur-Meuse in the Lorraine region of eastern France. The Ambulance was at Juilly, 30 miles northeast of Paris. It was a fully equipped 225-bed hospital located in the 17th century College of Juilly. All transportation of patients among of the facilities of American Ambulance was done by the American Ambulance Field Service (AAFS). At first, the function of the Service was to collect the sick and wounded arriving in Paris in hospital trains from the front and transport them to Neuilly and other treatment facilities from the main collection point at La Chapelle, but like the Ambulance, it transformed as the war progressed. The AAFS was staffed by volunteers, mostly students from preparatory schools and universities in the United States. They were upper class, wealthy, and filled with enthusiasm for the French cause. Their humanitarian impulse was well seasoned with curiosity and the youthful quest for adventure and glory. Until August 15, 1914, the Service was transporting patients in eight donated “town and touring cars.” On that date, the Ford Automobile Company of Paris gave the Service 10 new Model Fords chassis, which were fitted by the hospital staff with “ambulance bodies.” On September 9, these vehicles went to Meaux, 25 miles northeast of Paris, to transport patients wounded in the Battle of the Marne. In 1915, the scope and range of the operations of the Field Service changed radically when A. Piatt Andrew, a Harvard economics professor turned politician, became the Inspector General. Andrew had entered the Service as a driver, but he was soon disappointed just providing taxi service well behind the battlefront. When discipline problems arose among the volunteers—excessive drinking and failure to follow rules—the President of the Board of the American Hospital, Roger Bacon, without the consent of the Transportation Committee of the Ambulance, appointed Andrew in March 1915 to re-establish order in the ranks. Andrew’s vision for the Service, however, was broader than his mandate. He believed that it should operate much closer to the front lines, as did the English field services. Andrew chose a highly motivated and disciplined group of drivers to staff Section Z, which began operations in Alsace in April 1915. Their performance was so impressive that within a month, Captain Aime Doumenc, the director of transportation services in the French General Headquarters at Chantilly, signed an agreement to integrate the entire Field Service into the French system. The American Ambulance viewed this accord as an unauthorized action that threatened its professed neutrality, and tried to reign in Andrew. Unsuccessful, the Transportation Committee of the American Ambulance cut funding and material assistance to the AAFS. During July 1916, Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, a patron of the American Ambulance and board member of the American Hospital, seemed to have resolved the impasse between Andrew and the American Ambulance by guaranteeing the operating expenses of the Service, and arranging for its administrative transfer to the American Hospital. A short time later, however, the Hospital refused the Field Service the use of its facilities. The AAFS relocated to an estate owned by friends of Andrew in the Passy suburb of Paris. Andrew consolidated his program by aggressively recruiting and fund-raising through the American Fund for French Wounded that had doi: 10.7205/MILMED-D-15-00407

Orchestrating Automobile Technology: Comfort, Mobility Culture, and the Construction of the “Family Touring Car,” 1917–1940

During the social and technical construction of the affordable “family touring car” in both the United States and Europe, one of the urgent projects was the abatement of noise. As a part of the emergence of “automotive comfort,” noise abatement took place during one of the costliest operations in the history of automotive technology: the closing of the body. From an open tourer, the car, during the interwar period, developed into a sedan, encapsulating the driver and his passengers and drastically altering their sensorial intake, especially sight and sound. Thus, car engineering became an engineering of the senses. In this article focusing on the American car culture, it is argued that sound “orchestration” was necessary to enable the automotive subject (the nuclear family) to concentrate on what it liked most: gazing outside the car body. The tourist gaze was rescued through the orchestration (both domesticating and fine-tuning) of the car as a sound machine.

Miniature Electric Touring Car Chassis Structure Analysis and Optimization

We finished the miniature electric touring car chassis structure finite element analysis. Mainly for the miniature electric touring car chassis uniform rectilinear driving condition, the distribution of deformation and stress analysis, According to the above data to optimize the chassis structure, and verified the rationality.

Design of the Grand Touring sports car wing: geometric and aerodynamic twist

Wing twist gives the Grand Touring sports car an eye-catching ‘aerodynamic shape’. From the functional viewpoint, wing twist may improve downforce, provide stall control and enhance aerodynamic efficiency if the twist is optimised. This study aims, first, to explore the influence of linear geometric and aerodynamic twist upon spanwise upwash velocity, downforce and induced drag distributions and, second, to evaluate the use of optimum twist in achieving minimum induced drag while preserving high downforce, in wings with linear taper for the Grand Touring car. Baseline wing prototypes were designed and fitted, subsequently, with a Gurney flap and endplates to obtain complete wings. Aerodynamics for straight wings and wings with geometric, aerodynamic and optimised twist were computed using modified versions of the Prandtl’s Lifting-line Theory. Straight and geometrically-twisted wings with constituent NACA 651-412 airfoils present superior aerodynamic efficiency at angles of attack ≤ 1° and may be used as stabilisers on high-speed circuits. Geometric twisting elicits a partial, rather than complete, wing stall that contributes to safety in motor racing. A geometrically-twisted wing constructed with a NASA LS(1)-0413 airfoil yields high downforce at the expense of large induced drag via a double-peaked induced drag distribution, and it is suitable for high-downforce racing circuits. Nonetheless, the analysis suggests that a twist-optimised wing for the Grand Touring car very nearly duplicates the ideal aerodynamic performance of an elliptic wing and yields high downforce and minimum possible induced drag. The findings support the implementation of optimum wing twist at the conceptual stages of Grand Touring sports car design.

Shall We Go For a Ride?

This article, which focuses on a 1913 Model T touring car in the permanent collection of the Staten Island Historical Society, looks at the challenges faced by historic sites in attempting to care for and preserve their artifact collections while still making them accessible to the public. It documents the step-by-step process undertaken by the society's staff and board of trustees to determine whether it is appropriate to allow this car, a vehicle with a strong local provenance, to become an active-use artifact. The article describes the staff's research and assessment process, weighs the potential benefits and dangers, and offers several possible interpretive approaches.

SEM and XEDS Analysis of Paint Layers on a 1907 Model G White Steam Touring Car from The Henry Ford Museum Collection

Extended abstract of a paper presented at Microscopy and Microanalysis 2011 in Nashville, Tennessee, USA, August 7–August 11, 2011.

Shall We Go For a Ride?

This article, which focuses on a 1913 Model T touring car in the permanent collection of the Staten Island Historical Society, looks at the challenges faced by historic sites in attempting to care for and preserve their artifact collections while still making them accessible to the public. It documents the step-by-step process undertaken by the society's staff and board of trustees to determine whether it is appropriate to allow this car, a vehicle with a strong local provenance, to become an active-use artifact. The article describes the staff's research and assessment process, weighs the potential benefits and dangers, and offers several possible interpretive approaches.

The Road to the Model T: Culture, Road Conditions, and Innovation at the Dawn of the American Motor Age

The Road to the Model T Culture, Road Conditions, and Innovation at the Dawn of the American Motor Age Christopher W. Wells In 1920, a single vehicle dominated the American market for automobiles: Ford's famous Model T. Plain, powerful, and utilitarian, its success peaked in 1923 when Model Ts accounted for almost 55 percent of American automobile production.1 Introduced in 1908 at $850, by 1923 the efficiencies of mass production had allowed Ford to cut the price of the Model T touring car to just $298, enabling automobile ownership in the United States to move steadily down the income ladder. Few could have foreseen this result twenty years earlier, however. Then, the first American motor vehicles, owned almost exclusively by wealthy elites, represented a dizzying variety of designs that inspired spirited debate over such basic technological questions as the best type of engine to use, where to locate it in the vehicle, and how best to design the vehicle's body. In recent years, scholars have generated a host of fresh insights into the shifting contours of the early auto industry, both before and after the advent of the Model T. Much of this work has been inspired by the observation that social context actively shapes definitions of technological merit—and thus the success and failure of different technologies. Why did the internal combustion engine triumph over steam and electric alternatives? [End Page 497] What should we make of the widespread practice of owners modifying their motor vehicles? Were urban or rural motorists more important? How did gender and class shape the early car culture? How did the development of automotive technology in the United States compare to that in Europe?2 For all the attention devoted to these questions, however, most historians have placed the Model T at the center of the American automotive revolution primarily for its dramatic price cuts and the mass-production techniques that made these possible, rather than for the technological merits of its design. In Cars and Culture, for example, Rudi Volti summarizes the prevailing wisdom on this subject when he writes that the Model T "embodied few technological innovations, but was sturdy, reliable, and easy to drive by the standards of the time."3 This conclusion is called into question when the Model T is viewed in light of recent scholarship, especially when coupled with close attention to the turn-of-the-century social context and the slow development of the American road system. As the early industry struggled to its feet, American automakers grappled with a wide range of mechanical difficulties, the infusion of new design breakthroughs from overseas, steady competition from other domestic manufacturers, and terrible road conditions. They also had to respond to fierce debates about what motor vehicles ought to do and how they ought to fit into domestic life. These disagreements exerted significant pressure on motor-vehicle design, causing the early U.S. market to divide into two distinct segments: one forged in the world of the horse, and the other guided by enthusiasm for machines. In this context, the significance of the Model T's design is that it created a new type of motor vehicle—the lightweight automobile—that transformed the U.S. market from one of disagreement and division into a broad mass market focused largely (if not [End Page 498] exclusively) on a single technology. In doing so, it reconciled two seemingly irreconcilable worldviews, and in the process transformed the evolution of U.S. motor-vehicle technology. Click for larger view Figure 1 The 1901 Locomobile, a steam-powered horseless carriage (bestseller during 1901–2). (Source: Motor Age, 9 January 1901, 791.) Competing Visions, Specialized Designs American inventors tackled the problems of self-propelled road vehicles in the early 1890s largely by modifying and combining technologies pioneered in Europe, and the machines they produced shared little beyond the ability to travel under their own power. By 1899...

Desert on the March

Desert on the March Raymond M. Turner On the morning of November 2, 1907, a group of adventurers gathered at a small house near the corner of East Second Street and Park Avenue in Tucson, Arizona, to begin a month-long trip to the little-known Pinacate region of northwestern Mexico. The seven-man team was led by zoologist and unexcelled raconteur William T. Hornaday. The group also included Daniel T. MacDougal, at whose home they had assembled. MacDougal was a botanist and director of Tucson’s Desert Botanical Laboratory. Other group members were Godfrey G. Sykes, geographer, engineer, and buildings and grounds superintendent at the Desert Laboratory; John M. Phillips, entrepreneur and Pennsylvania state game commissioner; Frank Cole and Jesse Jenkins of Tucson; and Charlie Foster, a Mexican from Sonoyta, Sonora, who had come to town for the express purpose of guiding the expedition to Sonoyta. Hornaday kept extensive notes from which he wove a classic book-length tale chronicling the group’s adventures on this historic trip (Hornaday 1908). As noted by Hornaday, the seven men and all their gear were loaded into a White-Water Touring Car drawn by a bay team and a pair of small mules, and a Runabout by Callahan drawn by a lazy horse and a beautiful young mare. Their first major objective was to reach Sonoyta, Sonora, 140 miles to the southwest, where they would be joined by Jeff Milton , employee of the U. S. Immigration Service, and his friend George Saunders from Philadelphia. Another friend of Jeff’s, Rube Daniels from Quitobaquito, Sonora, was to join them later. Jeff and Rube, both closely A westerner by birth, Ray Turner taught botany at the University of Arizona (1954–1962) before joining the U.S. Geological Survey, where for many years his office was at MacDougal’s Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill. His interest in desert vegetation dynamics has resulted in studies of long-term permanent vegetation study plots as well as in his use of repeat photography for documenting landscape change. He is co-author of Sonoran Desert Plants: An Ecological Atlas (with Janice E. Bowers and Tony L. Burgess), The Changing Mile Revisited (with Robert H. Webb, Janice E. Bowers, and James Rodney Hastings), and The Ribbon of Green: Long-term Status of Riverine Riparian Vegetation in the Southwestern United States (with Robert H. Webb and Stanley A. Leake). He retired from the U.S. Geological Survey in 1989. Journal of the Southwest 49, 2 (Summer 2007) : 141–163 142 ✜ Journal of the Southwest familiar with the region, would guide them across the remaining miles to their final destination.1 The scientific bent of these men, leaning as it did toward the natural sciences and geography, provided Hornaday with abundant observations about their natural surroundings, and he incorporated these shared observations into his book. These observers’ keen insights were dramatically expanded by their photographic activities. Hundreds of photographs were taken by Phillips, MacDougal, Hornaday, and Sykes. These serve as accurate records of landscape conditions in 1907, augmenting and refining their field observations. In March 1959, a little more than half a century after the Hornaday expedition, I found myself in that intriguing country joined by Rod Hastings, Charles Lowe, Tad Nichols, and Robert Dubois (see Turner 2007). We were bent on recapturing on film the scenes that our predecessors had first recorded. Thus began an infatuation that has persisted to the present and has resulted in numerous repeat photos at some of the original camera stations. On the day of our 1959 departure, we gathered at the University of Arizona, just a few blocks from MacDougal’s former home and the point from which the 1907 expedition started. All of the gear for the five-man expedition was loaded into one travel-all and Hastings’ open, military-surplus Jeep. The road to the Pinacate region was now well paved, except for the final section of Mexico’s Highway 2 between Sonoyta and our turnoff to MacDougal Pass and points beyond. This was a rough gravel road that many travelers would abandon, using instead the smoother borrow pit running alongside the raised roadway. Even so, our travel time to our destination was...

Oregon Places: Forty-One Cents: The Pendleton—Pilot Rock Stage Line

OREGON PLACES Forty-One Cents The Pendleton-PilotRock StageLine byJamesJ. Kopp AQUARTER, A DIME, A NICKEL, a penny. One coin from each of the slots in the cash register drawer. Fast, efficient, and simple enough that many of thosewho had topay itcould retrieve the coins without looking. Forty-one cents. For nearly three decades, from the early 1950s through the 1970s,forty-one cents was the charge for shipping as much as thirtypounds on the freight linebetween Pendleton and Pilot Rock, two easternOregon towns separated by fifteenmiles of wheat fields, a bowl ing alley, a grange hall, a reservoir, a golf course, some sagebrush, and, on many days, a strongwest wind. Over those years, forty-one cents repre sented the simple and sincere service that characterized this small business and the families that operated it. And in the twentyplus years since the last package was transported between Pendleton and Pilot Rock for that amount, forty-one cents continues to be remembered as the symbol of the Pendleton-Pilot Rock Stage Line. It is also the basis for family lore,because the storyof thePendleton-Pilot Rock Stage line isasmuch about family as it is about business. Family-run "short-haul carriers," such as the Pendleton-Pilot Rock Stage Line operated throughout the state formost of the twentieth cen tury,with routes from Coos Bay to Powers; fromBaker toHalfway; from The Dalles to Shaniko, Arlington, and Heppner; and from Portland to many different cities and towns. One of the few documents that provides a snapshot of these common carriers is a report issued in 1969 by the Trans port and Logistics Research Center of the College of Business Adminis tration at the University of Oregon. The forty-eight-page report, Oregon Short-Haul Regularly Scheduled Com mon Carrier Trucking Characteristics, examines some of the reasons for the severefinancial problems encountered by the short-haul carriers. Thirty-two ? 2oo6Oregon Historical Society Kopp, The Pendleton-Pilot Rock Stage Line 607 short-haul carriers are included in the study, fourteen of them with fewer than ten employees in 1968.Of those, fivewere included inClass III of the Oregon Public Utility Commission Classification, with operating revenues of less then $50,000 ? Halfway Garage & Sales, Pendleton-Heppner Freight Line, Pendleton-Pilot Rock Stage Line, Sandy Truck Line, and Tigard-Sher wood Truck Service.1 The average length of haul for the short-haul carriers was 59miles (one way), with the longest distance being 201miles and the shortest being 15miles. The 15-mile trekwas that covered by the Pendleton-Pilot Rock Stage Line. IT WAS IN1926 THATMY FATHER, Bill Kopp, was asked todrive a truck for a friend ofthe family,Evan Cameron, who ran a stage line between Pendle ton and Pilot Rock for freightand pas sengers. When Bill agreed to drive the Model T truck for a few days, neither he nor anyone else imagined that he would be operating the freight line for the next sixty years. Cameron was at tending a convention inPortland and injured his legwhile on the trip, somy father's short-term commitment was extended. The injurydid not heal in a timelyfashion, and Cameron askedmy father to join him in a partnership in the company. Soon, Cameron decided to get out of the business altogether and offered the company to Bill. In the agreement between Evan Cameron andWilliam J. Kopp, dated October 22, 1926,my father purchased "the Buss [sic] line between Pendleton, Oregon, and Pilot Rock, Oregon, for the sum of $600.00." He also agreed "to carry theUnited States Mail, on said Buss line From Pendleton, Oregon, to Pilot Rock, Oregon, and From Pilot Rock, Oregon, to Pendleton, Oregon." The operation of both the freight and mail component and the passenger business, then consisting of a seven passenger Paige touring car,was more than a one-person operation, so my father asked his older brother Joe to join him in the business. In late 1926, the Kopp brothers took over ownership and management of the Pendleton-Pilot Stage Line and were issued permit number 83 from the Public Utility Commission.2 Bill and his brother JoeKopp were the sons of Franz (Frank) Kopp (1858-1930) and Katharina Adams Kopp (1864-1951...

Busy motor racing circuit gets a booster set to meet its water needs

Brands Hatch motor racing circuit in Kent was formerly the home of Formula One Grand Prix in the UK and, while this is no longer the case, it still attracts thousands of visitors from nearby London for events such as the World Superbike Championships, and the British Touring Car Championships. To help the venue cope with the hundreds of thousands of visitors it gets a year and the demands that they place on its water facilities Grundfos Pumps has installed its two-pump CR64-4 22kW booster set.

Taking Charge: The Electric Automobile in America by Michael Brian Schiffer

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 379 merits recorded decades later. In one especially misleading instance, Gartman opens his chapter on the 1920s with a conversation from the 1930s between Sloan and General Motors designer Harley Earl, complete with quotation marks and expletives. Yet in the citation, Gartman admits to have “pieced together” the conversation from 1969 and 1983 sources, inserting “characteristic expletives” (pp. 68, 233-34). In contrast, when Gartman builds his arguments for the 1950s and later, his evidence enables him tojuxtapose effectively the marketing reasons for automobile designs with “the functional excuses” in­ tended to legitimate gadgetry and other technological display, such as rocket-mocking tail fins (p. 165). Yet even here, an important part of his argument lacks evidence, namely, that consumers accepted these functional excuses in order to purchase extravagant aesthetics and power instead of safety or efficiency. How does he know that consumers found their “religious utopia in steel” (p. 160)? And in what sense did consumers by the 1970s “begin to see” through the superficiality of automotive aesthetics to the costs of Fordism (pp. 173, 183)? Is it not simplistic to describe the 1960s’ “frenzy of social movements, [as] each protesting a particular cost ofFordism” (p. 185)? Finally, although insights from social theorists such as Max Weber and Barbara Ehreneich can guide our thinking, they are not evidence for actual consumer or class behaviors. Pamela Walker Laird Taking Charge: The Electric Automobile in America. By Michael Brian Schiffer. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994. Pp. xiii+225; illustrations, bibliography, index. $24.00. Among writers on the history of the development of the automo­ bile, indeed of technology in general, there is a strong liking for lost causes. Most variations on this theme follow the line that “if only the-------- had been better developed/not suppressed by evil forces, then the smelly, noisy, nasty -------- could surely never have tri­ umphed.” Such writing is, of course, characterized by a utopian scheme that fails and a heroic romantic lead whose plans or desires are thwarted by the usual suspects. In the case ofthe electric automo­ bile, the lost utopia is a world mobilized by clean, quiet, electric vehicles. Michael Schiffer, an anthropologist, offers us two romantic leads: the Wizard, Thomas Edison himself, and middle-class woman­ hood, thwarted by gender inequality in its mission to save humanity from the smelly, nasty, noisy, dangerous gasoline-engined automo­ bile. 380 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Most such romances are also a cracking good read, and Schiffer does not disappoint. Unfortunately, in his enthusiasm Schiffer fails to do justice to the opposition, which materially reduces the book’s academic worth. As the author properly reminds us, the triumph of the gasoline-engined automobile was not a forgone conclusion at the turn of this century, although the triumph of automobility was. All three competing automobile technologies—gasoline, steam, and electric—had strengths. Electric motors develop maximum torque from rest, which makes them very easy to drive and attractive to neophytes. Gasoline engines need a torque-multiplying transmis­ sion: Ford’s planetary transmission in the Model T was the first that was user-friendly. Gasoline engines are also hard to start, or were until Kettering worked out the electric starter for Cadillac in 1912. Given these disadvantages, why did gasoline-engined automobiles thrive so mightily in the period before these innovations? Schiffer gives us the right answer, but the nature of his romance prevents him from accepting it. Electric automobiles, like steamers, had terrible range and poor power-to-weight ratios. Electrics could run perhaps 50 miles on a charge. Batteries accounted for 40 per­ cent or more of total weight. Weight and aerodynamics are the ene­ mies of good vehicle performance. Schiffer fails to tell us just how vital touring or, rather, geographic competence was to success. He completely fails to mention the importance ofAmerican companies copying the 1901 Mercedes, the first really successful touring car, both technically and in terms ofsocial acceptance. Gasoline automo­ biles offered their buyers, however mundane their own lives, the illu­ sion that an automobile could take them anywhere on the planet, even before hard surfaced roads. In this reading, and Schiffer under­ stands it...

El nacimiento de la SEAT: autarquía e intervención del INI

The Spanish Society of Touring Cars (SEAT) was for a long time considered the prototype of the paradigmatic company of Franco's regime. Franco's economic authorities presented the government's interventionism in car manufacture as the only possible alternative for the production of cars in Spain. The inability of private enterprises was the main argument used to entrust this industry to the National Institute of Industry (INI). This paper reconsiders the official account of the origins of SEAT. The INI used its power to block private initiative and assume as its own the creation of the first national mass production car company. Within the car industry the INI did not protect national companies (against what had been agreed in its constitutive act), but on the contrary defended its own projects.

Edificio de oficinas, en Madrid

This office building was designed according to a module of 1.60 X 1.60 m, to allow for maximum flexibility in its distribution and optimum adaptation to possible future changes in the internal organisation. The structure is metallic; the external walls are in brick or glass, depending on the zone, and both the internal and external treatment have been wisely chosen in order to follow the two basic principles of functionality and comfort. This building, besides containing the main offices of the Spanish Society of Touring Cars in Madrid, also provides room for a lecture hall, an automobile exhibition hall and a department of electronic computing.

Changes in Family Expenditures in the Post-War Period

IN THE period since the World War, technological advances in agriculture, in engineering, and in production methods, which had been developing over a long period, combined to place at the disposal of wage earners and clerical workers in the United States a wide array of consumers' goods which had not been available to them before. Some of these goods were actually new; for example, canned tomato juice, rayon fabrics, and certain types of electrical equipment. More of thein had been in the markets before, but at prices higher than moderate-income families could pay. New developments in agricultural production and in transcontinental refrigerator cars began to bring oranges and grapefruit, lettuce and spinach to urban markets the year round at prices considerably lower than those prevailing before the war. Motor-car production entered a new phase. Passenger automobiles had been produced commercially since the nineties, but the cost of a car was for a long time far out of the reach of the average American family. In 1908, less expensive models were introduced, and in 1922 the wholesale price of a currently acceptable touring car was $298, f. o. b. Detroit. Substantially the same car would have cost $525 at wholesale at the end of the war and $850 in 1908 when it was first introduced. It had little in common with the automobiles which are purchased new today, but it met the needs of American families in the 1920's.

Racing Motor Car Design

The development of the racing car to-day is taking place almost entirely in Germany and Italy. It is true that during the last few years British cars have figured prominently in the lists of world speed records, but the cars used for these attempts are not racing cars at all in the true sense of the term. The most important single factor in the suspension of a racing car is to keep the unsprung weight down to an absolute minimum, and this is one of the chief aims of the designer. Independent suspension at all four wheels has been found to have advantages quite out of proportion to the mere saving in weight. There is now a fairly general agreement that if the centre of gravity of a racing car is too low, the tendency to skid is increased. Racing cars built on the front-wheel drive principle have had a considerable success in America, but they suffer from the drawback of instability at the critical speed when rounding a corner. Brakes and transmission have both been developed to a high degree of perfection, but resemble in principle those now used on touring cars. Supercharging is general, largely as a result of special circumstances which the author discusses. The use of heat-resisting alloy steels has also become an important factor in the design of the engines. The author considers also the influence of fuel, tyres, and streamlined shape on the maximum speed attainable on land.