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Absolutely agree MM. I saw this article, and another in the travel section (I think) about driving to ski and thought they might be good links to put on the recent thread about driving to Austria. After reading both articles I thought that the various replies on this forum were much more informative so didn't add the link! Poor effort by the DT - in fact in this weeks Motoring the only readable bit was HJ
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Car magazines are aimed at car buyers. A large proportion nowadays are young women, and young women like to be in the fashion, i.e., wearing what the 'smart' women wear. Nothing wrong with that, but it often implies that the LABEL is what matters. Everything else takes a backseat (pun!). The authoress and her boyfriend probably don't know what pushes the car.
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And 'We didn't like it not having a dashboard clock [is that really true??] and the fuel consumption went up when we drove faster.'
on the octavia it is on the 'MFD' - multi function display i.e. you press the button and it cycles between time of day/elapsed time/temp/miles travelled etc,etc, and i'm suprised how much of a pain I find it not having a permanent clock display (I don't ever wear a watch !)
just 'cos I know what I'm saying doesn't mean I know what I'm talking about
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FiF - I've no doubt Sir J was a triff driver in those good old days - and no doubt still is. (And better than I'll ever be.)
But he don't make good reading. Especially when it's 'when Steve and I messed around in cars'. Should be in the 'Arts & Books' section.
(Does the Backroom turn everyone into a curmudgeonly old git?)
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For the record HJ is not back to two pages. He now has one page worth of room spread over two pages with adverts below.
I have complained to the Telegraph about this.
I quite like the Irish guys section but that is largely a 'think' piece about him a la Clarkson.
HJ's stuff is sometimes the only part of the Driving section about CARS!
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Now that Ripley's gone only James May and HJ amuse and inform. There is the occasional interesting article, but not often enough.
8 ball
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Wonder how much attention HJ & co will pay to this thread, what their views are on the loss of good contributers and how much say they have on the motoring sections content...
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Malteser,
I had never heard of Sir John, except that on the Jagtalk website, a contributor called Maggie, San Diego USA I think, mentioned that her father was writing for the Telegraph as he had been a famous driver.
When she posts, she is more entertaining than her father sometimes.
Matt35.
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PS.
For the sake of accuracy, daughter is Tina and is in San Francisco Bay area - drives an X Type.(Who cares?)
Matt35.
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She must have heard me - a bit long, but interesting?
"Tina Whitmore (Profile) on February 12, 2004 at 14:31:36:
Bikes, cars, girls and fruit-cake
(Filed: 07/02/2004)
John Whitmore recalls his close friendship with a Hollywood legend and motoring
maverick
Steve McQueen is a Hollywood legend. He is also forever associated with
motoring, for his motorcycle jump over the barbed wire in The Great Escape, his
beautifully filmed but vacuous Le Mans and his car chase through San Francisco
in Bullitt (later digitally replicated for a Ford Puma advert), which was
reminiscent of how he drove on the road much of the time. He died of cancer in
1980 but in life his story was richer, more outrageous, more courageous, more
paranoid and more tragic than could ever be portrayed on film. I knew him well
before the above images were created.
It began in the summer of 1961, when I was scrounging bits for my early racing
Mini from the BMC competitions department in Abingdon. Competition manager
Marcus Chambers asked me to check out "a crazy American who calls himself an
actor and wants to borrow a racing car".
I agreed to meet the fellow when I got back to London that evening. He was
staying in the Carlton Tower Hotel, where he used the service lift to avoid
being hassled, although few outside America had even heard of him at that time.
Such fame as he had was the result of a TV western series called Wanted: Dead or
Alive, which never made it across the pond, and his latest and some say his best
film, The Magnificent Seven.
Steve and I talked the whole evening away. Never before had I met such an
engaging, entertaining, raw and alive human being. He had an impatient passion
for women, motorcycles and cars.
I managed to borrow a warmed-over Austin A40 saloon for him to race in a club
meeting at Oulton Park the following weekend, but the filming of The War Lover
at Bovingdon put paid to more racing, though not to motorcycle antics. Steve and
I bought a couple of Triumph Trophy dirt bikes with which we drove the film crew
and local farmers wild.
Steve's wife Neile had not yet arrived in England so we also plundered London's
nightspots with similar verve. I even developed a taste for Steve's favourite
snack, English fruit-cake with bacon and cream cheese! Since Steve insisted on
driving on both sides of the road, he bought a Land Rover and wore his Colt 45
in a holster for protection ? or for practice at least, since he was vying with
Sammy Davis Jnr for the title of fastest gun in the west.
The end of filming coincided with the conclusion of the racing season and, since
I had already won the British Saloon Car Championship with a race still to go, I
allowed Steve to drive my victorious Mini in the finale at Brands Hatch. He had
a tremendous dice, swapping places throughout with Vic Elford and Christabel
Carlisle, who eventually won.
His performance was enough to convince Marcus Chambers to invite him to drive a
works Austin Healey Sprite with John Colgate in the 1962 12-hour sports car race
at Sebring in Florida.
A couple of weeks before the race I stayed with Steve and Neile in Hollywood,
riding Triumph dirt bikes in the Mojave desert and along the notorious
Mulholland Drive with Bud Ekins, the US dirt bike champion. We called ourselves
the Chicken s*** Racing Team but since you could not write that at the time,
Steve had the stuff chemically analysed and we used the equation instead. Our
helmets were painted by the still legendary Von Dutch, who sometimes rode with
us too. Apart from his bikes, Steve owned a Jaguar XKSS and his beloved Land
Rover.
I arrived at the Sebring motel before Steve, only to be woken in the middle of
the night by a blaring car horn right outside my room. I stumbled out of bed and
opened the door to find it blocked by a Chevrolet grille. The only escape from
the room and the noise was to climb on to the bonnet. Inside were Steve and Andy
Hedges, another BMC driver.
I was standing on the canvas top when Steve suddenly stuck the car into reverse
and I fell flat on to the roof. I was carried out on to the road, trying to wake
up, cling on and fend off the hilarity and thumping from inside. We were doing
some 70mph when the inevitable blue light and siren brought us up short.
The gun-toting cop was not happy, though I was relieved to be back on firm
ground, albeit a little under-dressed in boxer shorts. Fortunately the cop
recognised Steve in an instant and his whole demeanour changed. Perhaps he knew
that Steve was a faster gun than he. He asked us what we were doing, as if it
were not obvious. Steve answered casually in his inimitable voice that we were
looking for a coffee shop.
The cop became extremely obliging, if not obsequious. He loaned me his jacket
and offered to lead us to a truck stop where we could get coffee. By the time we
arrived, all the patrol cars in Florida had assembled to meet our proud cop and
his new buddy. Andy's ultra-British accent and my boxer shorts and police jacket
added to the hilarity of the night. After that, the 12-hour race was an
anti-climax.
Peter Riley and I drove a works MGA that was, embarrassingly, several seconds a
lap slower than Steve's Sprite. At least our two MGAs won the class but John and
Steve failed to finish after a good race. Steve was destined, eight years later,
to finish second overall with Pete Revson in a Porsche 908, his best ever
result.
And so to Munich for the making of The Great Escape, where Steve drove director
John Sturgess to distraction with his Gullwing Mercedes 300SL and a Second World
War n*** motorcycle. My first wife and I stayed with Steve and Neile in Bavaria.
One afternoon, in order to win a kart race, Steve relished causing James Coburn
and me to have a major accident, which disrupted filming yet again! It was, in
fact, Bud Ekins who jumped the barbed wire for the film because of insurance
constraints, although Steve had jumped it illicitly the day before.
Steve thought that he owned the right to make the definitive motor racing movie.
He was jealous of both the acting and driving reputation that James Dean had
acquired so tragically, and he was furious when John Frankenheimer announced his
Grand Prix project. With Sturgess as director and Eddie Anhalt as writer, Steve
set out to beat Frankenheimer to the draw. He cobbled together a team comprising
Stirling Moss, myself and the drivers that Frankenheimer had not yet contracted,
and announced Day of the Champion.
We mounted a huge 35mm camera on a Lola sports car, which I drove on test in a
real race at Oulton Park; I later filmed Stirling spinning off at the
Nürburgring. Unfortunately the budget did not materialise, nor did the script.
The film was doomed and Steve was devastated.
Le Mans was important to Steve. What a pity it had such a weak, love-story
script instead of using the opportunity to enter more deeply into the hero's
quest in the manner of Chariots of Fire, Billy Elliot and others. I was out of
motor racing and the Hollywood scene by then and saw little of Steve thereafter,
but he had a major impact on my life, especially in giving me permission to fly
in the face of convention at a time when I was very conservative. He could have
been a great driver, perhaps an even better motorcyclist. Few know that he
competed in the International Six Day trial in Germany for the US Triumph team,
or of the following incident, which was so typical of the man.
Steve was driving the team down the M1 from Coventry in my US Ford Fairlane
station wagon when they passed two girls in a Mini. He slowed alongide and
signalled them to stop on the hard shoulder, whereupon he grabbed his bag,
hopped out of the wagon and into the Mini. He was gone for two days."
Matt35.
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barlow was terrible, witty but a communist rant always followed.
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Communist rant? I might call Jason Barlow some things, but a disciple of Karl Marx he ain't. And what's wrong with a bit of challenging opinion? Pandering to your prejudices hardly broadens the mind.
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