WWMagazine 7 0

DB’s finest
New section:
L’Ayre du Temps
Hawk, Bonneville
builds
Silver Wraith
speedster proceeds
Photo Road Trip!
Subtle Restomod TR4
Issue 7

Contents
DB’s finest
Aston Martin experienced: a fine 1950s Grand
Tourer
Wraith Speedster
Part 7 The Wraith project gets its body frames
and bulkheads sorted out
Changes are afoot
Roadtrip
Part 2 of Paul Pannack’s BC photo essay: Vancouver
Island is in focus this time
Hawk 289 build
Part 3 Still refurbishing the dirty bits and
considering options
Works in Progress - Open Clouds
Part 4 Yet again, the evil-spirit-possessed GM
Hydramatic puts the S1 on a tow truck
Triumph Tales
The Teutonic TR6
BMW engine: appalling blasphemy, or actually quite
a good idea?
T120V Bonneville
Examination time: having got it home, let’s have a
proper look at it
Black and Magic
Cool TR4 lightly restomodded, in the best possible
taste
WireWheels Magazine is published by
Ayrspeed Automotive Adventures Ltd
No liability is accepted for any information published
herein: the editor’s degree is in English and Art. His
automotive opinions and for that matter his chassis
concepts are based on writing 1000 motoring articles
and 20 books, but he has no formal engineering
qualifications. Caveat emptor.
www.wirewheelsmagazine.com
editor@wirewheelsmagazine.com
L’Ayre du Temps
Cheating at amateur sports: what on earth is
the point?
Off Topic Educashun
Images
The Organic Engine Hoist
Engine cranes are for pansies
In the next issue…
Hawk Part 4
Clouds Part 5
Mini Marcos Part 6
Orchestras; Atlantic Roadtrip; Amphicar;
Delage lookalike; ally single seater
Above: Pistols at dawn: competitors prepare for the
Monte Carlo rally rerun in Glasgow
Left: Our late Good Life correspondent Helen Poon
took our senior photographer for a BC roadtrip
Ayrspeed Automotive Adventures Ltd is the venue for
the orchestration of one-off cars such as the boattailed
Rolls special, and for prototyping other ideas, if
sufficiently interesting.
Editor: Iain Ayre
Designer: Jelena Ayre
iain@ayrspeed.com
www.ayrspeed.com
Changes are indeed afoot, or rather they are
awheel.
We are taking advantage of technology to add
new features to WireWheelsMagazine that
can’t be achieved with a paper magazine.
We’re adding buttons to the flipmag pages to
connect you instantly from the magazine to
new options on the WireWheelsMagazine.
com website.
The MORE page on the website offers extra
pics and captions and video for each story.
The CAPTAIN’S BLOG page offers a weekly
catch-up to bridge the two-month gap
between the issues of a bi-monthly mag.
The TELEVISION website page button will
take you to the Youtube channel developing as
we move forwards.
The LINKS page will take you to many rabbit
holes to explore when you should be working.
If I were editing a paper magazine again,
which I would bet is now a lot less fun than it
used to be, I would currently be trying to spin
you some bollocks about the benefits of an
another cut in page numbers, reduced paper
quality, a cover price rise or a merger with
another sagging magazine title, as the partly
self-inflicted death spiral of printed car
magazines continues.
WireWheelsMagazine is not printed, though.
No cheapest-possible overdrafted Hong Kong
bogpaper print run, no unavoidable print
schedule, no begrudged shelling out of cash to
what used to be WHSmith to get the mags on
to their shelves.
To be honest, the lack of a rigid print schedule
is not entirely a good thing, as sharp-eyed
readers will have noticed yawning gaps
between our issues. But it does allow
flexibility, and in fact WireWheelsMagazine is
adding rather than stripping out variety and
features. Viz the recent new Triumph Tales
section, and now more on TVRs, as well as
the new web options.
Much of the technology of 2025 is quite
poorly executed and unreliable, and much of
it requires users to learn complex input that
should have been made easy by better geekery
design.
However, some of the tech is magnificent. A
flipmag format magazine that we can afford to
publish worldwide in any number for only the
editorial costs is itself pretty cool, and it’s actually
amazing that we can instantly connect you from a
button on the magazine page to more pictures and
captions, or to video footage for the story you’re
reading, or to link to the useful companies we
write about, or to previous issues for related
stories, or to the website of the car club we’re
visiting.
You can’t do that with a paper magazine.
The tech won’t work all the time, of course, as
there are computers and smartphones involved.
But switch it off and on a few times, good to go.
This brought up a thought: telephones used to
work 100%, all the time, like spanners. TVs still
work 100% for ten or twenty years. The screen
part, obviously, not the internet part.
The fact that Shaun the tuner can talk to a
MegaSquirt computer in my TVR via a phone and
a laptop from 300 miles away, and can tell the
injectors to fire, is astonishing if you think about
it. Okay, the Bitch from Hell TVR still won’t
fecking start, but the phone call to the engine is
pretty cool even if it doesn’t actually achieve
anything.
An interesting recent tech failure was that of GPS.
I was trying to attend a car club lunch in
Strathblane near Stirling, and the Garmin was
completely unable to take me to either the
postcode or to the village. This is a new tech fail,
but probably the first of many. Time to invest in a
large scale paper map if I can still source one.
This bodes ill for modern internet-controlled cars,
though: some of them may be paralysed in the
absence of a satellite signal.
In the USA, General Motors knows when and
where their cars have crashed, which is a useful
safety feature. It may be a downside that
Homeland Security and ICE can also find out
where you are, where you have been, and with
whom. And what colour your skin is. It would be
sensible to expect The Ministry of State Security
in China to use every Chinese car sold worldwide
as a mobile spy, or for that matter as a weapon.
Chinese smartphones may also not be a smart
move.
So backwards we go to reliable maps, coils and
rotor arms, and forwards to the WireWheels
widgets whenever the bit rate is good enough.

DB’s Finest
Is this the most
wire-wheeled
car ever?
Perfect proportions for a sports tourer. It’s a two-seater, with luggage space in the back.
You certainly couldn’t imagine an Aston Martin DB2
with anything other than wire wheels, and the red
wires with the metallic blue paint are perfection.
This Aston belonged to a local friend in BC, and I’ve
enjoyed riding in it a good few times. It’s a DB2;
they were built from 1950-1953 at Feltham in
England. It was designed by Frank Feeley and
coachbuilt by Tickford in aluminium over a tubular
steel chassis, which was based on the Claude Hill
design for the previous 2-Litre Sports. 411 of them
were made.
The engine is a 2580cc straight six cast-iron
Lagonda design with double overhead cams, making
105bhp at 5000rpm, but more usefully, 125lbs.ft of
torque at 3100rpm. Claimed top speed was 116mph.
The gearbox is a four-speed by the David Brown
company: Sir David Brown was the owner of this
gearbox company and the DB cars bear its initials.
He had bought both Aston Martin and later Lagonda
in 1947, one of their jewels being this engine. The
Tickford coachworks was also bought, and became
the Aston Martin factory.
DB knew whereof he spoke: the David Brown name
cast into this Aston’s gearbox was not just his own
name but that of his grandfather, who founded the
family company in 1860. They had various fingers in
assorted pies, but focused on gears. Earlier Aston
Martins had David Brown gears, and Amherst Villiers
Windscreen is split flat glass, which is helpful in
restoration finance. Pilkington can still supply the
curved screen for later DB3, but it wouldn’t be cheap.
was also a customer. David Brown started in the
family company as an apprentice, and progressed
through modifying and racing motorcycles, earning
himself a factory ride for Douglas. That is not a
small achievement.
He designed his own 1500cc twin-cam straight-eight
engine at home, making patterns and castings in the
David Brown factory and using the company’s
machine shop for the steel parts. This was stopped
by his father, as he had started sneaking company
time for it. On ascending to the top of the gearboxfocused
company, he engineered its fortunes to wide
success. He was canny: the Aston Martin company
was advertised for £30,000 and bought for £20,500.
Brown did even better with Lagonda, paying the
liquidator £52,500 of the £250,000 originally asked.
A top man, well worth calling Sir.
The purchase of Lagonda was mainly to get access
to this engine, designed by Willie Watson, who had
been involved with Invicta and pre-war Lagonda
engine designs. W.O. Bentley had supervised the
design of the engine, which gives it some significant
breeding.
Suspension on the DB2 is by trailing arms and coils
at the front with an anti-roll bar, and at the back it’s a
live axle on coils, controlled by radius arms and a
Panhard rod.
When I first came across the car, the engine was in
pieces, being rebuilt by the owner in his suburban
Vancouver area garage. He’s also a DB, as his name
is David Birchall. This was quite a while back, when
the car was just a first-class classic sports tourer
rather than an investment target. In fact I helped put
the engine back in, and in particular I helped to put
the huge single-piece flip front back on the car once
the engine was back in: quite a hairy business, as it
was very unwieldy and had been freshly painted.
The reason for the bonnet work and paint job was
because a magnet being used to investigate the
bodywork had adhered enthusiastically to the
supposedly aluminium front valance. That’s not
right. When the rather brutal steel bodgery had been
chopped out and the bumper and valance were back
to being aluminum, the flip front was even more
delicate.
It was all successfully achieved, and the Aston went
back on the road. It was impressive for 1950 – not
really fast, but the performance was strong and the
handling was good. At that time it was used fairly
hard but with some respect, rather than being
treasured. The suspension tended to the firm side, a
sporting ride rather than comfy and grand-touring,
and the poor condition of BC’s road surfaces could
be felt clearly when driving in the Aston. The driving
competence around Vancouver is as poor as the road
surfaces, and driving in lawless traffic made you
Dashboard is nicely worn in but nowhere
near worn out.

notice the lack of rear quarter vision in the car:
changing lanes among aggressive Bubbas in pickups
and spoilt teens in Civics can be quite hairy.
Nevertheless, the DB2 was frequently and actively
enjoyed, and home-fettled at weekends.
But then the value started getting silly, which actually
took much of the fun out of the car. If you’re rich,
you can enjoy expensive cars without worrying about
them. If you’re not, you can’t relax and enjoy giving
a very valuable object an enthusiastic B-road
spanking, or even driving it to lunch, because the
consequences of a mishap are suddenly a lot more
serious.
Okay: at this point, the value had risen to the point
where a lot more fun could be got from the cash than
from the Aston, including a Lotus Elan which was
and still is at an enjoyably- thrashable price point, so
the DB2 was prepped for sale. As you can see, a
spectacular result was achieved by a lot of effort, a
new paint job in Ecurie Escosse metallic blue, and
the subsequent polishing.
The decision to leave the interior original was an
honourable act of automotive integrity, but it slightly
misfired financially. The seats in particular had
drifted past patinated into tatty, and the gleaming
paint made them look worse. More cash could
probably have been extracted from the sale by
retrimming them, as the next owner was almost
certainly going to retrim the seats anyway. True
classic petrolheads are always reluctant to renew
anything that has survived for 70 years and is still
usable. A fresh retrim means you’re sitting on and
Rear screen is Perspex, with a very useful vent
in it. No idea why the idea of moving interior
air out of cars as well as into them was
abandoned in most older cars.
Splash plate covering the backs of the
headlights is hand-bashed and rolled, like
the rest of the body.
Looking closer, the panel gaps are actually pretty good for a hand-built car with a huge flip
front. 69 Rear view is as pleasing as the rear ¾ angle. There’s not a bad line on the car.
As often happens with really fine sports coupés, the roof line makes the car. The convertible
version of these cars is attractive but not as visually magnetic as the coupé .

Silver wires might have looked slightly
ordinary: the red changes the whole
aesthetic of the car to something more
sporting. Also spot-on for the period.
looking at 2025 rather than 1950, and you can’t get
original back once it’s gone.
I recall long ethics chats with an Austin Seven chum
over a first ever repaint for his 1934 Chummy, and I
took reference photographs of the remaining traces of
the faded and chipped pinstripes so that they could be
replicated if the repaint decision was finally made.
The original paint was toast, to be realistic: worn
through in many places, faded and flat throughout, but
even so, covering up the original 1934 paintjob with a
layer of 2019 was indigestible. Of course that’s a
purely intrinsic/aesthetic/ethical decision in a car
that’s only worth a few thousand: it’s a different
matter if serious money is involved.
It’s actually some consolation that the price bubble on
these Astons has now burst – their value dropped by
50% in the last few years, so let’s hope that a few
more will be brought out and used by enthusiasts,
rather than just being hoarded by investors.
The original leather was past patinated and heading towards tatty. Possibly it could have been
saved and re-coloured by a good trimmer? Replacement with new red leather would have
matched the new paint quality. A difficult decision.
Coil springs sitting in cast uprights, with
trailing links. The arrangement works well.
Rear view is as pleasing as the rear ¾
angle. There’s not a bad line on the car.
Exhaust manifolds are purposeful as well as
pretty.
Luggage space and headlining still look
fresh and inviting.
Original DB2 carburation is twin 1½” SUs.
More and bigger carbs are options, but
Willie and W.O. probably preferred higher
gas speeds to bling.

Architectural engine looks good, reflecting its
upmarket heritage.
Castings for the top of the engine are
elegant and sculptural.
Lightweight tubular steel chassis can be
seen here. Weight all up is about 2500lbs.
The finish is polished but not too much.
The left hand cam cover has another
casting on top of it that covers the plug
leads. Unnecessary, but again elegant.
Four-speed David Brown gearbox is
prepped to go back in.
“David Brown” refers to the family firm, not
to Sir David himself.
Gearbox back on, assembly is on the hoist
ready to go back in.
Engine is in: next trick is to get the freshly
painted flip front end back on the car
without scratching it.

Part 2
between buildings to actually take off and
land in Victoria Harbour. This is excellent, a
bucket list trip.
On the western coast, Tofino and Ucluelet are
full of hippies and surfers, and although
increasingly crowded, commercial and
expensive in high season, they are still well
worth a visit off season. A fashionable
experience is winter storm watching at the
Wickaninnish Inn: the Pacific Ocean can be
less than pacific when it’s having a tantrum.
Driving up the east coast on the smaller local
highway is also very pleasant, and again
going there off season skips the crowds.
Nanaimo is interesting, and the further north
you go, the emptier the landscape. People
have only been here for a couple of hundred
years, apart from the native First Nations
people who didn’t change the landscape over
thousands of years, and further up the island
the land is mostly virgin, so it still has quite a
pioneering feel away from the main roads.
The BC ferry system can be used to make a
change from driving, although it’s a
government organisation so it’s not very
efficient and not 100% reliable. On any trip,
there may not be enough ferry capacity, so
you need some novels in your car in case you
have to spend a few hours parked in a queue.
There’s no other route, either: quite often you
become aware that the thin ribbon of tarmac
is the only road, and is the only evidence of
civilisation, threading through millions of
acres of forest where nobody human has yet
walked.
It’s also worth noting that Island Time is
rather like Spanish or rural French time, in
that urgency and schedules are not treated
with the respect you might think they
deserve. As I said, bring a book.
Our senior photographer Paul Pannack went to Canada for a visit and got a
tour of the Okanagan Valley and some of Vancouver Island. He’s never without
a camera, and the way he sees landscapes is his own.
Vancouver Island is well worth a visit,
particularly if you’re feeling hemmed in by too
many people. It’s about the same size as the
English home counties, but with 850,000 people
rather than 50,000,000 so there is fifty times as
much space per person as the UK - plenty of
room, which is a nice change for a Brit. The
southern tip of the Island is dry and sunny
enough for regular summer wildfires, and it
turns into temperate rainforest as you go further
north. Spring is the best time to visit, before the
firestorm season gets going.
The roads are not bad, and a rented North
American campervan is a fine way of exploring
the space, sometimes going off grid and
sometimes staying at campgrounds with water,
electricity, even cable TV - although usually in
campgrounds, cable is just basic Peasant Vision
which is 50% crappy ads and 50% crappy
American reality or game shows.
Have a look at the island on Google maps –
most of the western half is completely empty.
You can also spend some delightful time on BC
Ferries, which amble between dozens of rather
gorgeous smaller islands, sometimes sailing
through scarily narrow channels.
Victoria is technically the capital of BC,
although Vancouver is its major city. Victoria is
an interesting place, and the name is a giveaway
as to its nature. In the same way that Quebec is
more furiously French than France, Victoria is
much more English than England. There are red
double decker buses, there is afternoon tea at
the Empress hotel. It’s very pretty.
From either Victoria harbour or from
Vancouver, you can and should fly out to the
Island and back with Harbour Air, who operate
small passenger seaplanes that cruise over the
small islands and then more or less dodge
Helen Poon, our late and lamented Good Life correspondent, takes Paul for a tour of
Vancouver Island.

Wood is still a common construction
material for bridges, as there’s no shortage
of the stuff. Although astonishingly, retail
wood bought in Canada is expensive.
Corporate cartel activity is rife and there’s
quiet Quebec-style corruption.
BC Ferries is the road network around the
coastal islands – ferry rides for pleasure are
recommended even if you don’t aim to go
anywhere in particular.
Beaches around Vancouver and the
Lower Mainland are pretty crowded, but
some of the island beaches are still silent
and serene.
Some parts of Vancouver Island are wet, cold
rainforest.
There are some truly excellent craft
breweries and distilleries in the Pacific
Northwest. Sadly, Sheringham doesn’t export
outside BC.

Part 3: Clunk
There are many, many microbreweries and
distilleries in BC, producing some very high
quality, imaginative and interesting
drinkies.
Hindsight is always 20/20. Stuart bought a
wreck of an MGB to strip for his Hawk build,
and he did well out of it financially, selling the
bits he didn’t require for more than the cost of
the wreck. But as he didn’t get to drive the
donor car before dismantling it, he didn’t
know about the clunk in the rear axle until the
inaugural drive of the car as a gleaming new
Hawk.
As it happened, this turned out to be a small
rather than a large disaster. The back axle of
an MGB is very strong, and is essentially
shared with the MGC and MGBGTV8. You
can usually hammer on it with a Rover V8
forever, but after a hundred thousand miles or
so and possibly no oil change, the diff does
develop some wear. If the crown and pinion
gears themselves and all the bearings are
Coachwerks.com in Victoria has some
interesting cars, in pieces. Worth a
googledrool.
At the very least, the diff should be
opened up, drained and cleaned out.
Some of the old oil evaporates after
forty years, leaving waxy kak behind.
If the teeth and bearings are still good,
seal it up, fill it up and away you go for
another forty years.
Workshop manuals are a bone of
contention. Do you need ’em? Are you
a man or a mouse? To be honest, the
mouse’s car probably works better. An
excellent T-shirt spotted at a Canadian
classic car show recently said “Leave
me alone, I know what I’m doing.”

Much of the refurbishment of the donor
MG parts just means wire-brushing or
blasting off ancient kak, rebushing
when that’s an option, and repainting
before refitting. It doesn’t require much
brain power and is good Shed Time.
Given the price of new or rebuilt
callipers, it’s only worth rebuilding
them yourself if you want to, and
frequently they’re scrap anyway.
Always worth checking, though – if the
bores and pistons are still perfect, new
seals cost peanuts.
knackered, you’re looking at a rebuild or a
replacement. If those big bits are shot, a
replacement secondhand diff is the best bet
financially, as a hundred pounds will get you
something in good shape. Quite often the
clunk is down to worn spacer washers and
copper cup washers, of which a typical cost
would be £peanuts including VAT. To replace
those, you have to jack the car up safely, drain
the diff, undo the big hub nuts with a long ½”
drive bar and an encouraging stick, disconnect
the brakes, use a slide-hammer and/or a puller
to get the half-shafts partly out, fiddle out the
worn bits and replace them. The big nuts are
torqued up to 150lbs plus decades of stiction,
and slide-hammering and encouraging-stick
muscling are much easier to perform on an
axle that’s bolted to a car rather than skiting
across a garage floor, so it’s not the best
option to deal with the problem after the axle
has been taken out. It is definitely an idea to
take a good look at the guts of the diff and
feel for slop when the back cover is off for a
new gasket, so that you know what to plan
for.
There are options with diffs. If you are going
to cruise, the standard B axle in good
condition will be absolutely fine. If you are
going to charge and want more traction, a
limited slip diff from Quaife at around £700
would definitely be worth a look. If you’re
going to use a substantially torquier engine
than 250bhp, such as a Chevrolet 350, the
Rebuilding the original MGB
suspension gives you competent,
reasonably comfortable performance
with slightly heavy low-speed
steering. Hawk’s suspension upgrade
is expensive but very nice, and can be
retro-fitted later.
same Quaife LSD could make much sense.
Our advice would be to source a good
standard spare MGB diff from the friends you
will make when you join the MG Owners’
Club – of which a Hawk owner will be a highstatus
member. Between £50 and £100 should
sort the spare differential. Then when the car
is built, try to break the diff. If you can’t break
it, you don’t need a Quaife. Given the low
price of spare MGB diffs, they could really be
regarded as a service item.
In America, anyone fitting a serious V8 into a
British car would tend to use a different live
axle completely – something like a 9” Ford –
which would need to have the casing and the
half-shafts shortened, but which would
otherwise not be a great deal bigger physically
than the original axle – although it would
definitely be sufficiently bigger to do the job.
But in the UK, V8 Mustang axles are rare and
spare MGB diffs are not.
If you’re going for a five-speed gearbox,
which you’d be daft not to, the standard 3.9:1
diff ratio will work nicely. The top ratio of a
T5 will be similar to the overdrive fourth on
an MGB, which is fine for general use.
If you like life really relaxed, the V8 allows
you to choose a higher final drive ratio or diff
gearing as well. The T5 fifth gear is usually
0.80, which drops the engine revs by 20%. If
New bearings all round, but avoid
cheap ones if you can. Weirdly, you
should be looking for the most
expensive MGB spare parts, as
there’s a better chance that they’re
made of metal rather than tofu.
The ignition and starter switch on the
steering column is redundant, as the
ignition will be on the dashboard in the
289. However, it still provides a
steering lock for IVA, and for anti-theft
and insurance-premium purposes, so
leaving it in place is a good idea.

This is what happens to a Rolls-Royce
diff if you don’t strip it and clean the
hardened kak out. You would
probably have a myocardial infarction
if I told you what a new RR diff costs.
Getting the drum off can be a pig.
Don’t hit the drums too hard, though,
as you can actually dent them which
fouls up the braking. The best
releasing fluid is auto tranny oil
mixed with acetone.
you’re running a well-sorted 289 or 302 V8 in
a light car, you have 280-300lbs.ft. of torque
available to push around 2000lbs of car, which
is three times as much grunt as an MGB. The
MGB is quite torquey even with its original
long-stroke 1800cc four.
In a V8 MGB or derivative, you are never
going to have to change down a gear again,
unless you want to. You have enough torque to
climb a mountain in overdrive top at 1000rpm.
I’m familiar with this because I put a rebuilt
diff in my old 1958 Chevy, and I raised the
diff ratio to 3.1:1 from something like 3.6:1.
My gearbox was a 700R4 overdrive
automatic, in which fourth gear is 0.70, so I
effectively put an overdrive on top of an
overdrive. The 700R4 tranny also had a
locking torque convertor which tends to drop
the revs further as well. I didn’t have a
tachometer, but during local highway cruising
at 100kph or 60mph my engine was just
idling, rumbling quietly away under the
aircraft-carrier bonnet at around 750rpm, if
that. With something like 350lbs.ft of torque
pushing a 3500lb car, I could do that. Fuel
mileage was obviously bad, but bad as in
maybe 20mpg cruising, in British gallons. It
was worth it: I could always drive the Mini if I
was feeling skint.
It seems as though we’re not talking much
about Stuart’s build, and that’s true. Apart
from the opportunities and problems provided
by the rear axle and its ratios, Stuart’s build is
now at a rather boring stage, where he’s
scraping rust and crap off manky old bits of
MG, and using the eloquent advice of Mr
Haynes as to the repair and refurbishment of
said bits, so we’ve left him to that for this
issue.
One thing to remember from this part of the
build is that when Stuart was wisely fitting
hard poly bushes to the suspension, he knew
not to tighten anything up fully until the car
was back on its wheels, because you don’t
want to risk locking the bushes in the wrong
place – this distorts them and fouls up the
spring rates. The poly bushes are a
Patience and a big stick are now required.
The nut is tightened up to 150lbs.ft and
the half-shaft has been in there since
1975. Breaker bar, scaffold pole and
either a slide hammer or a big puller are
now needed. Although if all is well with
the axle, you can just leave it alone.
worthwhile experiment, though. Even if you
don’t ultimately like the flavour of their
sharpening-up of the suspension, and the
transmission of more road feel and inevitably
more noise and vibration, poly is probably
worth a try. At very little further expense, you
can remove the poly bushes and go back to
rubber, and that job will be a piece of cake
because everything is new and greased.
The MGB brake callipers only have two pots or
bores. B brakes are okay, in that they will lock
up the front wheels. More powerful brakes do
give you more feel and more control, though.
Stuart went for a very traditional upgrade,
which is Princess four-pot callipers. They’re
not actually Princess callipers nowadays,
though, they’re replicas. When did you last see
an Austin Princess working, let alone in a
scrapyard with a serviceable pair of callipers
dangling within reach?
Pricing up extra braking is a matter of
marketing and branding more than practical
value. The highest amount of retardation per
quid seems to be provided by Wilwood,
although if you talk to a fashionable and
youthful type of person, they will tell you that
Wilwood callipers are uncool, or whatever the
current cool word for uncool is. Sick now
means cool rather than uncool, in the way that
in fashionable chat, bad used to mean good.
If you spot Stuart at a classic car show, as kit
car shows are becoming sadly thin on the
ground these days, restrain yourself from
making any snotty remarks about his
unfashionable brake callipers. You could be
subtle about it, though – maybe wear a Brembo
T-shirt, then nudge him and point at it.
That’s a decent sized puller. This is why
you join the local MG club and make
some relevant friends. The puller can
then be rented for a pint or two, and may
come with an owner-operator as well.
This is fairly nasty. There could be rust
inside the wheel cylinder as well as
outside, so best to replace or restore
them. If they are original, though, they
are made of real metal. Get them bored
out and sleeved in bronze or stainless
for a permanent fix.
Stuart replaced everything on the
back brakes apart from the backplate.
A wise decision.
New drums and wire-wheel hubs
decorate the ends of Stuart’s rebuilt
axle. New
washers and
spacers will
soon take the
slop out of the
diff. He can
expect no
bother from
the back of
the car for a
decade or so.

II
There is also steel/aluminium corrosion, but
eventually they are encouraged loose.
The original RR/Bentley master
cylinder is dismantled.
metal that will rust, so changing the iron bearing
surface for bronze or stainless steel is an upgrade
as well as a replacement. Some favour stainless
steel, some prefer bronze. Bronze is softer, but
realistically, wearing it out will take longer than
we will be alive.
Jim machines the inserts rather laboriously out of
a solid bar of high-grade 660 bearing bronze, and
he never had one fail in 40 years… until my one
jammed. Although looking back, it’s more logical
that the problem was further incompetence from
RWMandCo in BC who fouled up repairing the
transmission.
The possibly original wheel cylinders in my 1957
Bentley S1 were rough. Previous Owner said they
had been re-rubbered and just needed bleeding,
but that would have been, shall we say, an
optimistic viewpoint to adopt: as long as nobody
ever pressed the brake pedal, the brakes would
have been fine. As it was, the rust pits would
have ripped up new rubber seals pretty well
instantly.
Okay, we would have to rebuild the whole lot.
My car was still in one piece, so I decided to
have Jim rebuild a spare set of new brake
hydraulics that had been fitted to the Cloud II that
I was using as the primary Open Cloud
prototype. Also, on my own Bentley S, previous
owner or whoever had welded a chunk of
aluminium back on to one of the brake master
cylinders that had broken off when somebody
had overtightened one of the fittings, and cracked
it across the threaded section. It was welded
The big nut structures that cap the ends of the two master cylinders have been under a car
in the damp for 65 years. It takes a big spanner and a big hammer to dislodge them.
There has been a hiatus, or more accurately a lowatus,
in the reportage of this project: we’ve been
busy getting on with things than talking about
them. Let’s remedy that.
Jim Walters at www.BristolMotors.com, over on
Vancouver Island, took care of all the rebuilding
and upgrading of the Cloud brake cylinders.
New cylinders are still made of ferrous cast
The cylinders and components are then
blasted squeaky clean.
The original cylinder has six relatively
large drain holes.

guide to which panels will probably need to be
replaced.)
The fabricated new front body mounts also
arrived from Flying Spares. They’re quite
cleverly designed, and are screwed together. So
you would weld the big part to the car, tacking it
and welding little bits inches apart to avoid
overheating and distorting the metal, then you
would attach and weld the other parts in exactly
the right place. The fit of the parts was
encouragingly tight. Again, better/cheaper/faster
to buy them than to make them.
The cylinder is opened up to fit the sleeve.
The cheap copy has four small drain
holes, so the brake pedal would not
have returned properly.
The cheap copy also does not have a
shaped washer allowing some fluid
movement, just a plain cheap washer:
cheaping out here probably saved a
tenth of a renminbi.
Flying Spares helpfully sent a spare original old
core cylinder for story purposes and for later
rebuilding. The poor quality of the new cylinders
no longer mattered, as they were going to be recored
in bronze and their only function would now
be static and mechanical, in that they would be
carrying the pipe fittings and would be bolted to
the car.
The production plan with Ayrspeed Open Clouds is
to have bronze-sleeved brake cylinders throughout,
because cars that cost very serious money will
never be daily drivers with their systems kept
reliable by frequent use. They will be treasured,
polished and mostly stationary in air-conditioned
collections, where hygroscopic action means they
will slowly collect water in the brake fluid. This
will never cause a problem with a bronze-sleeved
brake system.
The bronze stock is solid and expensive.
A set of new inner rear wing panels also arrived
from Flying Spares. These are not pristine
perfection, but nor were they expensive: it makes
more sense to buy these panels for future Open
Clouds than to make them. New panels or major
rust repairs will usually be necessary, as these cars
do crumble in their secret parts which you can’t see.
Having completely dismantled one, I now have a
much better idea where they rust. (The items listed
as available replacement panels also give a good
The finished cylinders. There is
sealant between the sleeve and the
cylinder body to avoid any metal-tometal
contact and the resultant
galvanic corrosion.
adequately, and it was the return side rather than
the pressurised side, but you just don’t do that
sort of thing with brake components.
The unused set of new cylinders extracted from
the Cloud primary prototype were a bit rough and
very cheap-looking, so rather than putting them
in the car as they were, I sent those off to Jim to
be sleeved in bronze. An old invoice that was
discovered later revealed that the cylinders had
cost £46 rather than the usual £900, and had been
bought from some skanky Ebay source. Hence
the shit quality.
Quite a lot of material is removed. All
the corrosion is cut out.
By the time the sleeve has been turned,
inside and out, it’s quite thin. It’s then
polished inside and roughened on the
outside.
The inner rear wings are also usually
rotting away in Clouds, so complete
replacement is the best way of
eliminating rust.

The mount is well made and fits
closely. It will solve the problem.
The replacement body mount. This
is a bad rust trap, and most Bentley
S and Silver Cloud models have rust
in there, whether it’s visible or not.
With Triumph Tales brewing up in fine style, we’re entitled/required to
drive an editorial Triumph again. But what sort?
Jim has a fire engine in his garden. Jim is not married.
It was definitely time to replace the dull daily
shopping car in the WireWheels fleet with a
Triumph, as it’s too long since I drove one for
real.
There were two project TR6s in BC that came
and went, but they came and then they went,
without being built or used. I was writing
stories for Triumph World magazine about
those Triumphs, but I wasn’t actually driving
one.
I don’t have a Triumph at all now apart from
my Bonneville bike. This seems slightly rude
to me: I’ve always felt that the editor of any
magazine should be in the trenches with his or
her readers. You would expect a golf magazine
editor to be out on the golf court or whatever,
swinging their golf bats on a regular basis;
you would expect the editor of a dinghy
magazine to have wet feet and to be shivering
slightly; you would expect a wedding
magazine editor to be getting drunk and
catching the occasional bouquet. Or possibly
stopping fights at receptions: “Leave it,
Darren, he’s not worth it.”
The editorial Marcos may possibly be on the
transfer list for replacement, as its racing
pedigree may be its undoing. It was originally
conceived and designed as a racing car based
on Mini mechanicals, but very aerodynamic
and weighing 1100lbs. It was a big success on
the track; a lot faster, grippier and more stable
than a full-weight steel Mini. A Mini Marcos
came 17 th at Le Mans in 1965 and clocked
146mph along the old pre-chicane Mulsanne
Straight, which is astonishing as it had a
standard race-spec Mini Cooper engine from
the BMC competitions department. You could
probably have heard the valves bouncing from
Maison Blanche.
Part of the racing success of the Marcos was
that it uses Mini rubber cone suspension,
uprated by 40% by the low weight of the car.
It is rising-rate suspension: but the spring rate
starts off as breezeblock and rises to igneous
rock. Driving standard Minis on bad road
surfaces is pretty brutal, but the Mini Marcos
is worse: not only does it have a very stiff
GRP shell, but on the road it weighs around

half as much as a steel Mini, so even after
fitting Alex Moulton’s downrated Smootharide
suspension cones, the only real suspension is
the tyre sidewalls. For going very fast on a
good racetrack surface, this is sublime. On a
crappy 2020s British road, it’s borderline
painful.
The previous government’s deliberate
impoverishment of local authorities’ power
and money can literally be felt in the potholes
of the UK’s third-world road system, and each
additional cash grab or stupid mistake made
by the previous shower in Westminster cost us
all more wealth. Any potential funds for road
repairs were wasted on nasty and wasteful PR
stunts such as flying a few miserable refugees
to Rwanda, or on trousering billions for
useless covid gear, or bankrupting water
companies.
The roads are probably only going to get
worse. Brutal suspension on brutal roads is not
Vitesse is a good option, a fine practical
little sports saloon. Very pretty, quite
fast, manoeuvrable, cheap to run, decent
boot, four seats, lovely soundtrack and
revvy 1600cc six if you go back far
enough.
much fun. Maybe a full steel rollcage would
help civilise the Marcos, maybe built from
scaffold-pole to get some weight aboard. The
jury is still out on the fate of the Marcos,
although it is essentially a brand new car with
100,000 potential miles in it.
The suspension on many Triumphs is not
super smooth either, unless you look at a
2000 or a 2.5PI, or maybe a Stag, but a TR6
gives a reasonably civilised ride, and the
others are all livable. Being realistic, I live
450 miles away from London, and 200 miles
from the north of England. Collecting
magazine stories is going to continue to
involve some serious travelling.
While it would be cool to use a Triumph as
the full-time daily transport, it may not be the
best option. It would be much more sensible
to drive a comfy 4x4 semi-offroader with big
This is as far as I got with owning a TR6:
promising projects sidelined by more
important and exciting Bentley specials.
big deep tyres most of the time as a daily and a
work truck, given the third-world road
conditions and increasingly extreme climate.
deep tyres most of the time as a daily and a
work truck, given the third-world road
conditions and increasingly extreme climate. I
was quite impressed by my brother’s and even
more impressed when I Discoveried that it
wasn’t built by Land Rover at all, but is a Ford
platform with a Citroen/Peugeot engine.
deep tyres most of the time as a daily and a
work truck, given the third-world road
conditions and increasingly extreme climate. I
was quite impressed by my brother’s
Freelander 2 when I borrowed it for a while,
40+ mpg on turbo diesel, and a good chance of
getting from A to B without involving the AA.
On the other hand, Freelanders are slightly
boring, as well as rusting and electronically
complex.
Do I want to cruise the lumpy highways of
Britain in an anonymous fat silver blob or a
Michelotti sculpture?
How about a 2000 or a 2.5PI estate for a daily
driver? I’ve never owned one, although I did
have a cool uncle way back who flashed
around in a yellow 2000 when it was new.
132bhp, 150lbs.ft, manual with optional
(compulsory as far as I’m concerned)
overdrive. MPG could top 25, although part of
that is down to their light weight at 2700lbs.
Light weight is actually a downside for a daily
driver, as even a current Astra weights
3500lbs, and electrics weigh 4500lbs. A
collision would be painful, possibly terminal.
Also, I wouldn’t risk towing my 3500lb boat
with a 2700lb car, suicidal.
I’ve said before that running a well-maintained
classic can be cheaper than a newish car, and
as reliable. The AA says that the breakdown
rate is about the same as it was in the 1950s –
the cars’ parts may be ten times are as reliable,
but there are ten times as many parts to fail, so
you’re no further forward.
On the other hand, if I used a 4WD LR diesel
blob for long trips, I wouldn’t have to hammer
a Triumph up and down the M6 and A74. I
could drive something convertible from
Michelotti in nicer condition, kept mostly for
exploring locally and for low-pressure longer
trips. If I lived in England I could use a
Triumph for everything, but I don’t live there.
Every trip starts with 200 miles.
Okay, focus on Triumphs. How about a Stag?
Actually no, I don’t like the proportions. The
cabin is too far forwards, it looks like a cutdown
2000. The dodgy Triumph V8 in Stags
will either have been sorted out or replaced
with a Rover V8 in almost all of them by now.
I talked to one of the engineers involved in the
engine’s design, which was interesting. He
said the whole thing worked beautifully on
test, but it turned out that testing did not
Finding the right TR6 is tempting. I’m
not going to pay over twenty grand for
a trailer queen, but I would look for
something solid and usable. If it’s a
horrible colour, that’s a fine reason to
refinish and paint it. Left hand drive
also knocks a big chunk off the price.

include a partly-clagged or compromised
cooling system after a few years of use, and it
then turned out that the Triumph V8 was very
sensitive to a less than perfect cooling system.
As so often happens, the first buyers did the
road prototyping.
I do have the option to buy the gorgeous Italia
we have featured in the magazine. Perhaps the
ultimate postwar Triumph. But I can’t
legitimately buy it and enjoy it in the way I
would like. Owner Bengt spent two years
tracking down all the unobtanium trinkets and
recreating the bottom few inches of the car
before painting it in flawless silver: the Italia
is gleaming perfection. Whoever owns it next
needs to treasure and pamper it in a climatecontrolled
museum-style display cabinet, with
a few sunny-day car-meet cruises, not hammer
it up and down motorways and risk a whiteout
charging across the Pennines in winter, or for
that matter leave it in a Sainsbury’s car park to
be doored by some ill-bred pleb. While I
appreciate, and honour in the magazine those
who protect and serve and primp fine classic
cars, I’m not among their ranks.
Achieving the other potentially ultimate
postwar Triumph is also a possibility, because
it’s still occasionally possible to buy a
Triumph-based Devin in the USA as a kit car
rather than as a multi-million-dollar Scaglietti
sculpture. Bill Devin was an American kit car
maker in the 1950s and 1960s who was
reportedly a friend of Scaglietti, the Ferrari
One-off German sporting estate
conversion on a TR6 is rather
exquisite. It would take a long time to
create something like that, though.
TVR 2500M and Vixen are essentially
plakky TR6s. Fine cars, fast and fun.
Vixens looks are a little stumpy but
2500M is pretty.
designer. Scaglietti designed the 1950s race
and road Ferraris that now cost as much as a
small town, not just a village or two. Scaglietti
wasn’t going to risk upsetting Enzo by letting
Bill copy a Ferrari, but the story goes that
what he was able to do was to allow Bill to
copy one of his other minor designs, the
Ermini 1100. The Ermini company ceased
trading in 1958, and Pasquale Ermini ceased
living in 1959. This was one of the many
Italian etcerini companies that went out of
business, leaving their body designs relatively
free of copyright.
Bill stretched and shrank and fiddled with the
Ermini shape to fit various different
wheelbases and chassis, from VW Bug/Beetle
to Corvette, with a stop at Triumph in
between. The Triumph version is the most
visually happy of the Devins. The TR4-based
Devin was an impressive car: I enjoyed
watching a racetrack tussle between Corvette
and Triumph Devins, in which the V8 blasted
past the Triumph on every straight, and then
slithered round the next corner and lost its
place as the Triumph apexed smoothly past it.
The Triumph-based Devin bodies are probably
the closest to the original Scaglietti shape, as
the wheelbase and engine position would be
about right. Not many people know that a
Scaglietti-designed body can be bought as an
abandoned American kit car project for a few
thousand dollars, but if I want to do that I need
to be quick.
The chassis under a TVR is made of
simple steel tubes. They last well, but
fifty years is quite an ask. Repairs are
fairly straightforward, though.
Another related but sideways Triumph option
is the TVR 2500M or Vixen, both of which are
essentially plastic TR6s. Vixens are now silly
money, but occasionally a 2500M shows up
for a reasonable price. The Ms are more
conventional-looking TVRs of the 1970s, with
a longer bonnet, less stubby proportions and a
more professional general look. Under the
GRP skin they are the same, with a simple
tubular chassis. Fast, strong, pretty, and
actually a fine investment: their rarity,
fashionable name and good spares supply are
attracting more money these days. There are
also some Morgans with Triumph drivetrains,
and an early ‘50s flat-rad Mog has a great deal
of charm and a strong TR2 engine.
There are also plenty of interesting open
Triumph specials about, but as I’m in the
middle of building a big Bentley special,
buying a Triumph special half the size doesn’t
blow my frock up very far. Having said that, a
Vitesse-based Gentry is an improved sixcylinder
version of an MG TD or TF, and
those are pretty, fast and fairly waterproof. I
don’t have time to build one from scratch or
complete an abandoned part-finished build
with an IVA test nightmare lurking in front of
it, but a rolling light restoration of a drivable
and registered car is an option.
I’m no longer enthusiastic about most fourcylinder
engines: with the exception of the
MGB’s long-stroke V8ish grumble, the
straight-four soundtrack can be a little bland.
That six-cylinder proviso still allows the full
range of period Michelotti prettiness, though –
if you like the look of the Heralds but want a
straight six, buy a Vitesse: if you like the look
of Spitfires, buy a GT6, and if you like the
proportions of an Italia/TR4, buy a TR6.
Or mix and match. A Herald Estate body on a
Vitesse chassis would be something rather
special, maybe with a fabric sunroof from a
Herald 1200, and while we’re at it, a heavierduty
overdrive gearbox and 2500cc engine
from a TR6.
An actual TR5 or TR250 with pre-Karmann
curves is very expensive and not really good
value for a car to be used and enjoyed, but a
TR4A IRS fitted with a six is pretty well the
same car as far as I’m concerned. The steel
Surrey top option with the TR4 is also a fine
idea.
My brewing Bentley special will be very
convertible indeed, and that will do nicely for
the full-on fresh air experience.
Some say the ultimate small Triumph is a GT6
rebodied with a convertible Spitfire rear tub,
and in many ways that’s correct, but
personally I’d rather have a coupé with a
sunroof than a full convertible, and the
roofline of the GT6 is a work of art. Like the
E-Type with which it’s often compared, the
fastback tail of the hardtop GT6 looks even
better than the very pretty convertible Spitfire.
It also comes with the bonus of being a tenth
Drivetrain is pure TR6, in this case the
low-compression US spec with
Strombergs, low compression and
110bhp or so. It still has a good torque
to weight ratio though, which is all we
need for road driving.

of the price of an E-Type. A very nice rustfree
silky-engined GT6 might now cost £15,000
but that compares favourably with £150,000
for a similar E-Type. The E-type, to be fair, is
even more attractive than a GT6, but it’s not
ten times as pretty, not even twice as pretty. A
Triumph is also a lot more reliable than a
1970s Jag. The two E-Type owners I know
both endure frequent costly breakdowns.
A GT6 would have to be the later one with the
better suspension, smooth front wing tops and
facelift back end. By 1970, the profusion of
tail lights on Spits and GT6s was a mess.
A TR6 is a strong contender. It’s ridiculous
that I’ve owned two abandoned TR6 projects,
but never a drivable TR6. The asking prices
for the best ones are now well over £20,000. I
don’t know if they actually fetch that. In any
case, a perfect restored and sorted TR6 is not
going to yield many stories for this magazine,
which is a major reason for buying a Triumph.
A rolling restoration of something with a solid
chassis is probably the right move.
One of my favourite previous cars, a
1972 GT6 with a sunroof, bought slightly
bashed but not rusted. It was my daily
driver for a while, commuting between
London and Maidenhead.
The same would apply to a GT6 or a Vitesse.
It’s partly going to be a matter of waiting until
something suitable presents itself, and then
going for it.
The rear end facelift of the sports
Triumphs was a big improvement. All
the extra lights required after 1962
just added clutter.
Here’s a TR6 I should probably have
bought. It would have cost around
£11,000 after haggling, with a lot of
the right things done to it, but it
had reaction faults in the paint.
Above: this is a mess. Time for a rethink
of the whole back end.
The Vitesse could be a hybrid with an
Estate shell, 2.5 PI engine and box.
That would be something.
Left: GT6fire or Spit Six is the convertible
Spitfire tub on a GT6 chassis, with the GT6
power-bulge bonnet. Still not as pretty or
useful as the fastback shell.

Bonneville 2: the inspection
Although a lot of mechanical restoration work
has been done on this old Triumph, it’s also a
barn find, having sat in a garage for decades.
Let’s check it out and plan its future.
To backtrack a little, this 1971 Bonneville
T120Vwas bought in Canada as an
unregistered abandoned project, which last ran
properly in about 1972.
It had been bought new and ridden across the
country from Quebec to BC by a Frenchman,
and then the engine seized. Whether it was
because the Frenchman wasn’t used to the
informal total-loss oiling system typical of
British bikes, or for some other reason, we
don’t know. The oil puddles under British
bikes are usually a good clue that you need to
keep an eye on the oil level.
The Frenchman then au-revoired, leaving the
bike with the family he had been staying with
in BC. They didn’t bother with it for a long
while, but then they had a burst of energy and
got British-Italian, the bike workshop in
Vancouver, to fully rebuild the engine, with a
rebore and new pistons. That burst of energy
faded in 1998, possibly because the $2000
invoice for the complete engine overhaul –
pistons, bearings, valves, oil pump, machining
on heads, barrels and crank – came with a note
saying that the bike also needed a new
transmission. The early T120V five-speed
gearboxes were apparently a bit suspect. The
Bonneville sat around for another decade and
half until it was sold to the next owner, Gary in
Ladner near Vancouver, who bought it in 2005.
Gary stripped it, paid $1000 for a better later
secondhand 5-speed gearbox for it, had the
seat re-trimmed, changed all the cables,
replaced various bearings, clutch, shocks,
sprockets: there are some impressive invoices
in the fat envelope of paperwork that came
with the bike, totalling around $5000. Then he
painted the frame, reassembled the bike and
started it. It ran, but wouldn’t idle.
The bike wasn’t very attractive, as the gold
metalflake paint applied in 1973 tended to look
pretty rough by 1978, and very rough by 2005.
Gary nearly finished the resto and then got
sidetracked, and the Bonneville just sat. It
didn’t really need much to finish it off, but it
can be very difficult to get past the last 10% of
any long project. In 2021, Gary was deeply
into a very big kebab restoration of a 1957
Chevy, and he also had a Harley that worked,
which scratched his itch to ride a bike. Okay,
time to let the Triumph go, which is where I
came in with a fairly lowball offer.
Buying a vehicle with no registration in most
countries can descend into a nightmare of
clerkish obstruction and obfuscation: I have in
the past given up on getting a BC reg for
something old when it became a Kafkaesque
pain in the bum. In this case, the paper trail
with invoices and bills of sale went back to
1998, and the bike itself still has matching
numbers and is original and in standard trim,
so there were no complications. With all the
bumf in order and a Statutory Declaration
sworn before a notary, the registration came
through. In my case, I wasn’t too bothered
about gambling on getting a BC reg, as I
could just bring the bike with me to the UK
and import it with the bill of sale, then get a
UK registration. Not as straightforward as
importing it with a valid BC reg, but doable.
It was tempting to pile straight into sorting out
the new toy, but I got sensible about it and
decided to postpone it. I didn’t want to ride it
in Vancouver anyway, driving standards there
are very poor.
The transatlantic status of my motorcycle
licence was vague: I’ve had a full UK bike
licence since I was sixteen, but back in 2003
after emigrating to Canada, I had to take a car
driving test to get a BC licence. I didn’t take a
BC bike test. Later, that changed – you can
You’re probably not allowed to keep a
motorcycle in the sitting room unless
you’re single, or unless your wife is an
artist who sees it as a kinetic sculpture.

Stubby little silencer is okay for
Vancouver where there is no traffic
law, but I probably wouldn’t get very
far without getting a pull from the
plods in the UK. These are rusty
anyway, and new Triumph
peashooters are easily available.
The engine has not really been run for more than a few moments since it was rebuilt in
1998, but usefully, you can instantly check the compressions of a motorcycle engine
with the kickstarter pedal. This engine feels pretty good.*
The carbs will need to be stripped and
rebuilt with fresh gaskets, and some
ancient crud needs to be poked out of
the interior passages on the idle
circuit.
“It’s possible that the Dunlop on
the front goes back to 1971.”
now just exchange a UK licence for a BC
licence. In which case my bike licence would
be valid. You can also insure and get plates on
a bike in BC even if you have no licence at all
– it’s not checked. I’d bet half the shiny
poseur Harleys selfishly blattering around the
place at midnight with wide open exhaust
pipes don’t have qualified riders, or for that
matter, valid insurance: if you have no driving
licence, you have no insurance cover either.
The lack of traffic law around Vancouver was
the other reason for not wanting to ride a bike.
It’s a jungle, with extreme speeding,
selfishness and homicidal stupidity rife: I only
felt safe there when driving an 8000lb
campervan, and you think twice about driving
a sports car or a Mini. A bike? Around the
block maybe, but not out among the morons
driving around Vancouver. In Scotland on
quiet rural roads with - relatively - civilised
and competent British driving, now and again,
on a nice day, that’s worth the risk.
Back to the bike, and it’s not ready to use
anyway. The refusal to idle will be a blocked
idle circuit fuel opening in one of the carbs,
which need a strip and overhaul with new seals
and gaskets. Not a big deal. The tyres are shot,
with cracks in the sidewalls. There is no bill
for new tyres in the envelope, so it’s possible
that the Dunlop on the front goes all the way
back to 1971. The rear tyre is Chinese, and
also cracked. You can move the bike on the
doomed tyres, and you could potter it around
the block, but no more than that.
The fork seal on the right is leaking, something
you would expect from long disuse. Only a set
of seals, but quite a big job to strip the front
end right down.
Scotchloks in the wiring system.
These nasty little bodges are about
as popular among proper mechanics
as Kaposi’s Sarcoma.
The right hand fork/shock is slowly
leaking fluid, so it will need a strip
and new seals.

The tyres have not only cracked and
died of old age, but the rear one is
labelled Cheng Shin, not a revered
name in tyre technology.
The seat has new foam and a new skin.
Good for another fifty years.
The rear mudguard has already been
repainted, so doing it again and
better is fine. Modern base and clear
with some period-style metalflake
will look better than new.
Original manufacturers’ workshop
manuals are usually the best option,
and usefully they came with the bike.
After a visit to Baldeep at Dependable
Plating in Burnaby, the original
handlebars are looking better than new.
The front mudguard is also in the same
skanky original paint, but the black
and the pinstripes are fine: always
good to be looking at 1971 rather than
2023, as paint is only original once.
7 Current handlebars are rusty and a
bit bent, but the bike came to me with
the original American-style bars as
well.
Rust and cracking along the inside
of the tank doesn’t look good. The
tank might need more work before
slosh coating.
“These nasty little bodges are about
as popular with proper mechanics as
Kaposi’s Sarcoma.”

The dent on the tank is difficult to see, but you could certainly feel it. With new and
shiny gold metalflake paint, it would have become painfully obvious. Old JB Weld
repairs are not holding up well.
There are pages of Gary’s records of
the resto work he carried out. This is
interesting as well as being useful
history, and it tells you about the
methodical quality of his work on the
bike.
Bikes made before 1973 can have
black and white plates with small
64mm lettering in the UK: I might
leave the original BC plate in place
and fit the Brit plate above it.
The hot glue extraction technique
pulls the dent almost out, while
tapping delicately around the crease.
Good as new. The gold and the
pinstripes will be renewed, but the
original 1971 black sections of paint
can be cut back, clearcoated and
saved.
*Story: 1970s, I’m 16, weighing about 110lbs with a 24” waist. Somebody
invites me to take a ride on a Vincent HRD, but when I go to start it, I just
bounce off the kickstarter, even with the valve-lifter pulled. Okay, put it in
second, hold in the clutch, push the monster along the gutter, get it rolling
and run along on the pavement beside it, then leap on top and dump the
clutch. Pop, roar and away we go. Once it’s running I’m the boss. Yay,
memorable ride: those magnificent beasts are actually worth the £40,000
they cost nowadays, and are only bested by a Brough Superior.

100 years of Monte Carlo
TR6 waits to be waved off at the start of the rally. The Thompson/Brisbane team have
promised Triumph Tales a report
The now very historic Monte Carlo Rally is
celebrated by two levels of re-runs. The more
hardcore option is the Historique, a fairly
demanding overall timed run with regularity
Time/Speed/Distance sections. These TSD events
are also known as divorce rallies. The other
Monte re-run option is the Classique, which
wasn’t running in 2024. That would be more of a
tour.
The organising authority is still the Automobile
Club de Monaco after a hundred years, which is a
very fine thing.
The original rally back in the day was started from
various locations, and one of these was Glasgow.
There is a Scottish organisation that exists to
support the Scottish rally start location, and this
group is the Monte Start Committee, www.monte.
scot. The Ecosse Rallye Drivers Club is the same
people, and that exists to support the Monte
organisation with related classic car runs and
meets during the year.
It's becoming more and more difficult to organise
live motoring events in cities, as cars in general
are becoming a very unfashionable concept. The
Committee members are to be congratulated for
organising the event from Blythswood Square in
the centre of Glasgow: even with the 100th
anniversary of a major historical competition
carrying some weight, the city council must have
taken some persuading. It would be a shame to
lose the central Glasgow start, but as there are
only a few cars leaving from there, it could always
be started from a central Glasgow hotel car park
on private land, and city officials need not be
involved if motorsport events become too
politically unfashionable. Luckily, all the cars
involved are ULEZ permitted classics, as the
latest build date allowed is 1982.
Entry applications from owners of earlier and
more interesting cars are more likely to please the
organisers. As the rally entries are oversubscribed,
it might also help with getting a place if you were
to choose to start from Glasgow: it’s the most
hardcore option, with a 485-mile drive to Dover
on the first day.
There’s also the option to start from other historyfriendly
cities in Europe, and those are Bad
Homburg in Germany, Reims in France and
Milano in Italy. The structure of the rally includes
fairly easily achieved passage controls with
timings that allow drivers to complete the day
without breaking any speed limits. There are
penalties for getting speeding tickets, as road rally
touring needs to be seen to be responsible in order
to be allowed to keep happening. The time/speed/
distance element is in smaller sections within the
rally.
The Scottish pre-start day involved scrutineering
and a “wiggle-waggle” test, a driving skills event
traditional to early Monte Carlo rallies, as part of
the competition. This was held at Loch Lomond,
an attractive location and well worth a visit
anyway.
The actual start at Blythswood Square in central
Glasgow involved some ceremony, with the
Historique cars waved off one by one with a
stopwatch and a Saltire flag. They just have to get
to Dover that day, and within speed limits, so
precision-timing the start of each car to a specific
second just adds an element of drama and fun.
This first day would actually be the hardest day’s
travel with nearly 500 miles to Dover, along
crowded and potholed English roads with
motorway jams and the nightmare M25. Not too
The Ecosse Rallye Drivers Club is the
Scottish arm of the Monte Carlo Historic,
and it runs related events as well.
www.monte.scot

Mini Cooper’s twin carbs get some attention in the hour before setting off.
The first car would roll out at exactly 8.30, but the organisers and marshals were out in
force from well before dawn.
First car arrives in Blythswood Square. It had a support van, which is a bit flash. Packing
everything into a 911 would take some thinking.
tiring in a sorted TR6, but it would be quite hard
going in a replica works Mini Cooper. Depending
on the passage locations, it might be wise to make
some initial progress speedwise on the usually
clear and tax-camera-light Scottish motorways.
This year, after the regrouping at Dover, the
Calais overnight stop was the Chateau de Cocove,
a four-star hotel – no need for slumming it after a
hard day’s drive - and the second stop was at
Reims, where the scrutineering for French cars
would already have taken place. Langres and Gap
were the next stops, and of course there was
mountain action over the Alps before reaching
Monaco and the black tie banquet. Packing your
DJ and cufflinks into the car in Glasgow does add
an element of style. The final day was a mountain
circuit from previous Monte rallies, and lunch at
the top of the Col de Turini.
The cost this year was £450 per person, obviously
based on a driver and navigator in each car. That
includes a night at the four-star Chateau and two
nights in the 5-star Fairmont in Monaco, and the
gala dinner at the Automobile Club de Monaco.
Have to say, this is tempting and the cost looks
like very good value indeed.
The editorial 1947 Bentley is not only eligible,
but absolutely spot on: in 1949, “gentleman
driver” Mike Couper entered a MkVI Bentley,
nicely run in after 4000 miles from new, in that
year’s Monte Carlo rally.
“Like the Monte Carlo rallies of old, the
purpose is to get to Monaco in time for
the party.”
This year there were 244 entries accepted to the
Monte re-run, which makes this a pretty major
event. The black-tie banquet in Monaco therefore
involves some 500 people.
Cars entered in the Historique proper must be
prepared to FIA Appendix K for historic rallying,
which means they replicate the Works cars of
their period in terms of tech spec, but with some
safety updates. You need a roll cage, plumbed fire
extinguishing system, exterior electrics cutout
switch, high-back safety seats and a full FIA
harness. You also need to check that you have
more than 3 months left on your passport, and
must have the car’s V5 and your driving licences
and insurance docs on board. Your car must have
been built between 1924 and 1982. Again the
more exotic, ancient and entertaining cars stand a
better chance of getting a place on the event.
Among the Glasgow starters were a pair of Alans,
Brisbane and Thompson, in a TR6, who promised
to report on the event for the Triumph Tales
section of the magazine. Right before the start,
they suffered an alarming puddle of coolant that
suddenly appeared under the radiator, but it
turned out just to be a matter of having over-filled
the cooling system during final checks.

Dawn breaks and final fettling continues. TR6 has to be a fine
car for historic rallying: strong, fast and comfy.

A TR6 is perfect for this sort of historic event.
Reasonably civilised and not too tiring over long
stages, particularly if fitted with overdrive;
powerful enough to more than keep up; reliable
under hard use if well prepared; stylish and
pleasing to look at and use; and because there is a
long Works rallying history with the TR2/3/4/5/6
chassis, we can buy exactly the right
reinforcement plates to toughen it up for a
hammering.
As well as the pair of Alans, there was also a pair
of doctors: we got chatting to Dr Neil Oliver (no,
not that one) and Dr Alistair Gair in their
convincing Volvo 121. Turns out that Neil likes
brewing up monster specials with Rolls engines,
so there will be more chat with him for sure. They
will just be enjoying the event for fun, as they had
no interest in winning it or even collecting any
prizes at the banquet: their plan was just to finish
the event and enjoy it, so that is the likely
outcome. Some people have a tendency to
approach anything with an element of competition
perhaps too intensely to get much fun out of it, but
horses for courses.
Other notables were a French team in a Renault
Alpine, who had elected to start their rally in
Scotland because the French and Italian starts
made the rally too short and too easy. They
showed up the day before with stripy pullovers
and berets, and their car horn played the
Marseillaise, so that went down very well in
Scotland, celebrating the Auld Alliance between
Scotland and France. (There is a still-valid treaty
since 1295 between Scotland and France which
requires both to come to each other’s aid when
attacked by the English.)
If stopped for speeding on this rally, you lose
points, but speeding Scots who identify
themselves as such in France can sometimes get a
better result in dealing with French traffic police
than speeding Englishmen. (“Anglais? Non! Je
suis Ecossais.”) I was once accused of being a
“raciste” by a French cop over that, but he didn’t
give me a ticket.
WireWheelsMagazine hereby authorises English
readers to claim Scottish nationality if stopped for
speeding in France. In the same way that a great
many Americans pretend they’re Canadian when
abroad. You’re welcome.
This Monte rerun really looks like a fine event,
with the extra cachet of the Monte Carlo history.
Keep up with it at www.monte.scot
Rude remarks about a careless Range Rover
Sport. That name is rather a contradiction
in terms: whatever a Range Rover Sport is
used for, it’s not sport.
Rather full-on Austin-Healey looking
smart and purposeful.
The competitors arrive and are shepherded
into the square to line up for the start.
No worries, it had just been overfilled
and was relieving itself of the excess.
MG YA looks prewar, but that’s actually just
the body. It was an early adopter of
independent suspension and rack steering,
and is a lot more modern than it looks.
French team with an Alpine drove up to
Glasgow to make their rally trip 1000
miles longer. That was a bonne idée.
Oops! A puddle of coolant under the
TR6 radiator causes some alarm. This
is ten minutes before the start.
It’s all good. The sorted TR6 waits to slot
into its place in the queue. Each car has
its own start time.
YA has an XPAG 1250cc engine, which
powered postwar MGs until 1955. No great
powerhouse, but reliable and revvy.

Two doctors in a Volvo. Excellent rally
cars, tough and very reliable. The medics
head for the exit gate and the rally start.
The Chateau de Cocove in Normandy is
the first overnight. Nobody is
slumming it here.
Crossing the Alps in February? There
will be snow.
Twelve cars set off from the Glasgow
start, out of the 244 cars that comprise
the whole rally. The Glasgow boys will
be a cool minority. Real Cooper S is
Monte Carlo royalty. The Mini Coopers
didn’t just win the Monte Carlo, they
owned it.
There will also be some spectacular
scenery, guaranteed. There may
even be time for photographs.
Some quite financially accessible cars
have been rallied on the Monte Carlo,
which is useful if you can’t afford an
Austin-Healey.
You can’t really charge off laying
rubber, as it’s a rush-hour weekday city
centre with a 30mph speed limit. 485
miles to the Dover ferry comes next.
Scottish-built Hillman Imps offer another
affordable option, and once the front
boot is loaded they handle quite well.
With generic cooling problems sorted,
they also go well.
100 years since the first Monte
Carlo rally is quite an important
marker post in motorsport
history.

“…it would be reasonable to expect an Automatic Enrichment Device to
also not work on a Rolls.”
At this stage of the build, the focus was a matter
of making theoretically designed things work in
practice. The Rolls was rolling, the hubs had been
machined by Adam Trinder to fit the knockoff
wire wheels, and the car was pushable and
steerable.
Any major car build goes in a
series of fits and starts. The
Wraith was on its feet relatively
quickly, but some aspects of it
took a long time with little
visible progress.
II
The brakes were quite a big challenge, as they
were to be modernised with vacuum boost rather
than the old mechanical servo system. This turned
out to be a mistake. It looked as though it would
be cheaper than rebuilding the Rolls braking
system with the very expensive RR parts prices,
No apologies for more pics of Adam
Trinder’s gorgeous custom stainless exhaust
manifold, a work of engineering art.
The manifold ended up sticking out too far
and fouled the bonnet side, but Al liked the
idea of a riveted bulge to make room for it,
so that’s what I did.
but the brutal invoices from Robert Maynard for
working on a semi-modernised braking system
ended up being much more expensive than a
rebuild of the standard system, even with the very
high Rolls-Royce parts prices.
This period of Rolls was designed during World
War II, interestingly showing a mix of pre-and
post-war thinking. The front brakes are hydraulic,
with the master cylinder pressures boosted by a
mechanical servo on the side of the gearbox. The
back brakes are completely mechanical, and aft of
the brake pedal they are a separate system. So
even if the newfangled, ultramodern and
experimental 1946 hydraulic part of the system
fails, the rear brakes remain purely mechanical
and fully functional. They’re not connected to the
hydraulic part of the braking system at all. If the
hydraulics fail, you still have the back brakes at
full efficiency. Mixing and matching modern and
old components is tricky, though, and Adam’s
experimental work at this point was superseded
later by new designs that completely separated the
function of the handbrake from the brake pedal:
you can’t have a handbrake that pressurises a
hydraulic system, it has to be mechanical only.
But there is only one rod that operates the rear
brakes, so there had to be sliding couplings that
allowed both the handbrake and the footbrake to
operate the same rod without interfering with each
other. Again, the standard braking system already
achieves this.
The Rolls/Bentley brake system of the 1950s is
actually very effective, and will lock up the
wheels quite easily. The lesson learned is to
restore the original system and leave it alone, not
to waste money on trying to update it.
As the car is a pure speedster, with a half screen
and only a poppered-on tonneau cover for weather
gear, it’s also totally insecure, wide open for
thieving. I designed in a couple of lockers in the
rear bulkhead, secured by keys. These lockers are
also hidden behind the seat back, which tips
forward for access.
The gear gate is rather fun. It’s actually just
cosmetic, it doesn’t do anything at all in the way
of guiding the gear lever, although it is functional,
in that the reverse lockout is mounted on it. The
gear change challenge was that the Wraith was
originally left hand drive – the chassis number is
LWHD84, left hand drive Silver Wraith no. 84. It
therefore had a column gearchange, which is
always complex, rarely works well, and was in
any case long gone. All that was left of the

selector arrangements was the stump of a selector
rod sticking out of the wrong side of the gearbox.
When I started designing a gear change at the
conceptual level, I realised that the functionality
of the main selector rod actually hadn’t changed.
It revolved in the forwards and backwards
dimension, and moved in and out. So I saw no
reason why I couldn’t just attach a sturdy gear
lever strongly to the rod, run it over the top of the
gearbox into a handy position, bend it up at the
right angle and just use it like that. In the end, that
worked a treat: the gear change is very direct,
light, slick and positive.
Rebuilding the carbs was necessary because
ethanol in current fuels eats older gasket material,
and if your exhaust is on the same side of the
engine as the carbs, that means a possible fire.
The Rolls carbs are straightforward old SUs, with
the only potential complication being the AED, an
automatic choke mechanism fitted on the air
Adam turned up a cool brass gearknob,
which would later be replaced by a wooden
one in dash-matching maple and in a more
period-correct style.
The braking system on the MKVI/Silver
Wraith is part mechanical, part hydraulic and
boosted by a mechanical servo. Adam is
under my MkVI Bentley which uses the same
system, to make sense of it and copy/adapt it
for the Wraith.
intake. This is a thing that rarely works on old
Jags, so it would be reasonable to expect an
Automatic Enrichment Device to also not work on
a Rolls. I left the mechanism and casing in place,
as some future originality fetishist may wish to
fiddle with it, but the flap inside the tube is now
connected to a simple choke cable pull on the
dash, so you can choke the engine for the first
hundred yards and then push the knob back in,
saving fuel and bore wear from too rich a mixture:
autochokes always stay on too long, if and when
they are working.
The seat back is designed to fold forwards
to revealed secure lockers in the rear
bulkhead. The bulkhead at this stage is just
a thick sheet of aluminium.
The Ferrari-style gear gate isn’t actually
functional as a guiding gate, but the bottom
of the gear lever looked a little weird, so I
created a visual distraction by putting the
gate above it.
The mechanical servo boosts the hydraulic
front brakes, but the rear brakes and hand
brake are purely mechanical.
Ancient Automatic Enrichment Devices on the
intake aren’t going to work any better on old
Bentley engines than they did on Jags. It was
bypassed: a manual choke cable works every
time, and can be used sparingly, just until the
engine runs smoothly.
The lockers are quite a decent size, and
invisible. The car is an open speedster with
a half screen and a pop-off tonneau cover,
so there is no security at all.
This is a Dynamator, a cool British-made
alternator that has been made to look like
an old-school dynamo. It comes optionally
with a fake external control box, which a
real dynamo would need. The fake control
box could store spare points and
condenser, or a spare key.
The carbs needed a rebuild, if only to replace
the seals and gaskets with newer materials
that won’t be eaten by horrible modern fuels.
Inspiration and lessons being taken from Colin
Gurnsey’s handsome MkVI special, which has
turned out to be a fine car.

Cheats
Cheats
Colin’s hand-made three-post windscreen in
chromed brass looks very good, but the
outer posts, although actually vertical, don’t
look vertical: they needed to slope inwards
to look right.
The Wraith was originally owned by the
British actor Sebastian Cabot.
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Bullingdon Club... but then so are most people.
So, a while back the Olympics rolled around
again, with the usual evictions of poor people
to build new stadia and athlete hostels, with
the usual comically incompetent
underestimations of the huge debts that will
be left behind, and with the usual cheating on
an industrial scale by assorted countries.
I don’t know how many Olympic entrants are
cheating, but it will be quite a lot. The real
Prize-winning 1938 MG with its 1980s resto,
and 1950s TC or TD or possibly Wolseley
4/44 engine at a Vancouver show, beside a
real historic treasure – the first TA, therefore
the first ever poor man’s MG.
winners will sometimes be quite far down the
pack, if you discount the chemically assisted
cheats at the front. I guess the real winners
know whether they’re genuinely faster than
the cheats.
I’ve never understood cheating at amateur
sports, where there’s nothing real to gain. In
business and life in general, cheats end up
wealthy: for instance they end up in banks,
writing “bonus” cheques to themselves despite
2008-style performance. You have to pay the
big money to get the best bankers, they say:
let’s put the cleaners in charge, then. They
couldn’t do a worse job, could they?
Cheats even get to run the USA – just think
back to Florida and the pro-Bush cheating
judge, and later on, the voting boundary
thieving, racist voter suppression and
projectile-vomiting of lies that cheated the
current incumbent in.
But Olympic cheating is knowingly stealing
somebody else’s medal, which doesn’t make
any sense. It’s instantly worthless.* For some
people, knowing that they’re the strongest or
the fastest or whatever is important. But if
anybody’s cheating, the order of cheats and
honest competitors going past the finish line is
meaningless. If all cheating were of the same
quality, that would provide a level playing
field. As it were. But it’s not. There’s
competition between the bent doctors as well,
and a cheat can’t know if his bent doctor is the
best bent doctor or not. The real winner might
really have been in tenth place because he (or
she, cheating is ungendered) didn’t use a bent
doctor. But with only the legally allowed
performance drugs pulsing through their veins,
the real winner might come in behind nine
cheats.
Perhaps the way to go is to scrap all doping
rules and have the bent doctors and the cheats

cheating openly as a team, so the best combo
of crack-based injections and exercise achieves
a genuine win.
However, notwithstanding the above, I no
longer resent Olympics, because one of my
nicest friends, who lives stratospherically
above the grubby worlds of sport and politics,
had a lovely time volunteering in the
Vancouver Olympics, and if that meant I had
to pay a bit more into Vancouver parking
meters to help pay off the massive hidden
Olympic debt on her behalf, so be it.
In the realm of motor racing, I can see that
Formula 1’s blend of cheating and marketing
makes sense, as there’s very big money in it.
However, I can’t see the sense in cheating by
amateurs who pay to race cars on weekends.
Automatically, if you won by cheating you
didn’t win at all, you just sneaked your car in
front of the real winner in what looked like a
win – but it was a fake. You lost, really, and
you know it.
Here’s a prize with some value: Fastest Time of
the Day, Other Marques, at a Jag/MG club
slalom. I drove fast to win that, and didn’t cheat at
all. But to be honest, which is the whole point of
the current story, I was going to win FTD anyway
as I was the only Other Marque competing.
The increasingly dodgy “honours” provided
by English prime ministers are similarly of a
value that is variable according to how they’re
won. If you make a big and genuine
contribution to British community life in
business, export, charitable or cultural areas
for fifty years and get a gong, then you really
are Sir or Lady Whoever. If you just bunged
some grubby cabinet whore a few hundred
grand to buy a knighthood, you’re not really a
Sir and you know it.
I’m disabled for car racing because I don’t
really mind if somebody else is in front,
although I do love my track time. I’m
thinking about setting up a WireWheels
Sporting Drivers’ Club or something like it,
just to organise track days and slaloms. The
track days won’t have winners, but the
slaloms will, so there will be cheating. Does it
matter? Don’t know. If there are no rules
other than wearing a helmet and signing a
liability waiver, it would hard to cheat without
wearing a papier-maché crash helmet and
signing your name as Donald Dirt. What I
might do is engrave Fake Olympic Formula
One Overall Dodgy Winner awards, which
can be bought with a bribe to a local charity.
But I will want to see the receipt.
Winning a car show or concours competition
with a car you have merely paid money for
also strikes me as odd. If you built, or
restored, or commissioned and closely
orchestrated your own car build, you know
intimately how good it is, and how it
compares with the others of its type at a show.
If you just bought somebody else’s finished
car, it’s not really your achievement anyway,
so why would you be entering other people’s
work in a competition? That would be like
employing Lance Armstrong to win a
pushbike race for you and then collecting the
prize. And if he cheated, the prize would be
doubly worthless.
One of my pre-war car chums was bitching
about the misjudgment of his car at a local
show, where the judge is just a club bloke
who likes old cars. What’s that prize worth,
then? Why do you want it? Those who really
deeply know that marque and model of car
have an opinion worth listening to. Those who
don’t, don’t. Red paint is very important, too
– red gets you a big advantage in concours
and in selling as well.
My own 1938 MG TA came to me with a box
of 2 nd and 3 rd prizes from the local British car
show, but it didn’t deserve them. The
restoration was shiny and red but superficial
and poor, and the carpet was nailed down
over the master cylinder, so it wasn’t intended
to be driven ever again, just trailered to
shows. It took major work on the worn-out
and/or butchered mechanicals before the car
was fit to drive again. I don’t need any
additional 3 rd prizes, so I never entered the
MG in any shows. I did accept an invite to
show it at the local Jag/MG club’s big show,
because the TA represented pre-war MG
history and this was an MG anniversary, and
because they are nice people who always
invited our Mini club to join in when they ran
their slaloms, so I supported them. If there
had been any competition in the pre-war
class, it would have been between my shiny
bastardised dog with its wrong engine, and
the first ever MG TA – literally the first ever
poor-man’s MG, unique and fascinatingly
original. If I had “won” it would have been
slightly embarrassing.**
1947 MkVI Bentley was a straight swap for the red pre-war MG, ten years back in
Canada. A fair deal, as they were worth about the same, although the TA would be
easier to sell. Since then, it has been a reliable and pleasing member of the family.
I have an acquaintance who lost at Pebble
Beach. Without being specific, I knew he
wasn’t going to win a concours d’elegance
prize at Pebble as soon as I saw the line-up on
the lawn, because he was putting restrained
low-key navy-blue British elegance up against
colourful (red) chrome-plated French
flashiness, and the word ‘elegance’ in the
American English dialect does not have the
same meaning in English English.
Is red paint cheating? You tell me.
*There is a cash value to an Olympic medal,
although the “gold” medals are actually just
plated. How apt. There is no intrinsic value in
a medal won by cheating. Might as well buy a
replica for £14.95.
**This issue became redundant before the
Jag/MG show in question, as I swapped the
MG for my 1947 Bentley. So it was the TA’s
next owner Helen Poon who had to hang
around between 10am and 3pm. Don’t know if
she won a prize with it, I forgot to ask.

The Captain’s Blog
is a weekly Sunday evening rabbit published on
the WireWheelsMagazine.com website.
The magazine itself is published bimonthly,
because that allows a civilised pace of life, and
time to edit and hone stories.
WireWheels is published digitally because the
economics of printing car mags is a death spiral,
even if it’s printed in Singapore on bogroll and a
fat shelf fee is paid to WHSmith.
The world is not bimonthly, with life hurtling past
at a most undignified pace, and we think you
deserve a weekly opportunity to skive off from all
that and escape briefly into our castor-oil-scented,
spoked and leather-trimmed world.
When Ayrspeed was orchestrating the build of the
Levit Rolls-Royce Special, a weekly progress log
was written for Al in Chicago every Sunday
evening, accompanied by a nice glass of
Bowmore or Laphroaig. Smokehead gets a look-in
too. Okay, they’re not nice as such, but they are
pleasing. That tradition continued after the car
was finished and delivered.
Accordingly, consider yourself invited.
THE ARCHIVE
All WireWheelsMagazine issues
at the click of a mouse
SOCIAL MEDIA
Not much point in this, frankly, as the information on
the website is the same. But hey.
Facebook - The WireWheels Magazine FB page is
live.
Instagram is in development.
X No twitter feed. Funding one oligarch is enough.
YOUTUBE CHANNEL
WireWheelsTelevision is in development
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Click on the MORE button for more pics...
Below left: Chris Hollier’s cool fake vintage van; no
room for it in his Delage story.
Below: The WireWheels/Ayrspeed stable yields
many stories and pics.
Right: there’s never enough room in the mag to
publish all the good pics that have been taken.
MORE
Can you have some more pics? Absolutely. The
magazine structure imposes a limit on the number
of pics and caps in each story, but the MORE
button takes you to the many additional good
pictures and captions not used on the mag pages.
“Please sir, I want some more”

In the next issue.....
TR6 Ian to Iain
The new Triumph Tales project is
rough but rust-free
The Delage Delusion
A British special with a Gallic flavour
in French Blue
Silver Wraith build part VIII
Dashboards and dashpots: woodwork
and carb rebuilds
A Family Affair
Entertaining Spitfire resto, personalised
rather than restomodded
Mini Marcos build part 4
Instrument choices and trial assembly
The 70-year service
It’s wise to clean out your Bentley diff
at least every 70 years
TR6 is a fine tool for classic rally
reruns such as the Monte Carlo.
Plus:
Roadtrip, Images, a Triumph
special, Off Topic, L’Ayre du Temps