Archive for Items Categorized 'Automobiles', only excerpts shown, click title for full entry.

The MG Century: 100 Years—Safety Fast!

by David Knowles

A really fine, wide-ranging book by an authoritative writer who has unearthed a few new morsels; If you put MG out of your mind decades ago, it’s time to wake up and realize the brand is now “the export pinnacle of one of the world’s largest carmakers.”

Maserati 450S: A Bazooka from Modena

by Walter Bäumer and Jean-François Blachette

Super expensive, hard to handle, engine power that overwhelmed the chassis, sexy Fantuzzi coachwork. Built to suit the upcoming racing regs it became obsolete a few years later when they changed. So few were made you may never see—or hear, a real treat—one.

We Were the Ramchargers: Inside Drag Racing’s Legendary Team, 2nd Ed.

by Dave Rockwell

Passionate auto engineers don’t leave their day jobs behind in their free time but few went as deep into pro motorsports as this bunch of Chrysler engineers. The author, a Ramcharger himself, interviewed more than 40 team members, competitors, and track operators.

Road Hogs

Detroit’s Big, Beautiful Luxury Performance Cars of the 1960s and 1970s

by Eric Peters

The combination of book title and cover photo—a car so big it spills off the page—is clever! Author Peters refers, rightly, to the big cars of those years as “totems of a different America” and his book as “a funeral dirge.”

Ed Pink, The Old Master

by Ed Pink with Bones Bourcier

There was a time, before crew chiefs, when engine builders were as famous as the star drivers because they saw to every aspect of a car’s performance. Having built thousands of engines, at 92, Pink has finally called it quits.

Baillon Collection

by Rémi Dargegen

Looked at one car at a time, the Baillon Collection is interesting enough but it is the unique circumstances of it being found and brought to market that will forever make it the “find of the century.”

The Race to the Future: The Adventure That Accelerated the Twentieth Century

by Kassia St. Clair

Automobiles, electric lights, wireless telegraphy, the first synthetic plastic—everything is changing all at once. Ironic: The 8000-mile drive in 1907 from Peking to Paris happened at the same time newspapers touted “the triumph of the horse.”

Honda/Acura NSX: Honda’s Original Supercar

by Brian Long

Conceived as “the everyday supercar” the NSX delivered, often enough besting the higher-priced competition. The press and engineering folk loved it, the buying public not so much.

The Diesel Odyssey of Clessie Cummins

by C. Lyle Cummins Jr.

Cummins is not only the name behind the ubiquitous Cummins Diesel truck engine but also a world speed and endurance record holder. Readers with historical awareness will recognize in the publisher’s name a clever homage to Sadi Carnot, the brilliant young French scientist who is considered the father of thermodynamics.

Tales of Studebaker, The Early Years

by Jan B Young

Thirty-eight historical vignettes from Studebaker’s earliest years provide a look at life in America 1852 to 1930 and the then-nascent automobile industry and more.

Morgan – An English Enigma: The Vintage and Classic Years

by Martyn Webb

Plenty has been written about the anachronistic cars, now in their 115th year of production. What sets this book apart is that the author is the company archivist and that many of the hundreds of photos have never been published before.

NSU, The Complete Story

by Mick Walker

From knitting machines in 1873—by way of bicycles, motorcycles, and cheap but well-built small cars—to the futuristic, luxurious, world-class Wankel-engined Ro 80 passenger car in 1967 (that year’s European “Car of the Year” and also unofficial Car of the Decade) NSU was one of Germany’s pioneering manufacturers.

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