OTbF -- Specials I have built
- From: Andre Jute <fiultra@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2007 15:18:18 -0800 (PST)
John Byrns <byrnsj@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I given his auto racing background, I'm
sure Andre could set you straight on the meaning of "special" in this
context.
Regards,
John Byrns
A "special" is a hodgepodge car, built from the pieces of several, or
from a subset of the pieces of one car when it is turned to a purpose
not catered for by the original designer. An American hotrod of the
1932 Ford type and similar is now an over-the-counter series
production "special" of very limited imagination. A Bentley MK VI
special such as I used to build (go to
http://members.lycos.co.uk/fiultra/THE%20WRITER%20Andre%20Jute.html
and scroll halfway down the page to Designing and Constructing Special
Cars to see one) is an upmarket and rarer version of the older
American concept of a hotrod, which was recycling an old car's
mechanicals and chassis when the body rusted away. Today the concept
is pretty loose; I designed some huge 155mph (180mph without the
socially responsible speed governor chip...) fourwheel drive desert
cars for Arab princes that were called "specials" by the guy who built
them, to distinguish them from "series" cars that he catalogued and
built to order.
The British have always had specials in a certain kind of racing, hill
climb trials, and the Americans had open-wheelers named "Special" in
Indy-style racing, one belonging to Bill Vukovich for instance. But in
general, a modified racing car, regardless of the extent of the
modifications, all the way up to turning it into an entirely different
class of car, is usually called "modified" until the regulators catch
on at which time it is called "excluded" unless your lawyers are
fleetfooted in which case it might be merely temporarily "suspended"
while you bandy words with the stewards.
An example of a car that might be considered "special" by American
hotrodders was my racing Healeys, which was generally a Healey 3000
with a Chrysler Hemi engine shoehorned in and better brakes and
suspension mods to ease the handling when the car's marginal
roadholding ran out. Oh, and a hardtop. We were, on legal advice, very
careful to describe it merely as a "modified saloon" and my lawyers
argued successfully that it could by the regulations be entered in the
super-saloon class (It has a roof, see?), where of course I
slaughtered all the guys in real saloons; for the rest of you, a
saloon is a sedan. Of course, by winning so often in these crude
"specials" I soon moved up to a dealer and then a factory team, and
then I became old enough to get a license to drive on the public roads
and started being interested in girls, and the factory provided hot
and cold running mechanics who didn't require my assistance, and after
that I didn't return to specials for fifteen years.
Mmm, that's not quite the full story. At college I had a BMW Isetta, a
bubblecar usually fitted with a smallish motorcycle engine, which we
fitted up with an early-series Jaguar V12 engine (don't ask what
happened to the rest of the car...) on rails at an angle out the back;
at the rear of the rails were wheelies because when you put your right
foot down the front wheels lifted off the ground and the wheels on the
rails crashed down on the road to stop the whole car backflipping
(that's how I lost the first two we built -- the third and fourth were
convertibles and I didn't fancy dragging my head along the road). It
was very fast in a straight line (4s 0-60, 100mph under 8s) but didn't
steer and accelerate at the same time... Alzo, full disclosure, at
about that time too I built for the father of a girlfriend a set of
rails with Topolino body and a spare Allison V12 aero engine from my
racing boat. Now that was *special*, with a bonnet nine feet long! It
chewed differentials, of course, and eventually we fitted a truck unit
and detuned the engine to "only" 800bhp and fitted double rear wheels
to stop the tyres burning out everytime someone was enthusiastic with
the hot pedal; then it worked beautifully on a two-speed automatic
gearbox imported from Germany where that box was going into fast buses
(and earth movers, I seem to remember). I remember the sensation when
the owner and his wife drew up at the club in that monster on a dress-
up night... Aw, hell, I can't remember all the specials I built even
in my fallow period: an MGA with a Chevy mouse motor for my brother
just sprang to mind...and a Porsche 356 cabriolet with a Chevy mouse
in a box amidships for a girlfriend who promptly wrapped it all the
way around a concrete pole so that the number plates
kissed...and...and...
The Allison, incidentally, was a *wonderful* engine, as hydroplane and
offshore big boat racers both appreciated. I had three Allisons in my
final Gordon's Bay racer, and the entire engine installation weighed
not much over two tons (not counting the gearboxes). An Allison would
put out one horsepower per pound in standard trim, and then the
induction could be double-charged until two horsepower per pound was
available with relative safety, more if you didn't mind the occasional
brush with shrapnel. To give you an idea of how good it was even in
base trim, for little more than twice the weight of a big block Chevy
or Ford you got four times the horsepower, around 1300 shaft bhp. The
only engine that came near it was the Merlin, which was godawfully
complicated, with twice the number of parts of an Allison. People who
say American engines are "crude" are just envious of the simplicity of
genius -- they never understand that all those bright engineers work
very hard to make things simple. And back in the 1960s an Allison was
cheap; you could order up as many as you wanted from surplus for what
the supercharger would now cost... A Merlin engine cost the national
debt of a medium-sized country; one of my editors bought one and
fitted it on rails out the front of a Morris Minor -- because Bill
Townsend, the designer of the 1960s-70s Aston Martins, told him the
Minor had admirable front suspension! It did, very pure in motion
because Alec Issigonis was a humanist and an artist, but it also had
no brakes worth mentioning in the same breath as even a hundred
horsepower, never mind into the thousands...
After my years of experience, and lots of deep thought on the subject,
I have concluded that a proper special must be defined as a car for
which at least one custom adaptor plate has to be made, though not
necessarily in the drivetrain.
And of course the one that didn't get built: swapping a reliable
engine into my Citroen SM coupe to replace the wretched Maserati V6
which had been so carelessly cut down from the Maserati V8 (a reliable
engine; I had over the years several other superb Maserati from the
6cyl 3500 to the bigger V8 4.2 and 4.7 grand tourers) that there was
no tensioning adjustment for the timing chain, a disaster waiting to
happen. I just never found a way to put a good engine into the
miserable sixteen inches available for the engine under that
impressive bonnet. I was so desperate that at one stage I designed my
own W8 engine and was getting quotes for the block and heads;
eventually space on the crankshaft for the bearings outran my rather
basic knowledge of metallurgy, and the cooling was a nightmare in
three dimensions (this was before the Mac arrived and made desktop 3D
CAD a breeze) -- and my publishers and partners and family started
wondering what I had spent so much time on, so I moved on to project
I could finish in a sensible time, which was a Bentley Le Mans
recreation on a Mk VI chassis.
Andre Jute
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