Kick Those Shoes Off and Relax. It's the Delta 2017 Tea Break

[bauble]

Originally Posted by owrforever

My lovely bride has "hit" every house (seven) we have lived in, at least once. One house she hit three times! Tried not to go to the same body shop twice in a row. A couple were garage doors. Don't know which was more "high maintenance," the car, the house, or her!

What on earth does your wife have against houses? (Apart from the car, of course)

[delta]

My first tow car was an old 3 litre Rovee . Think I told you some years ago the garage owner helped me when I was just starting racing . Anyway it had leather seats and loads of room in the back seat . Now they were happy happy days .

[John Elwin]

Originally Posted by terence

I had a similar thing on my Riley 1.5.
Number was VAE 360.Was entually going to restor it (36000 miles from new,genuine mid wife owner and bought from Martin Brundles father John)
Anyways,had a pair of the engraved black plastic plates made in readiness for fitting after the resto.
This particular year we had a very sever winter,very heavey snow.On a trip to town over bad snow ruts and drifts,I managed to unwittingly knock off the original front plate,which I noticed a couple of days later.
Drilled and fitted the new plate and got back on with my work.
It was about two months later I noticed a slight difference between front and rear platesVAE 360 -360 VAE.Wondered why the speeding tickets had stopped����

I have a Riley 1.5-owning friend who will appreciate that story!

John Brundle was a bit of a character. I remember him coming into Hethel on occasions in a Triumph 2.5 PI rally car, may even have been ex works, can't remember now. He was a Lotus Service agent in those days.

[owrforever]

Bauble, there isn't enough space on this thread to explain my wife. Every time we move, I cringe. It's like a "right of passage" for the new house to receive her "christening." I keep hoping these houses will slow down and not jump in front of her. It's highly irregular to be on a first name basis with the guy that owns the local body shop, the brick mason, and trim carpenter! I'm steady money for them. I have grown to accept the whole thing as bad karma. It's "when," not "if."

[terence]

Originally Posted by John Elwin

I have a Riley 1.5-owning friend who will appreciate that story!

John Brundle was a bit of a character. I remember him coming into Hethel on occasions in a Triumph 2.5 PI rally car, may even have been ex works, can't remember now. He was a Lotus Service agent in those days.

John,it was indeed an exworks 2.5pi.
JB also had ,a bit later,an ex works Escort mk1 rally car,he needed all of the room on most bends in our neck of the woods.🤣
They were the days when Marty would fill my cars up at the pumps at Tottenhill.
John always had an interesting car or two ther.

[Mike Bell]

Originally Posted by terence

John,it was indeed an exworks 2.5pi.
JB also had ,a bit later,an ex works Escort mk1 rally car.

Yes, I competed against John in the Triumph on at least one occasion. I remember being in awe of it, knowing exactly what it was....

Still want a 2.5 pi, but really would like an estate....

[GORDON STREETER]

Originally Posted by delta

My first tow car was an old 3 litre Rovee . Think I told you some years ago the garage owner helped me when I was just starting racing . Anyway it had leather seats and loads of room in the back seat . Now they were happy happy days .

I used a 105e van complete with 1500 GT engine and sometimes a twincam for towing a two wheeled trailer for the race car that was filled up with all the spares/petrol etc. I often used to go 5 up as well to meetings all over the UK and abroad, health n safety and towing laws

[VIVA GT]

Originally Posted by GORDON STREETER

I used a 105e van complete with 1500 GT engine and sometimes a twincam for towing a two wheeled trailer for the race car that was filled up with all the spares/petrol etc. I often used to go 5 up as well to meetings all over the UK and abroad, health n safety and towing laws

I did a similar thing Gordon, towing my Mini Se7en fully loaded with all the tools & spare wheels etc. on a two wheeled trailer. When my faithful Viva GT expired I used a Mini Traveller with a tuned Cooper S engine to tow it. One night on the way home from Snetterton the whole thing started to snake, so I changed down a gear to try and pull everything straight, only for nothing else to change other than it was all now happening at over 75 MPH! As I was now using most of the road I decided that the accident I was about to have was inevitable, so the best thing I could do was to slow things down as much as I could before it happened. Every time the rig became straight, I stamped on the brakes, then off again whilst I rode the snake, finally after scrubbing about40 MPH off, it all straightened out.
I paid more attention to weight distribution and fitted a stabiliser to the trailer after that episode!

[Mike Harte]

Talking about trailers, mine was also a single axle job, albeit with a solid wooden floor that was somewhat higher than a standard car trailer; this meant that we couldn't load it conventionally.

One of the mechanics would hold up the trailer from the hitch to almost head height, and I would drive the car on to the trailer. At the point that the weight was at a fraction, and I really mean a fraction, towards the front, the chap holding it would let go and allow the hitch to drop gently down on to an empty 5 gallon oil drum.

The first time we carried this out in public - we had practiced in private many times before - all the other competitors stood and gawked thinking that we were mad. Probably we were. However, we never had any problems or accidents, and there was one slight young women who often helped us out whenever she was at a circuit with her Clubman racing boyfriend (who I found out just recently that had married her, and she passed away in the last year or so), who bet my mechanics that she could hold the front up during loading. She was right.

Once hitched up to the Zodiac tow car, the car was pushed slightly forward and chained down, and everything chucked in the Anglia.

As Iain would say, happy days.

[GORDON STREETER]

Double post

[GORDON STREETER]

A Zodiac ! blimey that was posh and could easily seat 5 passengers, if I took 5 someone had to sit on someone's lap in the old van. This happened on loads of occasions and when I was banned from driving my mate used to drive and his girlfriend used to sit on my lap ! I actually got married to her years later and he is still one of my best mates !!

[Gerard C]

Are the single axle trailers allowed in England? We us them because they are light but safety wise they are less comfortable than double ones.

[bauble]

Originally Posted by Gerard C

Are the single axle trailers allowed in England? We us them because they are light but safety wise they are less comfortable than double ones.

Mon ami, Gerard, it is obvious from the last few posts that the last thing on their minds was safety, on a trailer or the back seat of a Rover, or even the floor of a borrowed van.

I am none too sure of just how old some of these memories are.

[Mike Harte]

Gordon, the Zodiac came from the same second-hand dealer as my Anglia, and it was probably not fully paid for just like my Anglia. Somehow we just never got round to paying them off, and the dealer never really worried about it. At that time, most of the car dealers that I knew, and I knew quite a few of them around North London then, were making so much money that they didn't always know what to spend it on, so the £50 quid that I was supposed to pay for the Anglia meant very little to him.

It was a long time ago, and things were certainly different then. And some of the types of people that I met in those days you wouldn't be able to get near nowadays. Such as going around to Stirling Moss' little house in Mayfair, and asking him if he wanted to join us for a drink or two in the Steering Wheel Club around the corner. Now that is something that is really interesting, because the architecture for that house that was constructed for him was way ahead of it's time, and it still looks like a fairly modern structure even to this day. Actually, it used to look quite out of character at the time.

About the posh bit with the Zodiac, we only chose that because of the long hauls up to Oulton for a Saturday meeting, followed by Mallory on the Sunday on the way back. That was a gruelling weekend back then, especially as we would have to change the gearbox and diff on the Anglia for Mallory, having changed them for Oulton before leaving. And three or four people sleeping in the Zodiac on Saturday night was not the most pleasant of experiences.

[VIVA GT]

Originally Posted by Mike Harte

Gordon, the Zodiac came from the same second-hand dealer as my Anglia, and it was probably not fully paid for just like my Anglia. Somehow we just never got round to paying them off, and the dealer never really worried about it. At that time, most of the car dealers that I knew, and I knew quite a few of them around North London then, were making so much money that they didn't always know what to spend it on, so the £50 quid that I was supposed to pay for the Anglia meant very little to him.

It was a long time ago, and things were certainly different then. And some of the types of people that I met in those days you wouldn't be able to get near nowadays. Such as going around to Stirling Moss' little house in Mayfair, and asking him if he wanted to join us for a drink or two in the Steering Wheel Club around the corner. Now that is something that is really interesting, because the architecture for that house that was constructed for him was way ahead of it's time, and it still looks like a fairly modern structure even to this day. Actually, it used to look quite out of character at the time.

Mike, I was going to accuse you of name-dropping here, but then remember Stirling telling me some time ago about the good old days when a young bloke who raced an Anglia used to invite him for drinks in The Steering Wheel Club. (Until today, I just assumed he meant Gordon!)

[Lancsbreaker]

Originally Posted by Gerard C

Are the single axle trailers allowed in England? We us them because they are light but safety wise they are less comfortable than double ones.

Yes, single axle trailers are legal, although not widely used for car transport as they can't carry that much weight, legally....... (proper) Mini and Imp racers still use them, I think....we used to use one for our Imp rally car, towed by my landcrab 1800 back in the 70s.

I was glad we started to use four-wheel trailers later on, when we used slightly bigger cars (and went upmarket with a LWB Transit tow-barge) as it wasn't unusual to arrive at a rally start to find that one of the trailer tyres had disintegrated and we'd carried happily on 3 wheels..... I don't think much of the "budget" went on trailer prep and maintenance

[GORDON STREETER]

Originally Posted by Mike Harte

;3760750
Such as going around to Stirling Moss' little house in Mayfair, and asking him if he wanted to join us for a drink or two in the Steering Wheel Club around the corner

Back in the 90s we were in a restaurant at Spa and my wife said to me "who is that old boy over there who keeps eyeing me up" I said it's Stirling Moss he always had an eye for a pretty girl

[Gerard C]

Originally Posted by bauble

Mon ami, Gerard, it is obvious from the last few posts that the last thing on their minds was safety, on a trailer or the back seat of a Rover, or even the floor of a borrowed van.

Thanks Lancs, down here we are restricted to a total weight, trailer plus its load, the maximum for a single axle is 1600 kilos with an ten per cent allowance (I've been told). What they do check is the driver's licence.

[Mike Harte]

50 years ago, it never crossed our minds to even consider what the weight of the car and trailer were; just put the car on the trailer, filled it with tools and full jerry cans of fuel and off we went.

And nobody seemed to keep to the speed limits, either. Can remember going full chat along Six Mile Bottom (what an evocative name for a road) with the Anglia keeping up behind when we were overtaken, at some considerable speed differential, by a Mk ll Jag towing another Jag. The wind displacement caused by their passing was enough to actually lift the off-side trailer wheel, causing the trailer to bounce from one wheel to the other for the next mile or so before we could bring it back under control.

Just another thing that got tucked away in the memory bank, because they were happy days.

[John Elwin]

Back in 1979, trekking round with the European Formula Ford Championship, Pete Argetsinger had an ex BRS Austin parcels van as transporter/accommodation. It was permanently unreliable but that didn't prevent him from getting done for speeding in Germany. However, he was on the end of a tow-rope at the time, behind somebody else's transporter...

[Gerard C]

Seems that some of us lost memory… sometime. During the 2011 and 2012 seasons we had hard fights on the track with Boissy and some others. And on our way back home we did it again, I could read at least 100 mph with the trailer. When I changed from the Capri to a heavy 635, the cost in trailer's tires was huge. The speed tickets were not bad too…

[MGDavid]

Keep it going guys! For somebody who in spite of being retired now didn't start circuit racing until early this century, I can never get enough of these tales from a lost era...

[Mike Bell]

Originally Posted by MGDavid

Keep it going guys! For somebody who in spite of being retired now didn't start circuit racing until early this century, I can never get enough of these tales from a lost era...

Yes, great tales. Keep 'em coming...... Talking of speed while towing, I was returning back from Zandvoort, probably around 10 yrs ago, but was late and heading for Calais at a steady 80mph, when I was overtaken easily by a Belgian pick up towing a horse box with 2 nags in residence. They looked quite unperturbed.....

I was highly amused, as virtually every horse trailer in the UK seems incapable of being towed more than 40mph! I once followed a Vovo towing one across the S Downs near Goody, and the driver was doing 30mph, but running the N/S trailer wheels through every culvert and drain! The nags would have been more comfortable with the trailer going twice as fast but actually on the road.

[Tel 911S]

OK , a little towing story . Not me but a friend who often did the same events .
We were both rallying in Holland , forget which rally , but in late 80s .
He clipped a post on the rally in his Manta , gentle roll but took out the windscreen glass .
Went to load on to the trailer & his V6 Transit which promptly broke the oil pump / distrbutor drive .

So while I was still on the event , he set off for the Zeebrugge ferry with the rolled Manta with no screen , towing the Transit with the trailer behind .

Other than a rainstorm , he got back OK .
He was based in Felixstowe so only a couple of miles from the ferryport back in England .

[grantp]

Originally Posted by bauble

What on earth does your wife have against houses? (Apart from the car, of course)

That's potentially a rather personal question Baub.