Martin Scorcese & Richard Attenborough to Shoot “Silver Ghost” in 3D

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Ronnie Schreiber

Eleanor Thornton and John Montagu

Academy Award winning directors Martin Scorcese and Richard Attenborough have announced that they will produce a movie titled “Silver Ghost” about the life of John Douglas-Scott-Montagu, 2nd Baron Montagu of Beaulieu, a British politician, early automobile enthusiast, and friend to Charles Rolls and Henry Royce, founders of Rolls-Royce. The film will most likely center on the relationship between Montagu and his secretary and mistress, Eleanor Thornton. Thornton is said to have been the model for sculptor Charles Sykes’ “Spirit of Ecstasy” Roll-Royce mascot.

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Mutt & Jeff, Part 2:
Continental Mark VIII Lowrider

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Ronnie Schreiber

To view the entire photo gallery in your choice of 2D or stereo 3D formats, click here for a Flash player or here for an HTML applet

If that Cadillac deVille is rolling 30″s or thereabouts, this Lincoln Continenal Mark VIII has wheels about half that size, what appear to be 14″ spoke rims. It’s tempting to say that the car’s tail is dragging because of Lincoln’s notoriously unreliable air suspension units, but as  you can see from the photos of hydraulic system in the car’s trunk, there’s a custom hydraulic system and the owner of this Mk VIII decided to set the rear bumper on the pavement and the nose in the air for this show. For what it’s worth, this was not the most extreme lowrider at this show.

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Mutt & Jeff Part 1:
Caddy de Donk

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Ronnie Schreiber

To view the entire photo gallery in your choice of 2D or stereo 3D formats, click here for a Flash player or here for an HTML applet

With spring comes car shows. At the Metrocruisers’ spring shine ‘n show in northwest Detroit, I spotted this very clean mid 1990s Cadillac deVille done up a la donk. I think donks, are a bit silly when it comes to vehicle dynamics but this was a very well executed custom. It certainly, ahem, stands out in a crowded parking lot. I’ve noticed that you can get away with a larger variety of wheel diameters in a car with non-round wheel arches, and this Caddy’s arches are square, man, square. Checking with Wikipedia, I find that technically this isn’t a “donk”, but rather a “hi-riser” or a “sky-scraper”. Traditionalists say that “donk” specifically refers to cars based on 1971-76 Chevy Impalas, with “donk” being short for donkey, apparently a reference to the impala mascot. Squared-off and downsized 1977-90 Impalas and other GM fullsize sedans are known as “boxes”, and the last B bodies. ’91-’96 are called, appropriated “bubbles”. Anything else apparently is a hi-riser or a sky-scraper.

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Cars I’ve Loved and Hated – Michael Lamm’s Unauthorized Auto Biography, Chapter 14: Alfa Romeo Montreal

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Michael Lamm

1972 Alfa Romeo Montreal. Text and photos copyright Michael Lamm 2012

If I had the luxury of opening a private, very personal auto museum that contained the 80-odd cars I’ve owned over the past 52 years (and some were very odd indeed), I’d arrange them in descending order of favoritism. I’d park my favorite cars next to the entrance. Then would come those that I liked less and less and less than my favorites. Finally, way at the back of the building, tucked in just behind the Honda S600 roadster, would be my least favorite car, the 1972 Alfa Romeo Montreal I owned in 2007-2008.

Awful Romeo, I called it. Some cars, like puppies, want to do the right thing: They’re friendly, frisky and tail-waggingly anxious to please. To me, the Montreal was more like an intemperate ferret: aggressive, aggravating, high-strung, complicated and hard to live with.

The Montreal looked great on paper. An Alfa salesman could wow a potential customer with the car’s long list of engineering marvels. Before I get into those, though, I’d like to take you through a short history of how the Montreal came to be.

Read the rest of this week’s episode at the Hemmings blog:

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In Appreciation of Carroll Shelby:
LeMans Winning 1967 Ford GT40 Mk IV

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Ronnie Schreiber

To view the entire photo gallery in your choice of 2D or stereo 3D formats, click here for a Flash player or here for an HTML applet

The 1960s were good to Carroll Shelby as he hitched his star to the Ford Motor Co. – to both his and FoMoCo’s great success. Perhaps the pinnacle of that success was the 1967 Ford GT Mark IV racecar, designed and built for one task, winning the 24 Hours of LeMans. Ford had won in spectacular fashion the year before, with three GT40s taking the checkered flag together. After early failures with the GT40, to win at LeMans and take revenge on Enzo Ferrari for not selling Ferrari to Ford, Henry Ford II hired Shelby to manage the GT40 team. Shelby was also the team owner of record. Though his team’s development of the car, particularly Ken Miles’ contribution, was essential to the GT40′s ultimate success, Shelby had little to do with the car’s origins. The original GT40, while it was raced with a blue oval logo and paid for with checks signed in Dearborn, was designed by Lola’s Eric Broadley and built in England. While an Anglo-American effort seems appropriate for Shelby in light of the American-V8-in-a-Brit-sportscar concept behind the Cobra, few people have been more quintessentially American than Ol’ Shel. The Mk IV was an all-American effort: designed by Ford, built in the Shelby race shop, and driven to victory at LeMans by Dan Gurney and A. J. Foyt. However, having no more mountains to climb and having spent an estimated $200 million on the LeMans effort back when that was serious money (less than 10 years earlier, Ford lost about the same amount on the Edsel debacle) Ford decided to pull out of international sports car racing after winning the ’67 race. The GT MkIV win at LeMans was the last time Shelby competed at LeMans. I’m not mistaken, it was also Shelby’s last race, a fitting exclamation point on a superlative racing career. Such a career would make anyone notable in the annals of automotive history, but it’s even more notable in that it was only one facet of Carroll Shelby’s remarkable life.

The LeMans winning Ford GT40 Mk IV is on display at Racing In America, part of the Henry Ford Museum’s Driving America exhibit.

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Will Fire Safety Concerns Slow EV Acceptance?

Posted on May 13, 2012 by Ronnie Schreiber

Welcome Instapundit readers! Thanks for stopping by Cars In Depth. When you’re  done reading this post, feel free to check out the home page or our archives. In addition  to news and comment about cars, Cars In Depth is the original 3d car site, with more  stereo 3D photos and videos of cars available here than anywhere else. Don’t worry if  you don’t have 3D, or if you think 3D is a conspiracy to get you to buy a new tv set, you  can still enjoy the site. All of our photos and videos can be viewed in regular mono 2D as  well as a variety of stereo 3D formats.

The Williams team’s celebration of its first Formula One victory in 8 years at the Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona was cut short by an explosion and fire in its paddock garage that ended up injuring 16 people from a number of teams as they tried to put out the fire. Reportedly, one person was seriously burned though there are conflicting reports. Pastor Maldonado’s winning car was unharmed, as it was still undergoing post race scrutineering, but teammate Bruno Senna’s Williams which had retired from the race and was in the garage, near the fire’s origin, was badly damaged. Though Williams and Formula One have since said that the fire started in a fuel rig, early published speculation was that a spark from the KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery System) device in Senna’s car had caused the fire. KERS essentially makes F1 cars into hybrids that can store energy during braking and then release it when needed for acceleration. It’s not surprising that people immediately jumped to conclusions to blame the KERS device. Electricity has always scared some people. New technologies also scare folks and and people seem to have an inordinate amount of interest in the fire safety of the latest generation of electric vehicles and their batteries. A single crash-tested Chevy Volt caught fire and misinformation about “exploding Volts” continues to reverberate. A few days ago an almost new Fisker Karma destroyed itself, two other cars and much of a house in Sugar Land, Texas a few days ago, again piquing considerable interest.

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Happy Mother’s Day!
“Look At Martha”

Posted on May 13, 2012 by Ronnie Schreiber

Car culture tends to be soaked in testosterone, so we sometimes forget that, in most cases, the cars we love were designed by someone whose mother encouraged them to pursue their design and engineering talent. In motorsports too, while daddy may teach you the difference between a wrist pin and a connecting rod and when you should use a wrench instead of a pliers, it’s the mothers who let their sons (and increasingly daughters) go racing and then worry and pray about their safety. One of the more famous racing videos is of the finish of the 1993 Daytona 500, with retired racer and announcer Ned Jarrett making the call from the booth as his son Dale held off Dale Earnhardt Sr. to win stock car racing’s most prestigious race. Jarrett, a consummate professional, tried hard to maintain some impartiality during the broadcast until the  last lap. Normally in the booth for commentary and color, Ned Jarrett didn’t usually do the play-by-play work but the directors turned the mic over to him for the final call from the backstretch. “It’s the Dale and Dale show as they come off of turn four… you know who I’m pulling for, it’s Dale Jarrett. Bring her to the inside, Dale, don’t let him get down there… He’s going to make it, Dale Jarrett’s going to win the Daytona 500. All right!” As if to prove my point, just as Dale Jarrett’s car crossed the finish line, the director of CBS’s broadcast cut not to his father Ned in the announcers’ booth but rather to Martha Jarrett, Dale’s mom, sitting in a van, too nervous to watch the action on the track, as Ned Jarret says, “Look at Martha! Oh dear.”

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Shelby American, 1965

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Ronnie Schreiber

Finishing up with our look at the photos that Dave Friedman took for Shelby American, to commemorate the passing of Carroll Shelby, here are his 1965 shots. So how much do you think the four cars in this photo are worth today? Either one of these two original GT40s, with Shelby racing provenance, would be the stars of any auction, particularly the very rare open top spyder, and the last time one of the six Shelby Daytona Coupes sold, it changed hands for $7.2 million. I’d make a guess that today’s value of the lot would be somewhere north of $15 million.

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Shelby American, 1964

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Ronnie Schreiber

Shelby American was very busy in 1964. They were still racing Cobras and Daytona Coupes, but Ford had asked Carroll Shelby to also manage their GT40 endurance racing effort, plus there was the business of converting 50 Cooper Monacos to Ford V8 power (known as the Cooper King Cobras) and even some open wheel racing. As a result, the largest group of Shelby American photos in the Dave Friedman archive at the Benson Ford center, over 500 of them, is from 1964.

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Shelby American, 1963-1964

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Ronnie Schreiber

More from the Dave Friedman collection of historic motorsport photos at the Benson Ford Research Center, these 286 photos are of Shelby American’s activities in 1963 and ’64. Shelby cars were successful but they had their defeats as well. Dave Friedman documented the wrecks as well as the victories.

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