AUTO MANIA: by Dr. Iain Corness [email protected]

Pencils out, here’s the 2014 F1 calendar

 F1 competition

The 2014 Formula 1 season was confirmed by the FIA World Motorsport Council on Wednesday and as expected Korea, Mexico and the planned Grand Prix of America in New Jersey have dropped off the calendar.
While Korea’s withdrawal is understood to be because of financial difficulties, there is still hope that Mexico will make its long awaited return in 2015, Mexico having last hosted a Grand Prix in 1992.
For the New Jersey event, the picture remains unclear, as this is the second time that the grand prix has dropped from the race calendar, reputedly through financial worries.
The Abu Dhabi Grand Prix was originally scheduled for October 26, but will now take place on November 23, allowing the US Grand Prix to be moved forward to November 2.
Brazil will no longer host the finale as originally planned and is instead moved to November 9, when the Abu Dhabi race was supposed to take place.
The 2014 season therefore stays at 19 races, with some changes to the running order.
2014 Calendar
March 16 Australia
March 30 Malaysia
April 6 Bahrain
April 20 China
May 11 Spain
May 25 Monaco
June 8 Canada
June 22 Austria
July 6 Great Britain
July 20 Germany (Hockenheim)
July 27 Hungary
August 24 Belgium
September 7 Italy
September 21 Singapore
October 5 Japan
October 12 Russia
November 2 USA
November 9 Brazil
November 23 Abu Dhabi

You’ve had Car Of The Year (COTY) - now welcome TOTY

Here is TOTY.

Honda (UK)’s fire spitting ‘Mean Mower’ has scooped a very special accolade in the 2013 BBC Top Gear Magazine Awards, winning the newly-created Thing Of The Year (TOTY) title.
In this month’s magazine, Piers Ward of BBC Top Gear praises the “brave men and women of Honda” for creating the 1000cc beast, going on to explain that because Honda stepped up to the challenge and the resulting “life-affirming event” of driving it makes it worthy of a BBC Top Gear Magazine award. With it not being a car, they had to invent an entirely new category for Mean Mower, hence the new TOTY category.
The accolade follows a very busy six months for Honda’s Mean Mower, which first graced the pages of BBC Top Gear in its ‘Performance Car of the Year’ issue in July, on the back of its first appearance on track at Clemont Ferrand in central France. Further features have seen Honda Yuasa’s British Touring Car Championship (BTCC) driver Gordon ‘Flash’ Shedden compete on the mower against team-mate Matt Neal in the BTCC Civic race car, as well as pitting the mower against a super-fast executive saloon with a Honda push lawnmower in the boot.
Most recently Mean Mower appeared at the SEMA Show in Las Vegas, the world’s premier automotive speciality products trade event showcasing more than 2,000 new products and vehicles from across the globe. Displayed alongside Honda’s latest Civic coupe it was admired by more than 60,000 international trade visitors.
The 109 hp Mean Mower was commissioned by Honda (UK) and built by its BTCC partner, Team Dynamics. As well as a blistering top speed of 210 km/h, it is geared to cover the 0-60 sprint in a mere four seconds. It weighs just 140 kg, producing 96 Nm of torque and boasts an incredible power-to-weight ratio of 532 bhp/tonne.
The project saw Team Dynamics re-engineer a Honda HF2620 Lawn Tractor from the ground-up, adding a custom-made fabricated chassis, a 1000 cc engine from a Honda VTR Firestorm motorcycle, a bespoke suspension and wheels from an ATV. It features a custom-made paddle shift six-speed gear system, a bespoke sports seat and a Scorpion exhaust system.
Every effort has been made to retain as much of the look of the original mower as possible. The cutter deck was custom-made in fiber-glass, to reduce weight, while, in a stroke of pure genius, the grass bag provides a happy home for the fuel tank, a high capacity oil cooler and a secondary water cooling radiator. Mean Mower can also still cut grass, at up to 15mph, thanks to two electric motors on the cutter deck, spinning 3 mm steel cutting cable at an incredible 4000 rpm.
Piers Ward of BBC Top Gear Magazine enthuses: ‘On any logical level, the Mean Mower makes no sense - no one really needs a 210 km/h lawnmower that can do 0-60mph in four seconds. But sometimes, we just need our grass cutting faster...”

BMW, the last bastion of RWD goes FWD

BMW Active Tourer.

BMW Active Tourer Concept will lead the roll-out of three-cylinder engines and front-wheel drive models.
BMW has long been the flag-waver for the “sheer driving pleasure” of rear-wheel drive cars, with a former international boss even once dismissing Audi as a rival because it didn’t have a rear-drive platform.
But, all of life is change and BMW is showing that to be so. The new platform called the UKL1 will be underpinning the coming Mini and will also be used for 11 new models across both the Mini and BMW ranges. This was revealed by Ian Robertson, BMW global board member for sales and marketing, who told Auto Express in the UK.
He said the first of the front-drive BMWs would be the Active Tourer, to be shown at a motor show early next year - and also the first BMW to be powered by a three-cylinder engine.
Based on the Active Tourer concept unveiled late in 2012, the new arrival will face off against the Mercedes-Benz B-Class, coming Audi Q1 and the booming small prestige crossover field.
Its front-drive spearhead will be followed by a seven-seat version, another small SUV, a potential small city car and up to eight Mini models.
BMW has certainly defected to FWD from its previous RWD designs.

Nissan remembers Datsun

Datsun Festival 2013.

By Warunya Thongrod
Datsun Thailand organized the 4th Datsun Festival attended by over 500 Datsun cars and owners.
Spectators from everywhere arrived to gawk at cars, some as old as 61 years old. For this 4th Datsun Festival 2013, Siam Motors collaborated with the Datsun Thailand Club hoping to stimulate Pattaya tourism and allow citizens, who love old cars, to get close and take pictures with rare classic cars.
The event was declared open at Kiatphum Hall with Dr. Thaworn Pornprapha (Siam Motors) and Tawan Surongdecha, president of the Datsun Thailand club. In addition, there was also a presentation of Datsun legends, which were the most popular car in the 1960’s, until it became Nissan.
Nissan cars was founded in 1933 and in the next year, the company had been registered as Nissan Motor Co. by Yoshisukae Ikawa, building trucks, planes and engines for the Japanese war effort.
The first Nissan officially imported to Thailand was by Siam Motors in 1964. The popularity of Datsun became widely known with the Datsun Changyieb (Stepped on by Elephant) promotion in 1972, placing an elephant on the truck as a show of strength of the vehicle.

The Bathurst 1000

Bathurst 1000.

The Bathurst 1000 is the most popular race of the year in Australia. To the top of Mt. Panorama and down again a distance of around 6.2 km. By 1966 Bathurst had attracted an international flavor with the three works Morris Cooper S giant killers coming in 1-2-3.
The race these days is now only for the Australian V8 Supercar class, with initially just Holden and Ford, but now with Nissan, Mercedes and Volvo on board, the race attracts thousands of people to Bathurst.
But way back in the early 60’s was my first sojourn to the Bathurst mountain. There were only two major problems, firstly I was a starving medical student at that time and had no money, and secondly the only car I had was a very tired 1949 MGTC, which certainly would not make the 1000 km trip to Bathurst, let alone get home again. But I wanted to go.
I knew of a 1953 Ford Customline for sale for 50 Aussie pounds. A bit run down, in need of some tyres, but it was cheap enough that I could buy it, without having to sell my grandmother to a Turkish trader. We bought it, but still needed tyres.
Les, a friend, worked for a tyre company, and said he would supply the tyres if he could have a free ride with us. Agreed. Mind you, it was a trifle worrying that he insisted we bring the Customline around after hours with the lights extinguished.
But by Thursday night I had a car which (hopefully) would make Bathurst, sitting on four secondhand tyres which had cost me nothing. About the same price that Les had paid for them, but beggars can’t be choosers. A wink is as good as a nod to a blind man!
Now the old side-valve V8 Customlines were not known as being thrifty, and I could see that fuel was going to be our next problem. But Customlines were huge and would easily take six people, so Les and I found another four financially secure souls, who would bear the cost of the fuel there and back.
The weather did not smile on us and as we came to the first mountain range we discovered a slight design fault in 1953 Ford Customlines. They had a vacuum operated system for the wipers. When on a trailing throttle the vacuum was at its maximum and the wipers would go ten to the dozen, but when you depressed the accelerator the vacuum would decrease and wipers would just sit there, stuck to the screen, and no use at all as a device to clear water off the windscreen.
And so we made it to Bathurst by the Saturday night, and made it home on the Sunday night.

Autotrivia Quiz

Last week I asked what do these cars have in common? The Mini, the Aston Martin DB5, the Ford Mustang, the DeLorean and the Alfa Spyder, and it is nothing to do with engines, wheels or steering wheels, in fact nothing to do with their construction at all! The correct answer was that they were all cars that starred in movies!
So to this week. What British pre-war sports car had no driver’s door, but had a passenger’s one?
For the Automania free beer this week, be the first correct answer to email [email protected].