As an ardent supporter of British industry, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II often visited car factories throughout her 70 year reign, including Jaguar’s Browns Lane plant in March 1956. Following Sir William Lyons’ knighthood earlier the same year, the visit was in recognition of the company’s success in the UK’s postwar drive for exports.
When posing the question of which technological steps to take to improve vehicle fuel economy, the answers tend to fall on the side of engine downsizing.
With much made both then and now of Jaguar’s 1988 and 1990 victories of the Le Mans 24 Hours, its utter domination of the 1987 World Sportscar Championship has been largely forgotten. Yet it was arguably a much bigger achievement than winning a single, albeit 24-hour, race.
Alfa Romeo may be an also-ran in contemporary F1, but in 1993, the 155 V6 Ti rewrote history by winning the DTM championship in its first year of entry. With BMW and Audi withdrawing at the end of 1992, Alfa seized the opportunity to maximise the new-for-1993 FIA Class 1 touring-car rules.
Even before the application of windscreen wipers on automobiles, the need for a means to clear precipitation and muck from the windows of streetcars saw some interesting developments come to the fore. In 1903, Irish-born inventor JH Apjohn gained a UK patent for a mechanism that moved two brushes top to bottom to clear the windshield. Across the pond, US inventor Mary Anderson had to leave the front window down or stop to clear the snow from the panes on a streetcar ride during inclement weather. She came up with the idea of a swinging arm fitted with a rubber blade slotted through the window frame.
When I joined Jaguar in the mid-Seventies I was surprised to discover it was Malcolm Sayer who had initiated the XJ-S’s design since as a large grand tourer, it was a very different car from his most famous, the E-type.
