Turkish GP this weekend
Istanbul
Otodrom
The Turkish GP is on this weekend in the
Istanbul “Otodrom”, which as the old song went, “You can’t
go back to Constantinople, ‘coz it’s Istanbul, not
Constantinople”.
The circuit is about 80 km east of
Istanbul, and is 5.3 km long and the theoretical top speed
should be around 320 kph. The race is over 58 laps and
expect lap times down around 1 minute 24. Racing is
anti-clockwise, and for much more than that you will have to
watch the TV as I do. However, don’t look for spectators,
they are as thin on the ground as in Shanghai, where they
made huge sections of the vacant grandstands into
advertising hoardings.
The GP will be at 7 p.m. Thai time, but
check your local feed to confirm this. (Qualifying, by the
way is at 6 p.m. on the Saturday.) I will be watching as
usual from my perch at Jameson’s Irish Pub on Soi AR (next
to Nova Park). Join me for a meal and a natter first. They
might even have “turkey” on in the carvery section (or
perhaps large chickens)!
New BMW 5-Series with no Bangle bungle
The new BMW 5-Series looks leaner and
meaner, and far removed from the overblown whale that it had
become under BMW’s former stylist Chris Bangle.
The new 5 Series is a clean-sheet
creation with a lightweight body built off the same base as
BMW’s new 7-Series limousine. It is, however, 58 mm longer
than the previous model (4899 mm), while width is up 14 mm
(1464 mm) and the wheelbase is 80 mm longer at 2968 mm.
New BMW 5-Series
There are three new petrol engines - a
naturally aspirated six-cylinder for the 528i, a turbo six
for the 535i and BMW’s twin-turbo V8 for the flagship 550i,
while the 520d diesel will arrive later.
GoAuto in Australia, which has driven
this new 5, reports it has active steering, which changes
the gearing of the steering rack for easy low-speed
maneuvering and had been standard on all models except the
520d, but is now part of an option pack that also includes
rear-wheel steering.
BMW has re-introduced the concept of
rear-wheel steering, as seen previously in old Mazdas,
Hondas and Nissans, with this new electronic system that
allows for up to three degrees of turn.
The rear-steer system is only available
with the optional active steering system which allows for
the amount of steering input to change, depending on the
speed. This means a small input at low speed turns the front
wheels more than it would at higher speeds.
The suspension is an all-aluminium double
wishbone at the front and a multi-link rear set-up that BMW
calls an integrated V axle. It comes standard with regular
springs and dampers, while the turbo-petrol versions are
available with the optional Dynamic Damper Control that
provides an extra-soft comfort setting as well as advancing
the handling with adaptive front and rear anti-roll bars.
The 520d runs a revised 2.0 liter four
cylinder common rail turbo-diesel that produces 135 kW at
4000 rpm and 380 Nm of torque from 1900 rpm to 2750 rpm. Its
0-100 km/h time is certainly not high performance at 8.1
seconds, but the fact that it uses just 5.2 liters per 100
km on the official city/highway test is impressive.
The 4.4 liter V8 of the 550i is the
performer of the 5-Series range. It uses direct-injection
and twin turbos to produce 300 kW at 5500 rpm and 600 Nm
from 1750 rpm to 4500 rpm, which allows for a 0-100 km/h
time of five seconds. The fuel consumption stands at 10.4
L/100 km, which is heavy but not excessive.
BMW has moved to add the head-up display
system, which projects information such as the speed and
satellite-navigation directions onto the lower part of the
windscreen, as standard on all 5 Series sedans.
The extras list includes lane-change
warning, active cruise control, heat-sensing night vision
and two newcomers - Parking Assistant, which parks the car
with minimal input from driver, and Surround View, which
displays a bird’s-eye view of the car, using high mounted
cameras, as a parking aid.
The interior has evolved slightly with a
next-generation iDrive control system and a seven-inch
display on the centre console, facing the driver. Let us
hope that this latest iteration of the hated iDrive is
easier to use!
Autotrivia Quiz
Last week I asked what car, when shown
for the first time generated 22,000 orders on the first day
of the show? This was easy - it was, of course, the Ford
Mustang.
So to this week. How many finishers were
there in the World Cup Rally of 1970?
For the Automania FREE beer this week, be the first
correct answer to email [email protected] Good luck!
World Cup
Rally
I was fortunate to get the following
piece from a real wordsmith, Anthony Howard, by promising
that I would make sure his name was written large, so here
is a fascinating item about the World Cup Rally by TONY
HOWARD. I have had to shorten it somewhat for reasons of
space, so I hope he forgives me.
“Once upon a time, back in the glory
days, Fleet Street thrived amid rivers of alcohol, old
Spanish practices, the chatter of telex machines and the
unmistakable Linotype hot lead aroma. What kept this
ramshackle thriller on the road was its firm grip on
national advertising revenues and its prime position as
provider of news and entertainment. However, national
newspapers’ near-monopoly faced an increasing challenge as
independent television began flexing its muscles from the
mid-1950s.
In 1970 a proposal was put for the mother
and father of all motoring contests running from the
previous World Cup venue to the next - London to Mexico City
- in 1970?
Next question: what kind of organization
was big enough and silly enough to risk putting its
financial muscle behind such a hare-brained scheme? Why, the
Daily Mirror of course.
As the complex, highly-politicized worlds
of motor sport and the media converged the resulting ego
clashes were analogous to the Large Hadron Collider. My good
fortune was to be a Mirror foot soldier in the thick of all
this, charged with maintaining rally news flow to the 22
countries from which the 106 entrants arrived.
World Cup Rally
This involved crucial journalist skills
such as smoking, drinking and keeping very unsocial hours -
long before blackberries, sat-phones, wi-fi laptops, e-mail
or digital photography. For I was captive between the
varying time zones competitors were in from day to day and
the deadlines of British and foreign media as far afield as
Argentina, Australia and Thailand - all anxious for stories.
Writing Where they are - day by day
for the official program (price 4 shillings) was pretty
exhausting, I quipped to colleagues. So doing the real thing
was bound to be a touch arduous. With exquisite
understatement, IPC Newspapers chief Edward Pickering
remarked: “I understand that the tougher a rally is, the
more it pleases competitors. Even as a non-expert, it seems
clear to me that the Daily Mirror World Cup Car rally is
going to make a lot of competitors extremely happy.”
To warm things up, the rally first took a
brisk week-long 4,500-mile (7,300 km) tour of 16 European
countries, an hour ahead of London. Once in South America,
the remaining 11,500-mile (18,690 km) route was three to
seven hours behind us, which mostly entailed waiting late
into the night for any snippets that could be cobbled into
stories and telexed to grateful distant recipients. So I
lived just around the corner in the Waldorf Hotel for a
month, and sustained my stamina by re-fuelling regularly at
the Stab-in-the-Back, where there was a reliable telephone.
Inevitably, the post-mortem found it was
a jolly good jape that underscored the Mirror’s prestige
with established readers and advertisers. But it could
scarcely have built new circulation or revenues in Latin
America or mainland Europe. Furthermore, Fleet Street rivals
had essayed spoilers by sponsoring likely front-runners.
Great events invariably evoke widely
differing viewpoints. In his lavishly illustrated new book
World Cup Rally, Graham Robson makes a pretty good fist of
telling it how it was from the perspective of the
on-the-road organizing team and the competitors. He was
right in the thick of it as one of the rally controllers
leapfrogging along the route. A former competitor and team
manager, he is steeped in the sport, and as author of some
130 books he is a practiced hand at getting the words in the
correct order.
One of his main sources is ebullient
rally secretary John Sprinzel, now 78, who made the first
recce in South America. Robson visited Sprinzel at home in
Hawaii, while others in his cast of characters read like a
motor sporting Who’s Who from a golden age. Among them are
Paddy Hopkirk, flying Finns Rauno Aaltonen and Hannu Mikkola
(fresh-faced London-Mexico winner in The Telegraph
Magazine-sponsored Ford), Stuart Turner (once Ford of Europe
motor sport director), Peter Browning (former British
Leyland competitions manager) and even HRH Prince Michael of
Kent.
As Sprinzel and his two compadres
journeyed around South America attempting to transform a
theoretical line on a map into a viable rally route, they
encountered plenty of obstacles. Not least of these was the
world’s longest mountain range, sitting slap-bang along six
countries through which the rally was to pass - Argentina,
Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. With an average
altitude of 13,000 ft (4,000 meters), the Andes extend 4,300
miles (7,000 km) north to south and 120 miles (200 km)-430
miles (700 km) east to west.
The implications of high altitude began
to become a major preoccupation for competing teams,
concerned lest their crews and cars performed below par
while driving flat-out in thin air. There was the -
allegedly - apocryphal exchange of telegrams between Ford’s
Stuart Turner and his driver Roger Clark, on a recce in the
Andes. I paraphrase: Turner - “Need to know effects of lack
of oxygen at altitude. Make love to local girl at 14,000 ft
(4,267 meters). Report back.” Clark - “No girls at 14,000
ft. So tried it 14 times at 1,000 ft. Will this do?”
Robson’s World Cup Rally narrative zips
along at a brisk tempo through the many twists and turns of
an epic that began as a simple brilliant idea over a couple
of drinks and took on a life of its own as so much talent,
energy and money was thrown behind it.
I could smell the hot oil, sense the dust
in my nostrils, hear the clatter of stones and rocks in the
wheel arches, feel the car sliding around beneath me, and
endure near-hallucinatory fatigue kept at bay by adrenaline
rushes and sheer bloody-minded determination. Hyperbole?
Ach-yes-well-no-fine, as they say in South Africa. All that
plus 250 color and mono pictures of the characters, the
action, the heartbreak and my favorites - those incredible
Andean vistas.”
The Daily Mirror 1970 World Cup Rally 40
by Graham Robson (208 pages hardback, ISBN
978-1-845842-71-0, Veloce Publishing)
Copyright © 2010 by Anthony F Howard
