When Is A World Championship Race Not A World Championship Race?
Welcome to Must Read, where we single out the best stories from around the automotive universe and beyond. Today we've got reports from McLaren, The Truth About Cars, Motherboard and Hemmings.
What Happened To The Non-Championship Grand Prix Racing Calendar — McLaren
Alan Henry takes a trip down memory lane, to a time when there were championship races and non-championship races. What changed?
When is a World Championship Grand Prix not a World Championship Grand Prix? When it's a Non-Championship Grand Prix, that's when.
Time once was that the Formula 1 calendar was peppered with the things, although none now remain, very sadly (but more on that thought later).
In Britain, the greatest and last of them to bite the dust were the International Trophy and the Race of Champions.
Former Marine Bomber Pilot Lutz Blasts Former TTAC Chief Niedermeyer, Hits Popcorn Warehouse — The Truth About Cars
Former Editor of TTAC, Ed Niedermeyer, is being taken to task by Maximum Bob Lutz for his Wall Street Journal op-ed on GM and China. Break out the popcorn, this will be fun to watch.
The former marine jet attack pilot and Korean war veteran Lutz (never mind that the aging alpha male loves to be depicted with an un-American French/German Alpha Jet) did not use sissy Alice in Wonderland imagery, but overwhelming firepower. He calls Ed's articles "rants" and accuses him of swapping "truth" for "cheap political pandering." He blames Ed of the written equivalent of showing his genitals in Central Park, saying Ed "exposes his naiveté by not knowing (or acknowledging) the rules a foreign automaker must follow to participate and profit in China."
In 1897, A Bicycle Superhighway Was The Future Of California Transit — Motherboard
High-speed trains are all well and good, but what about a superhighway for bikes? It could have happened.
In 1897, a wealthy American businessman named Horace Dobbins began construction on a private, for-profit bicycle superhighway that would stretch from Pasadena to downtown Los Angeles. It may seem like a preposterous notion now—everyone knows Angelenos don't get out of their cars—but at the time, amidst the height of a pre-automobile worldwide cycling boom, the idea attracted the attention of some hugely powerful players. And it almost got built.
From The Bookshelf: 1916 Simplex, Crane Model 5 Handbook — Hemmings
This is just plain cool.
My mother was rearranging the bookshelves in the den at home when she pulled out this 1916 Crane-Simplex Model 5 owner's handbook, which my father picked up at an auction many years ago. Being the family's car nutcase, the book came to me. I thought that it might be something fun to share.
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