Cars in the show include a 1935 Triumph Gloria Southern Cross that was once part of the Henry Ford Museum, a 1960 MGA Twin Cam Coupe that raced at Sebring, and a 1966 Aston Martin DB6, one of the most potent sports cars of its era. The poster car, a 1933 Squire is the first of only seven ever built, and is considered by many to be among the most beautiful British sports cars ever made.

The “Best of Britain” show is included with regular museum admission, $12 adults, $10 seniors, $8 for students. Children under 8 are admitted free. The Museum is open Tuesdays from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., Wednesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The Museum is located at 6825 Norwitch Drive, Philadelphia, Pa., 19153, directly in back of the Airport Automall and five minutes off Interstate 95.

For more information, visit www.simeonemuseum.org or call 215-365-7233.

Source Simeone Museum

Examples of the earliest models – including founder Brian Lister’s first car, through the classic Lister ‘knobbly’ and Costin-bodied models and onto the 1990s Storm, which saw the name’s revival, will be reunited with the man behind the marque.

Their appearance coincides with a book written by highly-regarded Jaguar enthusiast Paul Skilleter, which chronicles the company’s sports cars, their founder Brian Lister and their successes during the late-1950s.

Closely associated with driver Archie Scott-Brown, Listers originally used MG and Bristol engines, but the switch to Jaguar engines and the shape of the car, dubbed ‘knobbly’, brought the company unparalleled success and exposure.

A later model, designed by then-leading aerodynamicist Frank Costin shepherded in a new cleaner, wind-cheating appearance, but didn’t repeat the success of earlier models.

Those earlier models proved successful in the fledgling historic motor sport scene, but the Lister name was revived in the 1990s with an all-new (but still Jaguar-powered) sports car. Laurence Pearce’s 600bhp Lister Storm ran at Le Mans and at Daytona, bringing home both the FIA GT Drivers’ and Teams’ Championship in 2000.

Brian Lister, who has provided major input to Paul Skilleter’s book, will be on hand to sign copies at Race Retro. Enthusiasts can buy a copy at an exclusive show discount to its normal retail price.

Adult ticket prices for Race Retro start from just £20 for Friday and £15 for Saturday and Sunday when booking in advance or upgrade to a VIP ticket with fantastic hospitality and a chance to meet our special guests. Children’s tickets are £5 on Friday or Saturday and free on Sunday. Parking is also free throughout. The show is open from 9.30am each day and closes at 5.30pm on Friday and Saturday and 4.30pm on Sunday. To book tickets and for the latest updates, visit www.raceretro.com

From Octane Magazine

The British manufacturer had been expected to sit out the 2010 season while developing a new car for 2011, but will now take two LMP1 cars to Le Mans and one car to the American Le Mans Series opener at Sebring, the next round at Long Beach and the LMS season opener at Paul Ricard in April.

Autosport Magazine revealed last week that Mexican driver Adrian Fernandez was working on a deal to race an Aston in the ALMS, and the former Champ Car racer and reigning ALMS LMP2 champion will join the team’s line-up for the program.

Stefan Mucke, Darren Turner, Harold Primat and Chris Buncombe have all been retained, with Aston Martin Racing due to announce a sixth driver in the coming weeks. The team is also set to enter selected races this season after Le Mans, but the details are still to be confirmed.

“We are looking forward to a great season of racing and we hope to have another strong showing at Le Mans,” said team boss George Howard-Chappell. “I’d like to welcome Adrian to the team, I’m sure with his experience he will be a great addition to our driver line-up.”

Aston Martin will also have an increased GT program in 2010, supporting two teams in the GT1 World Championship and one in the FIA GT2 series. Works drivers Mucke, Turner and Tomas Enge racing in the new GT1 series.

2010 marks the 40th anniversary of the 1970 London to Mexico World Cup Rally. A number of original cars that took part will be on display plus visitors can find out all they need to know about historic rallying. Visitors will be able to see the launch of the 2010 Stage & Road HRCR Championship season plus special scenic tours and the chance to see 100 series start up rallies. One highlight of the event will be the chance to listen to special guest rallying legend ‘Brian Culcheth’ interviewed by Graham Robson, a well known motoring writer and historian.

John Bishop, Car Clubs & Groups Co-ordinator at the Heritage Motor Centre stated “We’re delighted to be hosting the Historic Rally Car Register Open Day. The show is an absolute must for historic rally enthusiasts. Historic rallying is booming and becoming ever more popular among rally fans. This nostalgic event is not to be missed”.

Entry to the event is free of charge with the first 200 visitors also receiving complimentary entry to the museum. Thereafter rally attendees will qualify for discounted entry into the museum for just £6 per person. It should be a great event for all Mini and classic rallying fans.

To find out more information visit www.heritage-motor-centre.co.uk

To draw even more attention, the colour scheme of the Exige S Type 72 equals the famous and easily recognizable black and gold livery and is finished by the same person who painted racing cars for Team Lotus. With a total weight of just 935kg (2061lbs) and a Type 72’s supercharged engine producing 240bhp a sprint from standstill to 62 mph (100 kmh) is done in just 4.7 seconds. Top speed is reached at 145mph (233km/h).

The Sport Pack includes a bespoke high quality interior, sports seats with gold stitching and a adjustable anti-roll bar. Each unit gets a special build plate to remind you of the F1 car’s 20 Grand Prix victories. The exterior gets a set of unique black and gold light weight wheels and is finished with hand-painted logos.
Luke Bennett, Operations Director for Lotus Cars Limited said, “The Lotus Exige S Type 72 is an evocative sportscar, combining cutting edge handling and performance with the iconic Type 72 color scheme, one of the most famous racing liveries of all time. The Exige provides an intense driving experience either on road or track and this limited edition is a worthy car to celebrate such a legendary racing car.”

The Lotus Exige S Type 72 will be sold for £35,995 in the UK and you can get one for €40,332 in Europe.

The design for the Bloodhound SSC – SuperSonic Car – is now complete. Built from aerospace-grade aluminium, it is based on a 14-foot hybrid rocket and a jet engine from the Eurofighter Typhoon. A third engine pumps fuel through to the rocket.

The designers claim it should achieve 135,000 horsepower – equivalent to the power of 180 Formula One cars -British car aims for 1,000mph record and is expected to accelerate to 1,050mph in just 40 seconds.

The original design featured a much smaller rocket, positioned above a rather heavier engine. But this created too much drag. Increasing the size of the rocket threatened the stability of the vehicle, and the decision was made to effectively turn the design upside down.

The record attempt will be made by Wing Commander Andy Green, who established a record speed of 763mph in 1997. It will take place at a dried-up lake bed in South Africa’s Northern Cape Province in 2011.

Check out the Bloodhound SSC site for more information.

The dark blue DB2 Team Car came fifth and third in the French 24-hour race in 1950 and 1951 respectively. It was offered with a low estimate of 250,000 pounds by RM Auctions, in association with Sotheby’s, at its annual “Automobiles of London” sale in Battersea Park.

The classic British racer had been owned by Aston Martin’s chairman David Brown, who coined the “DB” marque, and had been kept unrestored in the same private collection for the last 52 years.

“It was a strong price,” said Simon Kidston, a Geneva- based classic car adviser. “The purchase will give the buyer instant access to exclusive racing events like the Le Mans Classic,” Kidston said in an interview.

The sale raised a total of 10.9 million pounds with fees, with 81 percent of the cars successful, RM said. These figures include lots that were sold after the auction, such as a 1925 Alfa Romeo 6C 1750 GS that found a buyer later in the evening at 522,500 pounds, said RM. No figures were available for the number of lots left unsold at the end of the auction. The presale estimate for the event, which included 84 cars and 37 lots of memorabilia, was 10 million pounds.

In preparation for a full championship effort in 2010, the team plans to enter the last two events on the 2009 ALMS schedule using the track time for testing and development.

The car is currently undergoing extensive system tests at RSR’s East Lansing, Michigan facility and is being prepared for a performance evaluation and shakedown prior to Road Atlanta.

The team will be hosting a press conference on Thursday, September 24 at Road Atlanta to officially unveil the car and drivers for 2009, and tire partners.

RSR will face a flurry of competition in GT2 from the likes of Porsche, Ferrari, BMW, Corvette and others. Fourteen GT2 machines are currently entered for the 1,000-mile/10-hour road race classic. The Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta will be held September 23rd -26th.

After an international driving career blazing the circuits of Europe and Australia, surviving the most exciting yet dangerous era in the history of the sport, Gardner largely achieved his ambition and eventually retired happily with his wife Gloria on the Gold Coast, where he has died after a long illness, aged 78.

The multi-talented Gardner was one of Australia’s greatest motor sport exports, winning more than 100 international races and numerous European titles as a driver, heading development programs for major manufacturers as an engineer, and taking out Australia’s biggest races as a team owner.

Long-time friend, employer and rival Sir Jack Brabham said Gardner “could drive anything”, and British ace Vic Elford – who vies with Gardner for the title of the world’s best all-round driver – said after a race in identical cars that the Australian had given him “an hour’s masterclass in how to keep an aggressive driver behind”.

Gardner, a gifted athlete, represented his native NSW in swimming, won national surf lifesaving titles, and was a handy if reluctant boxer. He earned enough from seven professional bouts to open his own garage. He also taught Brabham how to dive and sail, and maintained a single-figure golf handicap well into his senior years.

In his autobiography, The Sir Jack Brabham Story, Brabham described his old friend as “one of motor racing’s born characters”, whose colorful turns of phrase would have audiences in hysterics. “Although much of his language was completely unprintable, I’d defy anyone not to laugh. He could be hilarious.”

The laconic Gardner’s humour often masked a direct, no-compromise approach to life. One can only wonder what the rather stiff engineers at the German car manufacturer Porsche made of Gardner’s assessment after racing their startling new 917 sports racer over the frightening 187-turn Nurburgring circuit in Germany.

The 917 eventually became a great car, but in 1969 Porsche’s regular test drivers refused to drive the wayward machine. Gardner only took the assignment with the lure of a bucketful of Deutschmarks.

“I got caught between greed and common sense,” he later admitted.

“It was a bloody awful thing. The chassis flexed so much they filled the (frame) tubes with helium and rigged up a gauge so that if the gauge dropped you knew the chassis had cracked. They said if the gauge went down, I was to drive it back to the pits. Bugger that, I said; if the gauge drops, I park it.”

Gardner “frightened myself fartless” in the Porsche 917, which he reckoned had too much power for its narrow tyres: “The computer said they would be man enough for the job, but the bloody computer wasn’t strapped into the hot seat guiding this thing around the Eifel mountains.”

Fate led Gardner to race: he was 12 years old when his father was hit by a car and killed. He moved in with his uncle, a noted racer in Sydney, who later provided an old MG for his nephew’s first car race, which he duly won.

After numerous sports car wins in Jaguars that he had rebuilt, Gardner decided to try his luck and followed Brabham to Britain. He leased out his garage and “decided to give it five years” – but ended up staying two decades.

Formula one success eluded him – he made eight World Championship starts in 1964-65 driving an underfunded Brabham Team racing car, with a best of eighth in the British Grand Prix – but Gardner won in almost everything else.

He also played a central role in the development of cars for Ford and British constructor Lola.

Between 1967 and 1973, he won three British Touring Car Championships, the European Formula 5000 Championship, and finished runner-up in the European Formula Two Championship. He even became the first Australian to contest a NASCAR stock car race in the United States.

But after attending too many of his colleagues’ funerals, Gardner and his famous white towelling hat returned to Australia in 1975. He built a radical rear-engined Chevrolet Corvair that he drove to 41 wins from 49 starts, taking out the Australian Sports Sedan Championship before finally hanging up his helmet at the end of 1977.

Gardner turned to team management, initially turning colourful Sydney driver Allan Grice’s fortunes around with two more titles in the Corvair and a second place at Bathurst in a Torana. He then established an association with BMW that resulted in the creation of a driver training centre in Queensland and netted the 1985 and 1987 Australian Touring Car Championships for Jim Richards, and three Super Touring titles in the 1990s for Tony Longhurst and Paul Morris.

In between, he guided Longhurst and Tomas Mezera to victory in Australia’s premier race, the Bathurst 1000, driving a Ford Sierra. He ruffled a few feathers along the way, but was a much-loved figure in motor sport around the world.

Gardner, a winner all his life, may not have been perfect but he was always perfectly Frank. He is survived by his wife Gloria, and children Steven and Kristin.

By David Hassall

Powered by nothing but super-heated water, the team hope to blast their way to more than 130mph along a runway more usually reserved for the Nasa space shuttle. In doing so, they will set a new time for the fastest steam-powered vehicle. That was supposed to happen on Friday but so far the record has remained tantalisingly out of reach. At time of writing, the team had nothing to show for their efforts but bruised egos, damaged pride and a flat tyre.

That might still change: they were set to make another assault on the record yesterday, but even if they make it over the finish line, the frustration of mechanical breakdowns and unforeseen mishaps during what is, in essence, a giant physics experiment, has left the team with a renewed respect for a speed record that has stood unchallenged since 1906. “It’s certainly been tougher than I expected,” says Charles Burnett III, the driver of the car, after Thursday’s failed attempt.

“The issues have been more to do with the problems we have had to overcome, rather than actually driving the car. This week has been tough — the problems have just started piling up. All the right components are in the car, we just have to get them working together at the right moment.”

Burnett, a nephew of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, who made it into the record books in 1999 for an offshore water speed of 137mph, is no stranger to this kind of thing. Neither is Don Wales, the team test driver, who is a nephew of the speed ace Donald Campbell and grandson of Sir Malcolm Campbell. But neither of them anticipated the technical problems and old-fashioned bad luck that has bedevilled the project.

The 20-strong team have been in America since July preparing to take on the current world record, which stands at 127.659mph and was set by the American Fred Marriott in his Stanley Steamer. His car was a magnificent cigar-shaped contraption built by the Stanley brothers. But technical problems forced the latest attempt to be postponed for several days. Then last weekend the team made their first practice run and smashed the record speed reaching 137.14mph — but without the presence of monitors from the FIA, the governing body of world motor sport, it didn’t count.

Then, on Wednesday, the technical problems began. Under the rules of speed records, the car must complete two separate runs through a timed one-mile stretch, then an average speed is taken. The first official run went well, but as the team turned the car around for the second run, a valve problem was discovered. Mechanics battled throughout the day to fix the problem to be ready in time for another attempt on Thursday morning. Again the first run went well. With temperatures reaching 40C, the car clocked 130.6mph on the first timed run. After a swift 45-minute turnaround, Burnett started the return leg, hoping to increase the speed to 140mph. Halfway through it, however, the car was hit by the bane of all motorists’ lives: a slow puncture, probably caused by debris on the track. The record attempt was aborted yet again on Friday because of a faulty water filter.

“It’s annoying that we have these problems because we broke the existing record last Saturday,” says a clearly frustrated Burnett. “Unfortunately, there were no FIA timekeepers here to record the feat. It’s been a little tense because everybody in the team is doing their darn best to make the car work. It’s one thing when you have a mechanical issue which can be rectified but a tyre puncture is unlucky, a real nuisance”.

Painted in British racing green and with the muscular dimensions of a jet fighter, the vehicle is called Inspiration and bears little resemblance to the quaint Thomas the Tank engine machines more usually associated with steam power. In typically British fashion, it was originally conceived on a student notepad, designed in a wooden shed in Hampshire and built on a relatively modest budget of £650,000.

That was in 1999. It has since gone through several transformations with some help from Glynne Bowsher, mechanical director on the Thrust SSC, which holds the ultimate land-speed record. Today it is 25ft long and looks more like a rocket than a car — and it drives like one, too, according to Burnett. “It’s a real dream. The whole car is really stable. It’s like driving a dart.”

It looks sleek on the outside but Inspiration is a complicated network of water tanks, tubes and wiring that would give Heath Robinson sleepless nights. It works by using liquefied petroleum gas to heat 140 litres of water up to 1,000C. This is then forced through two miles of fine piping, which turns the liquid into superheated steam. When the steam reaches 400C, it is fired into a turbine, powering a shaft that drives the wheels.

Inspiration will pump out up to 360bhp, plus enough hot water to make the equivalent of 23 cups of tea a second. The three-ton car has no gearbox and a steering wheel with only seven degrees of lateral movement. Retro-style fins at the rear help it to steer straight across the six-mile sand track that is part of Edwards Air Force Base in California, which has been used as a landing strip for the space shuttle, as well as being where Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier.

Burnett’s main fear every time he climbs into the cockpit is a massive explosion. “The car is loaded with 70 litres of LPG,” he said. “If that ignites, I’m more likely to take a vertical trajectory than a horizontal one.

“There’s a five-second delay when I press the accelerator to the floor and then all hell breaks loose. The sound is deafening and the heat in the cockpit is immense and there’s a huge surge of torque when I open the throttle.”

Despite the frustrations of last week, Burnett remains confident the record is within reach: “It’s a record that has to be broken,” he says. “And when it is, it will have been worth all the struggles and difficulties we have had to overcome over the years.

“When I break it, the first thing I’m going to do is have a cold beer. There’s a bar near here where Chuck Yeager went when he became the first man to break the sound barrier in 1947. He was flying a Bell X-1 at 45,000ft. Hopefully, I’ll be a bit closer to the ground.”

Whether Burnett will be in that bar today drinking a beer of celebration or drowning his sorrows is all down to Lady Luck.

From The Times Online