Motor Racing And Gallery Motor

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As the UK Prime Minister promises support for the electric vehicle industry, Green MotorSport asks whether he is backing the right people. The British electric vehicle industry has traditionally led the world and already has the finest electric drive trains, but we have to wait another two years for the automotive industry to get its act together before grants are available for people wanting to buy electric vehicles. Competition from innovative energy industries could conserve the UK’s diminishing fuel resources, create new jobs and make Britain a leading exporting country again!

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has challenged the Government to back his ambitious plans to make London the electric car capital of Europe, helping to create jobs, cut carbon emissions and improve air quality. The Mayor has outlined a series of major initiatives to achieve at least 100,000 electric vehicles on the capital’s streets as soon as possible, equating to five per cent of total vehicles. The plans include working with businesses, boroughs and other public sector organisations to deliver 25,000 charging spaces in London’s workplaces, retail outlets, streets, public car parks and station car parks by 2015.

Transport to cut C02 emissions

The Committee on Climate Change, which was set up under the terms of the Climate Change Act, has proposed that there should be a statutory requirement for the UK to make substantial reductions in C02 emissions, including those of road transport, by 2020. That is only eleven years away, so we need to start now to build up electric vehicle fleets and buy our own electric cars if we are to meet climate change targets.

New electric car charging stations ready for deployment

The Electric Vehicle Solar Canopy has been developed to provide protection from the weather for the vehicle as well as generating electricity from the integrated solar roof. The rooftop fits perfectly into a standard parking space and consists of a semi transparent solar array, allowing around 20% daylight through between the PV Cells, and providing shade from the sun and protection from the rain. The green electricity can be used either to charge the batteries on electric cars or it can be used in the adjacent building. The Canopy is a modular design which contains 6 special solar laminates each rated at 260 watt peak (Wp), providing a total output from each parking Canopy of 1.5 kilowatts peak (kWp). In the UK this Canopy will generate around 1,100kWh/year. For more information about this brand new solar recharging station please contact a member of Green MotorSport. Currently solar charging stations start at around 15,000 pounds per unit.

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-strapped South Korean automaker Ssangyong Motor selected India's Mahindra & Mahindra on Thursday as the preferred bidder to buy a majority stake, a move that promises to give India's top utility vehicle maker greater global reach.

Three companies — Mahindra, Raghav Industries and Daewoo Bus — submitted binding bids earlier this week out of the six bidders that qualified in June to examine Ssangyong Motor's accounts and business, Ssangyong said Thursday.

The car maker went into court-approved bankruptcy protection early last year amid falling sales and mounting red ink. It was majority-owned by Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp., or SAIC, one of China's largest vehicle manufacturers, until SAIC lost management control during the bankruptcy process.

Ssangyong Motor Co., South Korea's fifth-largest automaker, is far smaller than domestic rivals Hyundai Motor and Kia Motors Corp. It mostly manufactures light SUVs, but also makes a luxury sedan, the Chairman.

"We made our decision after evaluating the offered bidding prices, fund-raising capability, management plans after acquisition, job guarantee for current employees and other terms," Ssangyong said in a statement.

Mahindra will pay Ssangyong a deposit of 5 percent of the acquisition price it offered and Ssangyong and its top executives will sign a memorandum of understanding with the Indian company by the end of this month.

Ssangyong did not reveal how much Mahindra will pay for the stake, but South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported, without citing the source of the information, that Mahindra offered $480 million.

The Indian sport-utility vehicle maker will conduct a final due diligence on Ssangyong next month before settling on an acquisition price in October. The final contract is scheduled to be signed in November.

Mahindra & Mahindra has long wanted to be a bigger global player, and executives say Ssangyong's over 1,200 global dealerships, 7 models and 5 brands will help it access new markets across Europe, Russia and Latin America.

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Well, hopefully not Uruguay or France after that terrible, but predictable bore-draw last night.

I think the bookies have got it about right by making Spain the favourites- they are the most likely winners, but I also think that Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Serbia and Honduras could spring a few surprises along the way and that Holland should be in for a very good tournament. As for England: well, they have a great manager, but I’m not sure that they have enough genuinely world-class players in the squad to win it. Argentina are the complete opposite- they do have enough quality players to win the tournament, (including probably the best player in the world- Lionel Messi), but the doubts are about their manager, who prior to the World Cup hadn’t impressed with his selections or tactics.

Anyway, what do you reckon?

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While we celebrate the start today of the football World Cup in South Africa, (more on the World Cup later), let’s not forget that today is also the 55th anniversary of one of the worst sporting disasters of all time, one in which over 80 people lost their lives. Here’s my piece to mark the anniversary of the 1955 Le Mans disaster from the Daily Express.

RECKLESS BRITISH PLAYBOY BEHIND MOTOR RACING'S BIGGEST DISASTER
Neil Clark

It was the worst – and most ­horrific – disaster in the history of motor racing. On June 11, 1955, at the Le Mans 24-hour race, at least 83 spectators were killed and hundreds more injured when the burning remains of the Mercedes car driven by 49-year-old Frenchman Pierre Levegh, flew into the crowd­ following a terrible on-track collision. A 400-square-yard stretch of cheering ­people became a black, hysterical horror,” reported Time magazine.

The disaster stunned the world and led to some countries banning motor racing altogether. Fifty-five years on, questions remain as to who was to blame for the tragedy, as a BBC4 ­documentary relates.

Was it caused by Mercedes gambling on unproven new technologies? Was the death toll so high because there was a secret fuel additive in a hidden tank which caused Levegh’s car to explode? Was there an official cover-up on the causes of the crash by the French authorities? Or was it all to do with the recklessness of a devil-may-care British driver who had been told he had only a few years to live?

The backdrop to the disaster was intense rivalry between German and British motor-racing teams and their drivers. But the fierce competition had dire consequences for safety.

Motor racing in the Fifties was far more dangerous than today. Safety measures such as guard rails and tyre walls were non-existent. Drivers risked life and limb in every race. Just a fortnight before the Le Mans disaster Alberto Ascari, a dual world champion, had been killed at Monza in Italy. Only four days earlier he had ­narrowly escaped when his car tumbled into Monaco harbour. At Le Mans, six men had died in the race since it began in 1923.

But before 1955 spectators did not expect to be victims.
At the 1955 race more than 250,000 people eagerly awaited a battle between Mercedes, the dominant force in motor sport, and Jaguar, its British rival. Lead driver for Mercedes was Juan Manuel Fangio, the reigning world champion from Argentina, regarded as the greatest driver of all time.


Jaguar’s star was the dashing blond and ultra-patriotic 26-year-old Englishman Mike Hawthorn, a man known to hate all things German. It was said of Hawthorn that if he had been born 10 years earlier he would have been a Battle of Britain pilot. As it was he focused on beating German cars on the race track – calling his own cars “Merc eaters”. But unbeknown to his adoring ­public the Golden Boy was a sick man. In 1954 he’d had a ­kidney removed and was told he would be dead before he was 30. Hawthorn was determined to live his short life to the full. An exuberant character, he smoked and drank to excess, loved parties and piloted his own plane. But his favourite form of recreation was chasing and seducing Europe’s most beautiful women.

In 1953, after celebrating his victory in the French Grand Prix, Hawthorn spent the night in bed with a French girl. She became pregnant but the affair was kept secret and the girl, from a respectable background, was forced to live in a house at the end of her family’s garden until the baby was born. Hawthorn travelled to Paris after his lover had asked him for help and five years later gave his young son a ride in his car when he and his mother visited England.

Hawthorn was also a practical joker. Fellow driver Stirling Moss recalls an occasion when he was standing under a tree outside a pub when he thought it had started to rain. When he looked up he saw Hawthorn poised precariously in the tree, urinating on him.

On the racetrack Hawthorn played to win. He was accused by some of reckless driving and the events at Le Mans did little to dispel that reputation. Around two hours into the race Hawthorn began to slow for a pit stop. The braking caused the car behind him, an Austin Healey driven by British driver Lance Macklin, to pull into the middle of the track. Pierre Levegh’s Mercedes, travelling at 150mph, mounted the back of Macklin’s car and soared into the air. After hitting a mound it exploded and broke up, spraying red-hot shrapnel and debris into the crowd. Levegh was thrown from the car and killed on impact in front of his wife.

Eyewitness Jacques Grelley later said. “I was stepping over bodies – they were everywhere. I couldn’t talk for three hours.” His companion was decapitated with his binoculars still around his neck. As people lay dying, priests administered the last rites.

Incredibly the race continued because organisers believed a mass ­exodus would hinder rescuers. While Mercedes withdrew their drivers six hours later as a mark of respect, Hawthorn was instructed to continue and Jaguar claimed a ­hollow victory.

The European media were quick to blame the playboy British driver for what had happened. A fierce war of words broke out between ­Mercedes and Jaguar. ­Hawthorn protested his innocence. “In my judgment I allowed sufficient time for the driver of any following car to be aware of my intentions and for him to take such action as might be required without being of danger to others,” he said. He considered quitting the sport but the official inquiry exonerated him and said no single person could be held responsible.

The verdict was supported by Belgian racing driver and writer Paul Frere. “It is completely clear from the photographs ­Hawthorn did not make a sudden-brake-and-pull-sharp-right manoeuvre only a short distance from the pits, thereby endangering the cars near him.”

The tragedy could have been put down to many factors. Before the race Pierre Levegh had expressed ­concerns about the speed of the cars in the ­narrow pit straight.

Levegh’s car was made from a ­magnesium alloy which made it lighter and therefore faster but the downside was that it was highly inflammable. Also the car’s brakes were unreliable, a deadly combination.

For years rumours persisted that a secret fuel additive in a hidden extra fuel tank caused the car to explode when it hit the bank, though this has never been proved. The accident led to the imposition of new safety standards at Le Mans. Mercedes left Formula One at the end of the 1955 season, not to return for nearly 40 years.

Hawthorn recovered his appetite for the sport and in 1958 won a thrilling duel with Stirling Moss to become the first ever British Formula One world champion. Having reached the pinnacle of his profession he then decided to retire and planned to marry the model Jean Howarth.

There was no happy ending. But it was not his kidney disease that killed Hawthorne. On a wet morning in ­January 1959, his Jaguar spun off the A3 bypass near Guildford, Surrey, and hit a tree. He died in minutes.

Ironically, it may have been his fierce anti-German sentiment that killed him. A friend had been driving a ­Mercedes on the same stretch of road and Hawthorn, who couldn’t bear to see a German car get the better of his Jaguar “Merc eater”, decided to race against it. So the man whom many held responsible for the horrors of Le Mans, met his own tragic and untimely death less than four years later.

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"Do you want a world where consumerism reigns supreme? Or a world that allows for silence, intimacy, culture, privacy, family life as well as intellectual and spiritual life?"

Paris’s splendid Mayor Bertrand Delanoe, on why he wants big department stores in the French capital to stay shut on Sundays.

What a shame that he’s not the Mayor of London too.

Hat tip: The First Post.

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