The Gurney-Eagle was the second US built car to win a Grand Prix. The first was Jimmy Murphy in a Duesenberg at the French Grand Prix held at Le Mans in 1921. But, I like your idea of a movie about the Eagles. It could also include the Indy cars that came later and did so well.

This is nit-picking, I know,but, the GT40 won LeMans in '66,'68 and '69. In 1967 it was the Mark IV with Gurney and Foyt. Not really a GT40. It was a completely different design. Still, it was four in a row for Ford.

No one has mentioned Trabant. I know they have become a "cult" car of sorts, but, they were junk when new and they still are. The photo shows the factory in Zwickau just before it closed for good.

You might want to double-check with Getty Images on the the first photo at the beginning of the article. That looks like the main grandstand at Goodwood, not Le Mans.

B is the Italian Job. 3 Minis' and the 1275 is the engine size; 1275cc. Only the Cooper S had that engine back then.

While it may seem impressive to build the 3.3Liter Bugatti engine from scratch, it has been done a number of times before. For the last thirty or forty years (maybe longer) Bugatti parts have been re-manufactured by the Bugatti Owners Club (from the original drawings) and many other sources. You can get just about any…

The Tiger tank that Porsche designed was also over-engineered and expensive to maintain... not much has changed.

In some ways, this reminds me of watching Mark Donohue in the Porsche 917-30 Can Am race at Road America. The Porsche was astonishingly quick and impressive, but just made a "whoosh" sound as it went down the straight. The McLarens and Shadows and the other Can Am cars made a wonderful "basso profundo" noise that you…

Damn... you beat me to it. I've been thinking "Quasimodo" every time I see a Panamera.

If my memory serves... Recaro started out as Reutter building bodies and seats for Porsche (and other companies )when Porsche was just gearing up for mass production in the early years. Porsche then bought out the Reutter company for it's body manufacturing ,but the seat division was not part of the deal and it became…

From what I've read about the gearbox, it was very complex. Two engines , each with a prop shaft running on either side of the pilot to the gearbox in the nose, to drive the counter-rotating gears in the two propellers. Yikes.

Here is another really good looking plane that never flew. The Bugatti Type 100 was built for a speed record attempt. It had two Bugatti race car engines mounted behind the cockpit. The war started just as it was being finished, so it was hidden from the Germans. It is now a static display in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

The Bugatti factory and estate still exist. The factory was bought by Hispano in he early sixties to make aircraft parts. The estate, with the villa and stables and Chateau St Jean was bought by VW and refurbished for the company offices to build the Veyron. For many years, before VW came along, the estate was sadly…

I had the same question. Could be just bad lighting on a bad photo. Here's another one from a similar angle

I recall reading about the record runs on the autobahn and they did close down the road, but, only the side they were running on. The opposing lanes were open to normal traffic. And you're right, there was very little traffic on the autobahns back then, so, it was probably not a big deal.

You're right... Ernest Henry and Albert Lory should have been on the list. My personal favorite is the Delage 2LCV 4-cam V-12 that ran in 1924 and 1925 in supercharged and un-supercharged form. I think each V12 engine has something like 196 roller-bearings. Amazing.

It's good to know that there is still interest in Miller and Goosen among racing enthusiast these days. I was good friends with Robert Sutherland, who in addition to having restored a number of Miller race cars, purchased all of Leo Goosen's original drawings from his widow. Mark Dees and other Miller owners were also…

Leo Goosen is often overlooked. Perhaps because he had a low key and quiet personality, his boss Harry Miller and later Fred Offenhauser took most of the credit for Goosen's work. Goosen also did a lot of the work on the Ford 4-Cam Indy engine that Lotus used at Indy. Again Ford took most of the credit.

Having owned a couple of Lotus Elans, I have to say that the phrase "The most consistently, endearingly terrible car company" sums up everything about Lotus. There are other companies with similar histories, but, they are a distant second.

Anyone care to guess how long it will take the "criminal element" to bypass the kill switch feature on their new getaway car??