Gordon's Got a Gong

Gordon Murray that is.  I did a piece on him back in April 2016.  Not that the BBC seem to want to recognise one of our great British engineers.  (Although born in South Africa, his parentage was Scottish and his nationality is British)

He designed the McLaren F1 and five F1 Championship winning cars including Ayrton Senna's 1988-Winning McLaren.  He's been involved in many innovative projects since.  Fortunately, at least Autocar have the story.

 

The gong he's been given in the New Years Honours List is the CBE (Commander of the British Empire)

 

I think great engineers should be given a Knighthood, but apparently they go to particularly odious Tory MPs called John who threaten to vote against Teresa May's Brexit deal: 

When is a Turbo not a Turbo?

When it's an after-shave?

Mmm, nice.

 

But not what I'm thinking about.  How about when it is a fish?

Amusing but no.

 

Actually, it is when we are talking about the Porsche Taycan:

Porsche's upcoming electric car will come in three flavours, Taycan, Taycan 4S and Taycan Turbo.

 

Except purely electric cars don't have turbos.  Autoguide have the full story here.  I guess "Turbo" just means "top of the range" in Porsche-speak.

 

It's  just a name.

 

Nothing to get wound up about.

Merry Crashmas

Two BBC News stories on consecutive days about cars ending up in interesting positions.

Looks like this one today was probably drink-driving:

Never seen a tree at Christmas decorated with a Peugeot 207 before.

 

Meanwhile, over in Cambridgeshire, this Peugeot 207 looks bad too:

It looks even worse from inside the car: 

This was from yesterday.

Looks like this one was caused by an inexperienced driver experiencing icy conditions.

Amazingly, nobody was hurt in either crash.

'Tis the season to be lucky.

Fit To Drive?

This eight-year-old boy is a little hero.

His name is Ben Hedger .

 

His mother had a seizure while travelling at 60mph.  She blacked out.

 

When he realised that something was amiss, he put on the hazard lights and steered the car to the hard-shoulder where it stalled.

 

"He said he just did what he had to do otherwise we would have died."

 

He's probably right - he probably had no choice.

 

But he did do it and that makes him a hero.

 

The car was a Ford Ka, it will have been damaged bouncing along the central reservation but she won't be behind the wheel for a good while now - if ever.  But she is alive. And so is Ben.  And so is everyone else who was on the A120 near Colchester at the time.

 

So a good news story on the run-up to Christmas while The World is being crap.