Derek Robinson, aka 'Red Robbo', good or bad?

[Lacquer Peel]

It'd be an interesting discussion if it wasn't full of TEDIOUS FUCKS.

[John F]

And back at you....

 

If you see a thread that doesn't interest you, just bypass it, what's so fucking hard about that?

It really pisses me off on here when some folks feel the need to constantly stick their oar in when others are happily having a discussion that they personally aren't interested in.

If you've heard it all before or aren't interested, just hit the 'back' button on your browser and find another topic to talk shit about.

 

It's a forum FFS, go look it up if the concept confuses you.

 

Ignore the little cunt, it usually goes away when it's time for its mother to dress it for school.

[simmo]

Tedious Fecks, that sounds like my cue,  A long while back I did a union H & S course (IOSH, NEBOSH or WHY) given by an old  boy that used to be a production line shop steward from I think Longbridge/maybe Cowley (yeh on topic ish).  Some proper Tory Boy asked him was there anything he regreted as a shop steward.

He answered that he was truly ashamed that they had had a vote on weather or not to  allow 'blacks' to work on the line .  This was the sixties so I guess a sign of the times rather than the unions not being right on.

[Junkman]

Shouldn't we now proceed to discuss who the tedious fucks are?

[John F]

The only tedious fucks here are 'Dr. Steven Brule', or any of the half-dozen other aliases used by this avid bed-wetter and serial onanist over the last couple of years.

[dollywobbler]

I'd read it somewhere that the SD1 had a live rear axle for engineering reasons rather than cost. It was a simpler way to build rear suspension where the wheels would remain upright during cornering, this retaining maximum amount of tyre on the road. The idea was that if you have more tyre in contact with the road you'd have more grip. It's the same theory used on the P6 suspension set up, just simpler. 

 

Cost was no doubt the biggest driver - the solution they came up with was pretty good though. A well-located live axle can deliver many benefits of independent rear suspension for much less cost. The Reliant Scimitar was a good example of this. The P6 was over-complicated really - did it truly offer great benefits over its simpler Triumph rival?

 

The TR7 also uses a live axle. Spen King was excellent at delivering genius on a budget. Something Issigonis just could not do. If anyone is a design hero of the British Motor Industry, it's King.

[John F]

A friend of mine had a TR7 back in the mid-90s. He was then offered a job that came with a company car, a Rover 216Si if I recall correctly.

 

My mate was truly miffed that not only was the Rover faster than the TR7, it also handled and accelerated better than it

[Junkman]

Cost was no doubt the biggest driver - the solution they came up with was pretty good though. A well-located live axle can deliver many benefits of independent rear suspension for much less cost. The Reliant Scimitar was a good example of this. The P6 was over-complicated really - did it truly offer great benefits over its simpler Triumph rival?

The DeDion-ish setup of the P6 (the main difference between a DeDion and King's rear axle concept is that a DeDion axle has a rigid axle tube and telescopic driveshafts, whereas the P6 has a telescopic DeDion tube and one-piece driveshafts) has the advantage of the lesser unsprung weight compared with a live axle. The advantage might be marginal in normal driving, but it is fuggin ace in the "because we can" department. It also takes away considerable space from the boot, thus necessitating the beautifully middle-class bourgeois square git philistine spare wheel solution. You aren't a proper 'dad' if you don't carry the spare wheel on the bootlid of your P6 and my children constantly pester me to that effect.

 

Holy shit, what a tedious fuck I am...

 

The TR7 also uses a live axle. Spen King was excellent at delivering genius on a budget. Something Issigonis just could not do. If anyone is a design hero of the British Motor Industry, it's King.

I have a lot of time for TR7s and it is a prime example of what I mean when I say some of the 70s BL styling was taunted at the time, but in the end aged better than other contemporary overhyped shit.

 

Mr. King sure was one of the best automotive engineers ever, England or elsewhere. For me he is right up there with Dr. Uhlenhaut and Dante Ciacosa. I'm infamous in the P6 club for terminating discussions regarding the modification of P6es with the sentence: If it was good enough for Spen King, it should be more than sufficient for you, so leave it as he specified it.

[oman5]

For me the very definition of "tedious" is those who have no valid contribution to make other than to slag off those that do. it's only tedious if you A> have no interest in old cars- so why are you on this forum? or B> are too dim to understand what people are on about. in which case, DUH! JOEY! BELM!

[John F]

 

I have a lot of time for TR7s and it is a prime example of what I mean when I say some of the 70s BL styling was taunted at the time, but in the end aged better than other contemporary overhyped shit.

 

 

Again, I disagree.

 

I quite like / feel sorry for TR7s (delete as the mood takes me), but they're overweight, underpowered, weirdly styled with those massive bumpers for the septic market and a little bit too ostentatious for what they are. They also FEEL overweight and slow and not particularly sporty, which is the final nail in their coffin. A shame the TR7 never 'officially' got the V8, that might have helped its image, but at the end of the day it was little more than a whimper after the bang of the TR6.

 

Styling is subjective. I think the TR7 looked dated within its own lifetime, and I'd much rather look at an Opel GT.

[dollywobbler]

Two things disappoint me about the TR7  - the lack of power and the hideous dashboard that should have worn Airfix badges. 

 

A V8 in a TR7 clearly improves it, but a tweaked four-pot makes a hell of a difference too. I drove one with fairly mild tuning - including better induction and exhaust systems - and it was an absolute riot in exactly the way most TR7s aren't. 

 

It always had a hell of a job though. The TR6 was brutal and sounded fabulous. A comfortable, wedge-shaped four-pot was never going to be the same. They should have put MG badges on it and killed off the MGB instead.

[Junkman]

I don't quite understand what power and drivability have to do with styling.

I also fail to understand what 1960s cars have to do with 1970s styling and in which way they are comparable, but since we are at it, the Opel GT and the MGB may have arguably looked better in the day, but their designs did not age that well.

[Spiny Norman]

Whatever we think about the shape after we've had over 30 years to get used to it, the fact is the styling was what stopped a lot of people even considering a TR7 back in the day, and any who did try one for size found it drove far too much like a 2 door saloon and not enough like the sports car it was being touted as.

 

Today, with those bumpers tidied up, it could almost pass as a Bangle BMW.....

[Junkman]

You said it a lot better than I managed to do.

[HillmanImp]

I do want a TR7 at some point. I have always liked the styling. Its was a ma-housivee departure from the previous but if they had not done so they would undoubtedly have been accused of not moving with the times.

 

As for driving them, never tried it yet. I will look forward to that dismal experience. It will probably seem fine after my GT6. The GT6 is slow as fook, its just the fact that you are sat really low and it makes a lot of noise that gives the impression that it is fast.

[chaseracer]

The TR7 also uses a live axle...

The one that shot a red light in front of me some years back ended up with a very dead axle after I hit its rear wheel at 40mph...

 

Spen King was excellent at delivering genius on a budget. Something Issigonis just could not do. If anyone is a design hero of the British Motor Industry, it's King.

Very, very true. CSK does not get the recognition he deserves.

[Junkman]

Mr. King was a fuggin genius.

 

 

 

A DeDion-ish rear axle held longitudinally in place with a fuggin Watts linkage. Beat that. This does take the ability to think in fuggin more than fuggin three dimensions. He was there in 1959.

 

I'm an automotive engineer and you could drop me on a deserted island with nothing but a fuggin drawing board and fuggin pencils and for the rest of me fuggin loife I couldn't possibly come up with this. Fuggin ace. Nobody in automotive history ever beat that. Especially not the hayshakers nowadays what with their rotten computer horseshit who think they are so supersmart but in reality don't realise that they are so stupid that they rattle when they walk. I piss on them.

[Junkman]

While I'm at it, I recommend everyone to take a closer look at the SD1 rear axle setup. Yes, it is a live axle at first glance, but if you engage brain, you will see that it is in fact fuggin self-steering. In 1976 for fuggs sake.

 

Do not underestimate British engineering. Just don't. Trust me on that.

[simmo]

Sorry taking this even more off topic.

 

Junkman pls pardon my ignorance  but what or who is a Hayshaker?

 

 Also in another thread you talked about stock cars I am assuming these are the BRISCA F1 type?  As I said there we used to watch these when we could but as I live at the wrong end of the country to most of the fixtures this was few and far between.  I have a vague memory of a bit of a hoohar around rear axles in theses.  I think a couple of guys were looking at  using American sprint cars type set ups which used to allow the car to squat down under load and even allow a bit of rear steer ?? Like I said a memory from way back so may be total nonsense but would be interested to know if this happen was banned. I think maybe Nigel Whorton's shale car was possibly connected to this, like he needed any extra help getting around Coventry.

[Junkman]

In ye goode olde dayse hayshakers used to do just that, walk up and down a freshly mowed field and shake the hay with a hayfork, so the seeds fall to the ground and only the straw is later collected, thus avoiding the field getting more and more barren over time. Due to the monotony and tediousness of the job, the persons selected to do it were not considered the intellectual elite.
 
You are absolutely right with your observations regarding the stockcars, and yes, it's BriSCA F1s, or rather NACO F1s in my case. Around the mid 80s a point was reached that yet more power from your engine didn't give you a real advantage anymore, so improvements in the handling department were evaluated. At the time, most F1s were still employing leaf springs. So the next step was linking the axles and using coilovers and that led to some quite interesting setups. The legal/illegal debate was more prevalent in the UK, because NACO had a somewhat more relaxed attitude towards it. And yes, inspiration was taken from US Sprint cars to an extend, at least geometry-wise. Sprint Cars have torsion bar suspension, something that never really made it into European stockcars. But as you say, Sprint Car rear axles are indeed self steering, and the entire geometry is so that the roll centre is above the centre of gravity, hence Sprint Cars actually lean inward during cornering.
Nigel Whorton is one of the guys who constantly pushed the envelope engineering-wise, and I think he used the services of Clive Lintern for it.
Another one is Chris Elwell, who raced a spaceframe car built by Peter Kuriger from New Zealand. It was one of the very few BriSCA/NACO cars ever with torsion bar suspension, and it also had an all aluminium Sprint Car engine. The car was so radical, that it triggered several rule changes, eventually becoming illegal after (I think) the 1989 season.

Now BTT, Red Robbo was either a total arsehole, or on VDA's payroll 

[simmo]

Thank you very much for the info Junkman, I'm glad to have a memory that was somewhere near what actually was going on Cheers