Heroes and Villains

[warren t claim]

I thought I'd start a thread about people who have changed the face of motoring for better or for worse. Feel free to comment and add you own.

 

The first bad boy on my list needs no introduction.

He's not here due to any appeasement reasons as Prime Minister but for his actions as Chancellor of the Exchequer back in 1938 when he raised the duty on DERV and therefore wiping out all the hard work done by Harry Ricardo in making Great Britain the world leader in diesel technology. Today the British car industry could of been as dominant in Europe as the the Germans or French had he not snuffed out our commercial advantage.

[Timewaster]

 

Barbara Castle.

Gave us breathalysers (arguably good), 70mph motorway limits (Booooo), helped decimate the railways and stood up for the women at Ford in their strive for equal pay.

 

A mixed bag from this old bag.

[dollywobbler]

I'd like to present Issigonis as a villain. Talented for sure, but perhaps if he'd tailored the Mini/Landcrab a bit more towards the potential customer rather than egotistically thinking that he knew best, BMC wouldn't have ended up in so much bother.

 

Which leads me to Red Robbo. Just what British Leyland needed - a workforce that became very shy of actual work. I probably have an unfair view of unions entirely based on this twat. Not saying there weren't management issues at BL, but how long do you really think you can go on making a half-arsed job of turning cars out before a company falls on its arse?

 

Hero? The afore-mentioned Harry Riccardo, even if it was companies like Citroen that ended up benefiting from his skills rather than the British market. I'll also nominate the Michelin factory for allowing Citroen to make seriously wacky cars for many decades, rather than smothering all the individuality out. That job was left for Peugeot...

[Amazo]

 

John Z. DeLorean - He was most well known for developing the original Pontiac GTO, the Pontiac Firebird, Pontiac Grand Prix, his tenure at Chevrolet in the late 60's/early 70's that not only turned them around, but had Chevy on their own nearly selling as many cars as Ford, the DeLorean DMC-12 sports car, and for his high profile 1982 arrest on charges of drug trafficking. The alleged drug trafficking was supposedly an attempt to raise funds for his struggling company, which declared bankruptcy that same year.

[dollywobbler]

 

Another one is Andre Lefebvre. The one man behind the Traction Avant, 2CV and DS. Yes, there were other important people involved but blimey did this bloke know how to make a car handle! That pic is from a book that's well worth a read.

[Pete-M]

VILLAINS

 

 

Napoleon Bonaparte. For making most of Europe drive on the wrong side of the road.

 

 

Mr A. Hitler of Berlin. For making the Czech Republic drive on the wrong side of the road.

 

 

Johnny Two-Jags. For putting a bus lane on the M4 and implementing anti-motorist legislations under the order of the idiot below.

 

 

Gormless Clown, for being the enemy of the motorist for 13 years. Tax hikes on anything to do with motoring, and the abolition of rolling classic car tax.

 

HERO

 

 

David Bache. For the P5B Coupé and a lot of other stuff.

[chaseracer]

I'd like to present Issigonis as a villain. Talented for sure, but perhaps if he'd tailored the Mini/Landcrab a bit more towards the potential customer rather than egotistically thinking that he knew best, BMC wouldn't have ended up in so much bother.

 

Which leads me to Red Robbo. Just what British Leyland needed - a workforce that became very shy of actual work. I probably have an unfair view of unions entirely based on this twat. Not saying there weren't management issues at BL, but how long do you really think you can go on making a half-arsed job of turning cars out before a company falls on its arse?

These two hypotheses may not be entirely unlinked...

[chaseracer]

Motorway hero: http://www.cbrd.co.uk/people/james-drake/

[Pete-M]

Which leads me to Red Robbo. Just what British Leyland needed - a workforce that became very shy of actual work. I probably have an unfair view of unions entirely based on this twat. Not saying there weren't management issues at BL, but how long do you really think you can go on making a half-arsed job of turning cars out before a company falls on its arse?

 

Red Robbo destroyed the British motor industry, and a lot of areas while he was at it. The BL plant in Speke closing cost a massive number of jobs near me, Lucas and many others all left taking their work with them.

 

To me, Derek Robinson and his union cronies did far more damage to the UK than anybody else from the 1970's to the present day, with the possible exceptions of Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and Arthur Scargill.... but Robinson killed our motor industry, and for that I will never, ever forgive him. If Robinson hadn't been such a prick with his strikes for any reason then I wouldn't despise unions the way I do, the miners may have been able to keep the pits open - I suspect the reason Thatcher was so hard on Scargill was that he appeared to be following Robinson in his methods and she wasn't going to stand for it, and Scargill had seen Robinson doing his thing so he wasn't going to back down either. - so that was that. End of the motor and mining industries. Unions don't like to back down about anything, and they tend to be greedy and strike happy.

[dollywobbler]

Yeah, tricky one. Unions certainly made a mess of the motor industry - and not just BL. On the other hand, as mentioned earlier in the Barbara Castle post, unions did (eventually...) help sort out the seamstress pay situation at Ford. Generally, I agree that the unions got very out of hand during that time. Perhaps Sir Michael Edwardes deserves hero status for sorting out such a mess?

[Vin]

HERO

 

 

Dante Giacosa

 

Designer of many Fiats including the Topolino, 500 & 600. His last car was the Fiat 128, which utilised what is probably his legacy - the transverse engine layout with seperate gearbox and unequal length drive shafts.

 

[Negative Creep]

 

 

This fat turd is responsible for championing the OMG NEED TO BUY A BRAND NEW PRIUOS OR WE WILL ALL DIE OF GLOBAL WARMING/CLIMATE CHANGE bollocks. From his multi million dollar mansion with a carbon footprint the size of most large street. Maybe George Dubyah wasn't so bad after all..........

[Rod/b]

David Bache. For the P5B Coupé and a lot of other stuff.

 

Not least the BACHEHELMET hairstyle.

[Cavcraft]

Sorry gents but I'm calling the 'mostly bollocks' card ref the nasty union leader/s. No matter what they might suggest it's up to the workforce to agree or not agree and vote accordingly. You want to know what really killed B.L? Shit cars that's what.

[dollywobbler]

Not really buying that. Show the workers how to wield a bit of power and they'll be eating out of your hand. Some of these union leaders are as good as Alistair Campbell at giving things a bit of spin. Like that dickhead at the RMT, Bob Crowe.

 

The SD1 COULD have been a great car. The Princess COULD have been ground-breaking. The Allegro. Oh. Ok. That wasn't the fault of the unions...

[pompei]

"Sooner or later

We're gonna listen to Ralph Nader"

 

The Buzzcocks - Fast Cars

 

[scooters]

One of my heros is Huub van Dorne..who invented Variomatic transmission and built some of the most under rated...in the UK anyway...wonderful little cars at the DAF company

 

Villan...that rwunt mandleson and his crime against the environment scrapping tens of thousands of serviceable vehicles to prop up the Korean motor industry....c@#t

[scooters]

Not really buying that. Show the workers how to wield a bit of power and they'll be eating out of your hand. Some of these union leaders are as good as Alistair Campbell at giving things a bit of spin. Like that dickhead at the RMT, Bob Crowe.

 

The SD1 COULD have been a great car. The Princess COULD have been ground-breaking. The Allegro. Oh. Ok. That wasn't the fault of the unions...

 

FACIST

 

Bourgeois oppressor of the masses!

 

Thatcher's lapdog

 

Etc....

[dollywobbler]

Oi! I wasn't going to vote for her as a hero!

 

How about Jezza Clarkson as a villain? Because of him and other power-obsessed journos, all modern cars have no suspension to ensure they can travel quickly around a race-track. He also slates anything old or not powerful, preferring instead proper wanker chariots that only he can afford. He's managed to get an entire generation fixated on his silly TV programme, even though they don't like cars. This means that their entire knowledge of cars is taught to them by Clarkson, so they also think old is shit and people in car clubs can be laughed at when you destroy their precious vehicles. Wanker.

 

Nice hair though...

[scooters]

Yes...Clarkson is a wanker...whilst I am sure that many things he comes out with are tounge in cheek...his braying hordes of prezza driving acolytes lap it up as gospel

 

He knows this but nevertheless continues to feed them their worms the louder they cheep he continues to spout swelling his insufferable ego further. This is why he is a wanker.

[Cavcraft]

Clarkson's a turd. A bored, spoilt turd at that. However I suppose it's not his fault that people are thick enough to believe everything he says nor that the Internet is chockablock with people trying to be him.

[CreepingJesus]

Sorry gents but I'm calling the 'mostly bollocks' card ref the nasty union leader/s. No matter what they might suggest it's up to the workforce to agree or not agree and vote accordingly. You want to know what really killed B.L? Shit cars that's what.

 

+1.

Unions don't design shit cars.

Unions don't fob the buying public off with rubbish, and hope putting a 'Jack on it will make it ok.

Unions don't end up 60,000 leagues under a debt, to various governments and institutions, and in thrall to their 'advice'.

Unions don't decide which factories to shut, and which ones are politically expedient to spare.

Unions represent the bulk of the people doing all this work, and have stood up for their members' collective will, time after time in their century or so.

It's the management who sign it off, knowing that it's rubbish, but that they're secure, who are to blame.

 

David Bache, Spen King et al., are heroes to me: I love their artistic and scientific genius. They were the last generation to be building cars without anonymous committees, and we won't see their likes again, at least not in mainstream manufacture.

I'll also stick in a word for Nick Butler. The guy who puts aircraft grade engineering into everything he does. One of the guys in a shed, we so often marvel at.

[Justin Case]

 

It is not necessary to add anything to understand my choice of hero

[dollywobbler]

Unions DID strike at the drop of a hat.

Unions DID allow their colleagues to have time off during the working day. "Cover for me while I nip out."

Unions DID take a disaffected workforce and make them extremely unwilling to actually work.

 

Sure, management lost it too. You can trace where companies had a change of leadership. Failure often followed.

 

I'll have a quick 'hero' visitation for all the assembly line workers though who (when not striking...) have to put up with a job designed (I s'pose Henry Ford gets the blame for this, he really was an anti-semetic villain!) to break your mind with tedium. They're always going to be in the firing line as well. You need X number of people to produce X cars, so when demand plummets, you need to chop your staff. I can see how that could cause anger with the management, even if it's simple company survival.

[pompei]

I'd like to nominate those guys at an Italian tractor factory who, in the 1960s, stayed behind at night to design a sports car and came up with the Muira, perhaps the most beautiful car ever built.

[Amazo]

Earle Steele MacPherson (you know where this one is going...)

 

 

He worked for the Chalmers Motor Company and for the Liberty Motor Car Company in the early 1920s, and joined Hupmobile in 1923. In 1934, he joined General Motors, becoming chief design engineer of Chevrolet division in 1935.

MacPherson was the chief engineer of the Chevrolet Cadet project, a compact car intended to sell for less than $1,000. MacPherson developed a strut-type suspension (told you... ) for the Cadet, partly inspired by Fiat designs patented by Guido Fornaca in the '20s, although the Cadet did not use a true MacPherson strut design.

After the Cadet was canceled in May 1947, MacPherson left GM, joining the Ford Motor Company later that year. One of his first projects was to adapt his strut suspension design for the 1949 Ford Vedette, for Ford's French subsidiary. This became the first car to use the true MacPherson strut suspension. Ford's Poissy plant got off to a slow start with the Vedette, however, and the Fords Zephyr and Consul which captured the headlines at the 1950 London Motor Show have also been claimed as the first cars to appear in mass production with MacPherson struts.

MacPherson became chief engineer of Ford Motor Company in 1952, a position he retained until his retirement in May 1958.

 

Not to be confused with Elle Macpherson; now that's a different kind of Macpherson strut...

[HBR]

It's all very well saying the unions just represent the will of the workforce but what do they base their will upon? They see things from their own personal viewpoint & what they know & understand themselves & want things to change in a way that benifits themselves & their mates, they dont see or appreciate the big picture.

Not that it's all the union's fault, some of the cars were truely crap!

[Station]

You can't knock the Bertone design family and it's clearly-on-drugs car concepts. Everything they've done looks either amazing or completely insane.

 

 

 

[Mr_Bo11ox]

Unions are a good thing in general, but theres no doubt that Red Robbo was a massive twat. Eventually Michael Edwardes went over his head twice and balloted the BL workforce directly about whether they really wanted to strike or not. Robbo was of course pro-strike and lead an energetic campaign to get the workers to 'show the management they won't be cowed'. But as it turned out most workers just wanted to come to fuggin work, do their job to a decent standard and go home again. DR lost of these direct ballots and that was the end of him pretty much. Its impossible not to wonder how much of the 'strike damage' done to BL was directly 100% his fault.

[Pete-M]

I'm going to defend Clarkson..

 

CAR / Motor / Autocar etc were all handling biased in the 1970s when it came to anything quicker than a Renault 4 or with any bias towards performance. If there was a group test it would pretty much always be the best handling car that won unless that car rode terribly..

 

Clarkson has more experience of cars than pretty much any of us. He's driven everything from Tuk Tuks to T-34 Tanks. Curved Dash Olds to Koenigseggs, Vivas to Veyrons. Yes, he winds up the anorak brigade but that's no bad thing, most of them are pompous arseholes anyway.

 

If you get offended by him smashing up a shite old Marina and are idiotic enough to start some kind of "Save the Marina" quest on t'internet then of course he's going to keep smashing them up. Watching the old BL crowd getting uptight is fucking comical. Top Gear bought the cars, so you cannot tell them what to do with them. Dropping a piano on a Marina is a far lesser crime than buying, for example, a Lancia Fulvia 'to restore' and then leaving it in a field for 15 years because you 'intend to restore it'. If TG wanted to buy my 604 to drop it off a cliff I'd sell it to them provided they were willing to pay the asking price. Same for the Jag, the Mk2, or the Jeep.

 

Top Gear in its current form is amusing, informative, entertaining and most of all fun. It got Joe and Jane Public interested in cars again. The same Joe Public that if it wasn't for Top Gear would be listening to the lentil munchers and other Green lunatics and campaigning to get cars off the streets, electricity banned and all the other dark age Luddite shite they want. It seems to me that a lot of Top Gear haters do so because it brings cars to the masses, making their little hobby less exclusive, and because Clarkson, May and Hammond are more often than not bang on in their assessments of whatever they drive.

 

Nothing worse than some anorak spouting shite about how Clarkson is an idiot because Clarkson stated (accurately) that the Spagthorpe Bologna* is an ill handling, badly riding, badly built, torque free, gutless, uneconomical piece of shit with a reasonable interior. Anoraks only go nuts if they've actually got a Bologna and think it's lovely. The fact that the anoraks in question have often only ever experienced the likes of a 1973 Marina 1.3 with a bent chassis and a misfire and a Stanza with knackered shocks to use as referemce means they'll defend the Bologna to the end and will loudly complain whenever Clarkson tells the truth.

 

He's not always right, obviously, nobody is, but from my experience he tends to be pretty spot on most of the time. Often I've driven the cars, come to my conclusions then later read something he has written about the car in question and his views have been very similar to mine. Same with May, he likes some weird stuff, but his descriptions of cars tend to be accurate.

 

I don't want the world to ever go back to the likes of Chris Goffey, William Woolard and that gurning bint Mallory rabbiting on about glovebox cubic capacity and why you should buy the 1.3 diesel instead of the 2.0 Turbo because you'll save £10 a week running the fucking thing. People who want "Cars to get from A to B, that's what they're for, nothing else" should read "Which" or "What Car" and make their choices with a bloody slide rule and a load of impossible to match EU fuel figures. They shouldn't be sitting in front of TV watching a programme about cars, they should be watching wall paper fade or something that will interest them instead.

 

 

Oh, and although Bertone designed the Favorit, the Commie Czech government at the time made massive alterations to the design to stop it from being an object of desire. Which is why it looks shit.