Of this and that

Sir,

Motor Sport continues to bring joy and interest monthly to this Spanish hillside and your October edition was no exception. “Chasing Ghosts” chased up a memory for me—an a boy of 141 was at the last Clipstone Drive speed trials, it was a bike meeting and “Everyone” was there, Freddy Dixon, George Dance. Chris Staniland, Bert Lc Vack etc. etc. It was the latter who made f.t.d. on a Brough, some 111 m.p.h. I think, which was a little slower than the world record he had recently are up in France with the same machine, perhaps it was this Brough victory that was later celebrated? I remember the road being just as narrow and behedged then as in your photo.

The letter from Mr. Winstanley on exhaust turbo-charging and Major Frank Halford’s designs is most interesting, but is not your correspondent confusing the construction of the “Nomad” with that of the “Deltic”? The Nomad was a flat-12 with twelve-cylinder heads — it did not have opposed pistons. Compounded it certainly was as well as having other ingenious means of extracting every possible his of useful heat. Did the Special of 1923 really start out with a true exhaust gas turbine driven pressure charger? Was it not rather a positively driven centrifugal supercharger which suffercd from the same unfortunate characteristics as the 16-cyl. BRM? (And should have been changed for a positive displacement one for the some reasons.) And while on supercharging was the huge affair in the cockpit of the R4D ERA a Shorrocks? I always thought it was a Power Plus. I cannot remember the firm of Shorrock pre-war.

Malaga, Spain PHILIP HYLTON

(Yes, the Halford did start out with an exhaust driven turbocharger. The supercharger in R4D is a Shorrocks, but this is a replacement for the earlier Zoller device which proved somewhat unreliable. — Ed.)