Here are some pictures of the track in the 1970s. I took these during the holiday fortnight, when me and a friend went into the building when it was empty ...
My first car was a Scootacar, which I owned when I lived in Coventry. I bought this from my sister’s work colleague in about 1966 for £35, which I borrowed from ...
Triumph worked on developing a truly competitive sports cars and at one stage took an Alfa Romeo apart to see why it was a successful design. Healey also went to ...
The Standard Triumph Competition Department was situated within the same building as the service division, on the Birmingham Road, Allesley, Coventry. The competition shop occupied roughly a third of the ...
When D day arrived, we all assembled on the car park at Allesley, truck loaded, tools, cars, lined up for loading, waiting for the car transporter to arrive. Ken Richardson ...
Come the race day, the cars looked great. We were running 928 HP (no. 59) and 929 HP did not run due to a bad engine oil leak. 928 HP ...
Towards the end of 1960, big changes came about; the Rally-Racing Department at the Allesley Service Division was closed down, and Ken Richardson and a small number of people were ...
In the early 1970s a new department was set up within the service department for press cars. We worked under Mike Brooks, who was also with Austin-Morris Press Cars in ...
My earliest memory of Rootes was the annual visit to the pantomime at the Coventry Hippodrome with the other kids of Rootes workers. We all got a Christmas stocking of ...
A Rootes product, but ironically never built in Rootes territory in Coventry and Warwickshire, the Imp was built at a new factory in Linwood, in Scotland. Nonetheless, Rootes was a ...
When I first went there I went from GEC, and I arrived there in my Volkswagen Beetle, and the security man wouldn’t let me take it in there! He said ...
Naturally, the changing industrial landscape of Coventry and Warwickshire means there are a number of car manufacturers who have fallen by the wayside over the years. This article sketches the ...
I left the Fleet Air Arm after 12 years in 1960 and joined AWA in July of that year working as an instrument technician in the instrument test lab under ...
Coventry and Warwickshire has a proud motorsport tradition. Coventry Climax supplied engines to Formula One teams in the 1950s and 60s, and in more recent history John Judd’s engines have ...
Local manufacturer the Rootes Group owned some of the outstanding names in British motor sport heritage, Sunbeam and Talbot in particular. Like most British manufactures Rootes and its successor, Chrysler ...
A 500-mile cycling and walking network is being set up in the West Midlands and named the ‘Starley network’. This prompted me to investigate further: there’s a Starley statue I ...
Home thoughts from abroad?
Well from the Isle of Wight actually and unlike the poem by Robert Browning, it was September rather than April, but apart from that……..
Anyway, it was in ...
