50 Years Ago Today...
50 years ago, CAR was racked by an almighty transatlantic argument, all summed up by a drive in a preposterous fake Mercedes
CAR had an argument with the US, and Excalibur bore the brunt
It’d never happen today – the most colourful features in CAR’S September 1969 issue seemed to hinge around an eloquent-but-damning essay by Brock Yates in Car & Driver, reprinted in CAR then responded to furiously by editor Doug Blain in an all-out argument.
Yates – best known nowadays as the man behind the Cannonball Run – was reflecting on America’s falling out of love with the British sports car in favour of its own V8-powered muscle cars. Our increasingly unreliable, underdeveloped machines, Yates broadsided, were failing miserably. ‘An average Austin[-healey], its valve lash in constant adjustment and its wheel bearings buried in a perpetual cocoon of grease, might appear indestructible in England, but the average American might drive it into the ground in a few years.’ Then he made the point that the British road network adopted motorways decades after other countries, and that the highest traffic density in the Western world rendered our performance cars pointless anyway. Our damp-but-mild climate meant we didn’t seem bothered about avoiding freezing or overheating either – whether under the bonnet or in the cabin.
Blain was – in a savagely personal counterpoint describing Yates as having ‘heavy jowls, worried brow and thinning hair’ – quick to point out that most of the British car industry was Americanowned and thus blame could be laid at the door of remote Detroit management anyway. But to underline his point, Blain sent one of his writers to complete a test-drive of an Excalibur being offloaded by rock ’n’ roll star Tommy Steele in the UK.
Spending half the feature tearing its looks to shreds – the fauxmercedes SSK design adulterated by a need to accommodate
wide tyres and a V8 – and mocking the rudimentary Studebaker chassis and underpowered engine contrived to sprout six exhaust pipes, the unidentified scribe went on to determine that the Excalibur was ‘a perfectly horrid beast to drive. Years of exposure to the most exotic of option-laden transatlantic machinery have allowed us to forget just how bad, how heavy, how unresponsive, how imprecise a common or garden, non-power-assisted Detroit steering system can be.’ Automatic gearbox in a sports car, ‘hyper-sensitive brakes’ and ‘ineptly angled pedals’ were flagged up too. The point made was that Americans couldn’t make a sports car even when they tried.
And yet, elsewhere in the magazine is a story that underlines the domestic British motor industry’s dull-wittedness with a go-faster stripe. Janspeed had taken BLMC’S new five-door frump, the Maxi, and made the most of its newfangled five-speed gearbox by installing a twin-su H4-equipped engine and freer-breathing exhaust to turn it into an Escort Rs-basher. ‘The Janspeed mods have made a world of difference’, said Mike Twite. ‘BLMC’S Special Tuning department is already evaluating it.’
But as we can see in retrospect, BLMC let what might have been the world’s first hot hatch slip through its fingers a decade before the Volkswagen Golf GTI. Maybe Yates had a point.