Morley says...

YOU KNOW what Ernest, this GT500 fuel-tank thing has been bugging me, too. At first (and it’s the accepted wisdom) I thought each filler fed one tank (the original under the floor and the GT500-specific auxiliary tank between the rear shock towers). But then I started getting letters, like yours, telling me that one of the filler necks was to allow air out during the refuelling procedure. But that raised more questions than it answered: Were there two separate tanks, or just one big one; did the racing rules of the day allow for refilling from two fuel churns at once?

And because there were only (about?) 100 GT500s made to homologate them for racing and a high percentage of those would have gone to the big parc ferme in the sky by now, I don’t know of one I can visit for a look-see. But finally I found a picture of the layout in the boot and it seems that the twin filler necks both feed into the auxiliary tank. From there, the auxiliary is linked to the (standard) main tank with the latter’s filler neck, in the usual position next to the rear number-plate, blocked off. It looks as though either filler would act as a fuel-in or air-out deal, which would make sense, because the safe filling side would be different on clockwise and anti-clockwise circuits and depending on whether the pits were on the infield or outfield. As in, you wouldn’t want to be standing on the transit-lane side of a race-car, juggling 50 litres of explosive fuel over your left shoulder while other race cars bomb past trying to make up milli-seconds (no pit-lane speed limit in them days).

Can anybody out there add to this, or does somebody have a GT500 we could examine? Purely in the interests of accuracy, you understand.

As for Torrens; well, I reckon we’re all guilty of mixing up our terminology now and then, aren’t we? I mean, you’re right about a motor being electric and a fuel-burner being an engine, but I can see Torrens’ point. And while I’ve never seen an automotive powerplant that can grind flour, I’m happy to refer to it as a `mill’. Let’s be honest, if we all wrote to exacting, engineer-approved standards, this’d be a pretty dry old magazine to read, no? But point taken.