Issue 05 influxwww.adrianfl ux.co.uk pussy galore celebrating the Jaguar legend IINF05.coverNF05.cover 1 33/3/08/3/08 115:54:075:54:07 OVER 25 YEARS & ONE THOUSAND CCs The styles change... 0800 089 0050 | WWW.ADRIANFLUX.CO.UK IINF05.ifcNF05.ifc 1 229/2/089/2/08 117:43:557:43:55 CONTENTS FEATURES Welcome… 12 CAT POWER 34 MADE IN BRITAIN I CAN’T BE THE ONLY PERSON OUT Charting Jaguar’s new dawn and Inside Bentley’s iconic Pyms THERE WHO, while watching a fi lm the rise of the XF. Lane plant in Crewe. from a bygone era, fi nds themselves surveying the cars in the background 18 PEROU’S FREEDOM 40 LET THEM EAT MUD in fi ne detail as well as laughing at the PRINCIPLE In the trenches with Land Rover’s evolutionary anomaly. mullets and the kipper ties. There’s the Fashion photographer Perou and the thing about American muscle. gritty, geezerish realism of Get Carter, offering an acreage of English iron 44 DEFINITIVE MOTORS 20 ENGLISH IRON 10 heroes and villains from in the North East. There’s the balls-out action of Bullitt, A tribute to English cars: a dream Flux’s four wheel fetishists. with the stripped down growl of a Ford V8 tearing through lost but never forgotten. the streets of San Francisco, not to mention the throaty 46 HONDAMENTALISM grumble of the drug dealer’s Countach in Miami Vice. Cars 26 LOCAL HERO How Honda’s image makers are manifestations of the engineering brilliance, design Introducing Farbio, the supercar captured our imaginations. innovation and entrepreneurial balls of a certain place and from South Gloucestershire. time – they continue to fascinate, inspire, revolt and titillate 50 WRIST ACTION by turn. Celluloid only heightens the experience. 28 BARRY SHEENE A selection of time pieces We hope you enjoy the ride. Here, now and forever. Aftershave and surgical steel: the that have a high end seal of fast times of the motorbike hero. automotive approval. 32 MOVING MOMENT 52 GRÜTER’S GRUNTER Fangio meets Moss. The GG Quadster changes our minds about ATVs. Michael Fordham REGULARS IGNITION 04 Losing It 06 Wankel’s Way 08 The Digital Ekonomy 10 Two-Lane Blacktop HOMES 56 A barn for the 21st century DIRECTORY 58 Your guide to Adrian Flux insurance services 03 IINF05.contsNF05.conts 3 55/3/08/3/08 117:10:557:10:55 I ALWAYS HATED ECHO AND THE BUNNYMEN. It was the summer of 1984, and I had just scored my driving licence, but had yet to score. I’d done a deal with my Grandad years before. “No tattoos or earrings or motorbikes by the time you’re seventeen, son, and I’ll buy you a motor.” With him being a honourable old git – and me being obsessed with the idea of having my own car – he stuck to his word and I remained respectable in his Victorian eyes. So there I was, just turned seventeen, raging with testosterone and doing laps at last of Romford town centre in a slightly knackered but cool-as-fuck 1975 orange MK1 Escort. This would be my ticket to the world of carnality. All I needed was a girl. Me and my mates had turned up at a club called the Pink Toothbrush in a godforsaken corner of deepest darkest Essex on a Thursday night. New Romantic night. Oh well, an easy mistake. She had long, long legs and was slightly gothic and I was all skin-tight stonewashed, slip-ons and a head full of Luther Vandross. An unlikely meeting, alright. She’d laughed and my bowl wedge and Tacchini tracky top as she sipped her snakebite through a straw, and I took the piss out of her trench coat here at the height of summer. But the ribbing soon turned to fl irtatiousness and I told her I’d drop her home. We ended up driving all the way to the coast and parked up overlooking the Losing it beach as the sun rose, her slagging off Thatcher and me telling her that the miners were a bunch of lazy northern gits. I must TheInterior have fancied her rotten because I let her play her mix tape and tell me about her A-level exams. What I remember most, Trench coats, bowl wedges and fi rst though, is the embarrassing noise the black vinyl interior made as we moved and the way it seemed, at fi rst, an ergonomic fumblings – vinyl moments in a Escort MK1 impossibility. But in the end it happened, just as a Joy Division tune began to beat its gloomy dance in my ears. She unwound Photography Richie Hopson on the vinyl and I was never the same again. These days, when I see a picture of a MK1 Escort I get a twinge of nostalgia for that time and that place. But I still hate Echo and the Bunnymen. X 4 IINF05.ign1NF05.ign1 4 229/2/089/2/08 115:52:295:52:29 IGNITION Interiors 5 IINF05.ign1NF05.ign1 5 229/2/089/2/08 115:52:355:52:35 6 IINF05.ign2NF05.ign2 6 33/3/08/3/08 116:22:436:22:43 IGNITION The Rotary Engine ThePower The rotary engine is a triumph of vision over conformity Wankel’s Way FELIX WANKEL WAS A BEAUTIFUL FREAK. Sitting there that not only cause vibration, add weight and cost, but are in the Weimar Republic of 1924, with perfectly fi ne piston much more likely to go wrong. engined Mercedes-Benz motors rumbling around all Fast-forward forty-odd years, and Mazda signs a licence over the place, the young mechanical engineer was sure to exploit Dr Wankel’s rotary engine, under the tutelage of he could do better. His thinking went thus; in a piston engineering guru and design visionary Kenichi Yamamoto. engine the cylinder does four different jobs – intake, The company spent $50 million developing the engine and, compression, combustion and exhaust. Once the in 1967, launched its fi rst rotary engined car, a stylish, Italian pistons have done their energy-consuming job, looking, two door coupé called the Cosmo 110S. Although then you need loads of moving parts to connect it Mazda’s early development work on the rotary engine was to the drive shaft. Why not, thought Felix, build beset by reliability problems, but their current range of an engine that does these same four jobs, but rotary-motored vehicles are prime examples of Dr Wankel’s with each job happening in its own part of original vision. They rev high with ease and deliver power the central block? Instead of pistons and more smoothly than any piston engine known to man, but all the associated bits and pieces, like are a little juicy and hug the upper level of emissions regs. camshafts, valves, springs, rockers, Even so, the rotary engine is the result of an engineering belts etc, why can’t the central vision which refused to accept that the preconceived housing of the engine itself paradigm was the only way to go. Ironically, in an age of rotate? This would dispense technological convergence and environmental imperatives with the need for all those to fi nd new ways of doing things, the Wankel engine just may annoying bits and pieces be the way forward. X 7 IINF05.ign2NF05.ign2 7 33/3/08/3/08 116:22:476:22:47 IGNITION Thomas Pinel’s Ekon The Ekon imagines a future where the car is just another portal for digital communication, and changing your motor’s appearance is as easy as getting a new skin for your iPod The Exterior The Ekon concept brings digital communication to the open road The Digital YOU’RE SEVENTEEN. IT’S A WIRED WORLD and everyone is plugged in. You socialise on Facebook and bebo. You download music and video from the web. You blast online buddies in a post-apocalyptic cityscape through your games console. You watch fi lms stored on a hard drive on your HD plasma screen. For much of your day, the world and the people with whom you interact are pixelated avatars who behave exactly how you want them to. However, when you jump in your car, it all goes a bit wrong. As your analogue radio fades in and out with Edith Bowman’s banal intonations, you’re forced to deal with real things in real time, 8 IINF05.ign3NF05.ign3 8 229/2/089/2/08 115:53:105:53:10 Ekonomy such as traffi c jams, potholes, speed cams and digital communication won’t have to stop once the miserable gits slumped next to you on the you get in the car. Through a network of light slip road. And you probably think that you’ll have sensitive, tactile interfaces, the Ekon will allow to put up with the tedious reality of the day-to- this new generation of drivers to communicate day driving experience forever, don’t you? with others through the light and shade of a Thomas Pinel obviously doesn’t. That’s why series of digital devices. Not only will they be the recent graduate of Coventry University’s able to turn the car from, say, lime green to Automotive Design MA has come up with the phosphor blue with a wave of the hand, but they Ekon. Pinel’s idea is that a new generation of can also ‘post’ images, movies and music to the Xbox, iPod and web-bred car consumers will car’s plasma-wrapped exterior panels.