This bloke likes vintage Bentleys.
Crash gearboxes.
No synchros. None.
Into a corner at speed at Silverstone, you are the synchro.
You downshift or you do not.
There is no try.
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You've got to appreciate his comment, "The best way to see a car is sideways through a chicane.".
I liked the shot of the spark advance and air-fuel mixture right the steering wheel! An you thought a radio or txting was a distraction. Makes me want to pack up and go to a real vintage race - love the exhaust blat-blat and distinct smell of Castrol.
Click on YouTube at the bottom then click full screen. What an awesome video!
Wow! I've always loved the old Bentleys but this gives me a whole new level of appreciation for them.
I recently saw an ad for some nameless Asian car in which they spoke about the wireless connectivity, the ability to carry your friends to "cool" places that doubtlessly also had wireless connectivity, etc. Not one mention about how it performed as a car or what it was like to drive. People attracted to that would look at this Bentley as if it came from another planet. Those few that had some level of appreciation for machinery would put it on the same level as an old steam locomotive. Sigh...
Timeless piece of art!!!
Well, I'm not pining for non-synchro gearboxes, but his take on them shows how much more skill driving used to require. Or at least how much more attention you had to pay to the act of driving. Not to mention setting your own spark advance and mixture as you drove.
Some models of the Ultimate Driving Machine now list a manual gearbox only as a little-advertised option - for the eccentric few who still care. I guess that means that today's Ultimate Machine does most of the driving. Lower market Japanese cars offer stick shifts only on the entry level models, implying the only reason today's hipster would want one would be to save money.
When I drove a new Miata, I mentioned to the forty-something salesman that the pedals were well placed for heel-and-toe. Long vacant stare.
Looking at the spec sheets, though, it seems that today's driver needs blue tooth connectivity as much as headlights or windshield wipers. I think, like it or not, we've all started down the long, steady slope towards self-driving cars - which will need neither headlights or windshield wipers. Maybe the steering wheel will be the next little-advertised option for the eccentric few who still care.
Buckle up. It's going to be a bumpy ride.
One of the vintage classes at Lime Rock Historics, last summer, had four or five Blown Bentleys (usually called "Bentley Blowers"). Cantankerous starters would be an understatement, but once they got going and the mix and spark were set right, they all had this glorious sound when powering down the front straight (once they actually got ON the front straight after the unweigphted, downhill, entering curve). These cars were/are AWESOME racing machines, regardless of their crash boxes.k
I had a non-synchro 1'st in my '57 VW sedan for a while. You kind-of got used to matching engine revs to get it to slip into first, coming in to a light, so I would imagine double-clutching and matching revs on a crash box to be about the same. My original VW crash box went away when I installed a 2,110 and headed off to college.