Indholdsfortegnelse for July 1963 i MotorTrend

ARTIC-KAR Bantam Fridge come in handy for people on the move. It works either off a 12-volt car cigarette lighter or 110-volt AC. Its 14 × 12 × 13-inch dimensions will store some 18 pounds of food. $64.95; Artic-Kar Sales, Inc., 3333 E. Kiest Blvd., Dallas 3, Tex. “KAMIKAZE” BUGS can be kept from plastering themselves all over your windshield with the Deflecta-Shield, a new, clear, Plexiglas deflector. It also protects windshield in sand storms, and hood from stone damage. $14.95, plus installation. Deflecta-Shield Corp., Corydan, la. FRIGETTE Strato Dawn auto air conditioner has a completely new design providing 40 per cent increase in open air cooling area. It’s 5-1/16 ins. high, 16¼ ins. wide, and 12½ ins. deep, with a three-speed, 12-volt motor. Frigiquip Corp., P.O. Box 7207, Oklahoma…

THE HILL in front of us was almost straight up, about 400 feet, crisscrossed with erosion ruts and covered with loose dirt. It’s normally used for motorcycle hill climbing, but we were sitting in a four-wheeler. Behind us churned a Corvair engine with four carbs and a few other modifications—ahead was the hill. Shoving the four-speed shift lever forward and flooring the accelerator, we sent the car rushing at the hill. Fat 8.00 × 14-inch snow tires bit into the loose dirt, but halfway up the face of the hill, they began to break loose. A slight feathering of the pedal corrected this; we could see nothing but sky. We topped the rise, like the first hill on a roller coaster, bringing both front wheels high off the ground and…

BUSTING AROUND on back trails is a pastime that puts heavy demands on both the aficionado and the vehicle. Both have to be plenty rugged to take the beating that begins where the road ends. The rigs most commonly seen are usually four-wheel-drive vehicles with plenty of brute power and are noted for their rugged reliability. One such outfit that’s been gaining steady favor with the country’s back-country set is the Toyota Land Cruiser. This isn’t to say that a Land Cruiser (or any 4WD vehicle) is for trail-busters only. A 4WD can be a pretty important addition to any fair-sized farm or ranch. Construction companies find them invaluable, as do hunters, fishermen, and other sporting types. Of the variety of 4WD vehicles available in this country, none can surpass…

RALPH MULFORD will always be remembered as one of the all-time greats of American automobile racing. He got his track baptism about the same time as Ralph DePalma, Barney Oldfield, Bert Dingley, Ray Harroun, Joe Dawson, Spenser Wishart, and other pioneers of the early 1900s. His career spanned nearly 20 years and included virtually every great honor auto racing has to offer. During his career, the ex-choir singer reaped such rewards as the coveted AAA National Championship in 1911 and 1918, victory in the famed Vanderbilt Cup Classic, wins on the highly rated board tracks of the post-World War I era, and victories on practically every major circuit in existence at the time. His lifetime total of 7287 points earned in national competition ranked him fourth behind Ralph DePalma, Earl…

THE MEETING of USAC and NASCAR behemoths at Indianapolis Raceway Park proved that when the top dogs get together, the result is pretty much a standoff show. Raceway Park’s Yankee 300, a 300-miler over the plant’s 2½-mile road course, acted like a magnet for such drivers as Fireball Roberts and Curtis Turner. And although USAC’s A. J. Foyt was the man who finally went home with the honors, he did so only after the Confederate color bearers and a sports car ace, Roger Penske, fell victim to misfortune with victory almost within grasp. Actually, the stage was set for a continuation of the Civil War on wheels almost a year ago, when the Park’s management decided to promote a stock car race that would wind its way through the tules…

RUSSIANS road race just like everyone else. Of if not just like, at least as much like as they can. Below are two scenes scrounged from a Spanish periodical, MOTOR MUNDIAL, which that magazine undoubtedly scrounged from someone else. Under a head reading, “Automobile Races in Russia,” a subtitle claims modestly, “In the Soviet territory there exist actually some 150 racing sports cars.” The accompanying article shows several pictures of bear-hatted race drivers checking out some Barney Old-field-style machines, and one shot of a starting line-up that looks slightly like Watkins Glen in the early Forties. The MOTOR MUNDIAL article concludes, “Soviet mechanics produce race cars that are admittedly inferior to Cooper, Lotus, BRM, Ferrari, and Porsche, and these days it looks like it’ll take a while for the Russians…

ONCE UPON A TIME there were two Fellows. They each had a Horse and Buggy, but one of these Fellows had a thing called an Engine, and this was able to do almost as much Work as a Horse if someone could find a Way to hook it up to the Buggy. The Engine drank only Lamp Oil and Water, it didn’t eat Hay like a Horse, and drank the Oil and Water only when it was working. Pretty soon these Fellows shook up everyone when they came sputtering into Town in their Buggy, but without the Horse. Right away, it was easy to see they were some kind of Nuts and had to be dealt with immediately. So said the People who still had to hitch Horses to their…

EVER SINCE OLDSMOBILE announced the turbocharged F-85 Jetfire hardtop, the rest of the line seemed to get lost in its shadow. Just one slot down from the blown number is a very handsome five-passenger coupe with an aluminum V-8 and a four-barrel carburetor that outperformed the Jetfire we tested last year. And it isn’t far behind the top performer this year. The Cutlass comes in coupe and convertible versions, with 195 willing horses, a luxury interior, and road manners that make it an easy car for anyone in the family to drive. Our test car, the coupe, came with Hydra-Matic and the standard 3.36-to-l rear axle. It had only 235 miles on it, but when we took it out to Riverside Raceway for our speed and acceleration runs, it showed…

ROAD TESTING one of the luxury cars is always a pretty soft job. Even more so if the test crew’s just come off a steady diet of all-out performance machinery, off-road stormers, and pint-sized imports. This is when you really appreciate the term luxury as it’s so aptly applied to a car like the Lincoln Continental. At first glance, it’s not easy to tell a ’63 Continental from a ’62—or even a ’61 for that matter. Planned obsolescence just isn’t cricket in a car that costs upwards of $6200, so styling changes from year to year are very subtle. Knowledgeable Continental owners will notice that the grillework is changed slightly and that the deck lid line has been raised and now has a more pronounced “squarish” look. (The not-so-knowledgeable will…

MECHANICAL TRANSPORTATION has evolved into a lot more than the necessity image it once had. A surprising array of new vehicles for recreation on and off the highway keeps coming off Detroit’s drawing boards. Four-wheel drive, soft-tire cars, truck campers, trailered vehicles, housecars, and combinations of these hit the market regularly. Are all these vehicles somebody’s necessity? Obviously, recreation is the motive for purchase. The truck camper is a good example of the dual role of the family car. Pickup trucks grace the garages of many neighborhoods as a second car. Production figures in the truck camper industry are hard to pin down, but best estimates show about 45,000 campers built in 1962. Each year, the total climbs. That same year, 1962, over 58,000 travel trailers were sold for about…

SHIFTY PONTIAC I’m having trouble with my 1963 Catalina four-door (with Rotomatic transmission, four-barrel carb, 303 hp, and Safe-T-Track). When I got the car, the three-speed automatic used to shift to second gear at 11 mph and high at 20 mph. Shifting was so rough that it felt as though the engine was stalling. If I tromped the gas pedal, though, this condition didn’t exist. When I took the car to my dealer, he said this was normal. Not satisfied, I had another mechanic adjust the linkage, and that helped a little. It now shifts at about 14 and 30 mph, and it’s still rough. Several people have told me the only cure is a new transmission. Is this true, and if so, should I pay for it? EDWARD DONNELLYBrooklyn,…

WHAT’S THE THINKING? That was a nice article in the May MOTOR TREND on the front-wheel-drive T-Bird, but what’s the thinking? Awhile back, we had the Cord and quite a few Indy front-wheel drives. How many FWDs are there at Indy these days? The current cars I drive, Mercury and Lincoln, don’t take the same old curves as comfortably as did our ’37 Ford and ’39 Mercury - too heavy on the front end. Presently, we see the rear-transmission Tempest trying for better balance and weight distribution. There may be logic in the Volkswagen-sized compacts putting all the machinery at one end or the other. But the T-Bird is a fancy, full-length rig. Its principal attraction is four individual bucket seats, and these would be divided by shift consoles, trash…

FOR MORE THAN 40 YEARS, the conventional automobile tire has been built up by overlapping several layers of cord fabric (plies) diagonally across the carcass. Today there’s a better way to do this for many tire applications: Run the cord straight across the casing and then put a strong “belt” under the tread to stabilize it. It’s called the belted, radial-cord tire, and its advantages include more cornering power, more responsive steering, better traction (especially on wet roads), and considerably longer wear. You pay for it with a slightly thumpier ride and heavier steering at low speeds. Above about 50 mph, it’s all gravy. You can’t yet buy an American passenger car tire with this construction. Chances are you’ll be able to within two years; meanwhile, you have several European…

WHEN THE BIG controversy about seat belts came up a few years ago, scientists and engineers wanted to know what good they do. To find out, they belted dummies into new cars, then (by remote control) rammed these cars into brick walls. This meant each test cost one car—a pretty expensive system. General Motors’ experimental engineers felt they needed something better and more controllable. This year they’ve come up with an impact sled—a device they can use over and over again, and at the same time they can control such variables as speed and deceleration. Its sensitive recording instruments don’t have to be changed from car to car, and the whole installation fits into one building, where weather doesn’t hinder work. Actually, instead of stopping abruptly, as a car does…

IN 1930 AND 1935, Tony Giaimo drove a 1929 Franklin from Los Angeles to New York and back, taking five days for each one-way trip and using a total of one pint of Quaker State oil. On July 4th, 1933, just to prove the Franklin unburnable, he ran one of the air-cooled wonders through Death Valley, and despite the 124° weather and warnings from Nevada rangers, he came through in great shape. Back in 1921, Giaimo (then 19) got his first job as a mechanic with Ralph Hamlin’s Los Angeles Franklin dealership. Tony was a natural from the beginning, and when Hamlin branched out into Hollywood in 1925, Giaimo was sent there as head mechanic. He was appointed assistant service manager for Hamlin Enterprises in 1930, leaving in 1932, at…