Can't vet your recollections.
(I'd be surprised though, to hear that a Cisitalia model ever Had a back seat ;-)

I did once see / touch a real Merc. SLR (of the ill-fated '55 Le Mans crash/fire) magnesium body - at Mercedes museum in Stuttgart.

(The troops were more fascinated by my new red A-H Sprite! than - about Their stuff!) Cackle.. I let one of 'em drive it about the parking lot, while I was seeing about getting a service manual for a friend's 300SL gullwing.

(That had *no* power steering and drove like truck. 'Course over 200 kph it all smoothed out, I'm told)

It was much more fun bein car-nutz before Evrybody thought they knew what was Kool... and we got the Thunderbird, and proved in Murica that,

When Murica builds a small car.. it will be the longest, widest heaviest lo-mileage! small car the world has ever seen ..and, that's what we did :-)

Cheers,

I.

Indeed my maroon '47, coachwork by Signore Pinifarina (~ Zizi Jeanmaire renamed er Jeanmaire = to the -1?) has a back seat, but since I never let the chauffeur drive this one, I prolly can't use the Tecra in the back seat - unless stopped at a local soiree - but why would I want to do That, Then? (And the ignition is.. a bit pesky in downpours - still)

Hey.. did you know that Bugattis (of the Ettore vintage) used *square* cam followers? Yep: pour some babbit into the difficultly swaged-out square hole (not to be confused with Sinclair Lewis's prototypical Murican marketer George Babbitt) --

Then hand scrape til the tappet smoothly slides up & down with required clearance. His logic: The full 'width' was desirable since there was only one plane of needed motion - a much simpler round one, would have wasted that chance for er 'uniform and low wear rate' (for any given area).

Great idea if your labor for original assembly is paid in vino de tavola, I guess ? And a perfect application of the monumental idea:

always note the number of 'degrees of freedom' in a mechanism; never use a 'redundant constraint'. Ex: a 3-leg stool is perfect - 3 points determine a plane, even on an uneven floor. 4 legs? chair wobbly if it Isn't a perfectly flat floor

Ah well, there were indeed Craftspersons alive on this planet.. I have wondered - what the Vincents might have been like, with the genius of Phil Irving et al? - had the British not had to build stuff from the clapped-out machinery still working at end of WW-II.. while the umm loosers got all brand new stuff + techno help yada yada (?)

(The fork blades were made from melted-down surplus Spitfire propellers, it has been said)

Sorry, nostalgia ain't what it used to be..


Ashton
never before has so much been