Retro Scene Magazine

Moretti a short tale of a small car or two...

HoTWire — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:05:00 -1400

When putting together our rare car pieces we usually have a fair idea of what’s in store, a car we already know about, or know of. This time we started out down one path and had to change tact half way through, so this isn't exactly a rare car entry, but a rare company entry.

Usually you'd associate low volume Italian cars with their famous prancing horse and raging bull brands, high end super cars and sports GTs. Moretti came from a different angle, they approached the market via small coupes, the Gran Sport and the Cita. Later they moved into more family oriented small cars, the 600, 720B and 750 all being fine examples. All these cars were beautifully designed in the Italian tradition of smooth styling. Moretti tried a number of different versions of their 750 platform, everything from racing cars to estates and commercial vehicles proving the platforms versatility. Their real problem was not the quality of the cars but the cost, in the face of competition from Fiat, specifically the Fiat 600.

Ultimately it was Fiat the saved the Moretti name, by allowing them to produce specials based on their cars, like the 500 Moretti Coupe or the fantastic 2500 Moretti SS. This work continued all the way into the 1980s the last Moretti car being the Fiat Uno Moretti Folk from 1983. In December 1989 the company ceased to exist.

Whilst Moretti isn't hugely well known the cars they did produce are really something special, perhaps their problem is that they were pitched too high for the families buying small cars and pitched too low for those that could afford Ferrari exclusivity. However any company that leaves us with a car as pretty as the Fiat 850 Moretti Sportiva S2 (pictured above) deserves a special place in our hearts.

Michael Ward Photos on Flickr has some more Moretti pictures, which have graced the pages of the excellent Auto Italia magazine.

There is also a lot of information on the Moretti Registry including photos of all their models.

BMX and Cars Again

rmad — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 03:46:00 -1400

We've had Andy Ruffell and Bob Haro mentioned here before so I guess you've probably guessed we're into our old school BMX here on RSM. Right now we're heading towards the launch of a sister site where we can indulge our musical, extreme sporting, style and love of generally cool stuff without diluting the feed of car stuff here on RSM. Until then though I'll post some stuff that we've stumbled across whilst we're putting it together

This is Woody Itson, a California-based BMXer from back in the day who seemed to share an affinity for motorised transport just like us:

What would you have spent your pro BMX earnings on...a Centra-shod and kitted 'Rocco? Woody did. Good man.

Got a pay rise? Get a Porsche.

Not Woody's this time I assume, but it's hard not to notice that US-spec B310 Sunny hiding in the background isn't it?

You can expect more details on the new venture soon.

Guy Allen - Art

HoTWire — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 01:00:00 -1400

If you've bought an issue of Octane magazine(link) you may well have seen the excellent illustrations for Felix Petrol, these excellent cartoons are drawn by Guy Allen.

Working out of South West London Guy creates wonderfully stylised representations of some extremely iconic machinery, with a leaning towards the classic and Italian, the cute Fiat 500 seems to have inspired some fantastic illustrations, a particular favourite of ours being the yellow one followed by a group of duck chicks. A quick trip to the Guy Allen website shows you that he is more than just an automotive artist his portfolio of work cover posters to caricature.

Guy has a number of his images available as limited edition prints, which would certainly make for a great present for the petrol head in your life, check out the Petrol Gallery and Felix Petrol sections of Guy's website.

Maybe one day we'll be able to commission him to do some work for RSM. One day...

When The Crowd Say Bo....

rmad — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:03:00 -1400

Years ago I bought a Fast Car Magazine with CDRom on the front as a free gift. That CDRom contained images of cars and wheels and allowed you to combine the two via your computer. That, I suppose, was my first experience of the computer-based modifying that has become known as the 'Selecta'.

Back in 2002 I frequented a forum called Volkszone and it was jolly good fun. One day a chap called Rich Whitlock posted a link to something rather special...the Bus Selecta. To my knowledge, that was the first real online modifying program, and possibly still the best - certainly Rich's creations have stood the test of time and in my opinion still produce the best results as well as having the simplest interface. Once again we've trawled the internet so you don't have to - resulting in a list of online car modding programs to keep you occupied for hours...or even days. We've had a play on a few too...

We have to start with good old Bus Selecta - found, logically, at busselecta.com. Here you'll find a few programs allowing you to create your vision of the ultimate VW Bus (splitscreen and bay window varieties), Beetle (courtesy of volkswarenhaus.de ), Type III (via the legendary Type Three Detectives) and even Porsche!

Next we visit the obscure trabicustomizer.com where we find a very Selecta-like design, but with a Trabant rather than an aircooled 'Dub. It's just as infectious though and the results have you hankering after some real East German 'tin' to play with:

,p.

Still in the Selecta style, but switching it's focus to slightly newer Volkswagens is this Polo version found at polo-land.fr where you can play with Mk1 and 2 Polos and create your own teeny watercooled masterpiece:

Slightly simpler, but similar looking is this one at Mini Resource where you can create Mini saloons, vans and even a Countryman...one complaint: I can't find any way of adjusting the height

Sadly, that's all we have of the Selecta-style ones - leaving us with the photo-based exa mples which, if I'm honest, don't quite rank as highly as the non-photo based versions above. Still worth a fiddle though...

This one at Fuji Wheel Corporation in Japan reminds me of that old Fast Car CD, it serves the same purpose too - trying some new rims on various cars. It's limited, but if you can find a car that you like (being a JDM fan helps), there's no harm in playing for a while.

Last up is the 'modder' series, starting with the successful Dubmodder from slipstream, which stands out amongst the others for being a subscription service...a brave move when all the others I've found are free, either through generousity or sponsorship, but I guess we are just too used to getting stuff on the web for nothing. If you're about to put together a Mk1-5 Golf/Jetta, Scirocco or Corrado then spending a few dollars to see what the finished product might look like is probably a wise investment. For those miserly types, there's a trial version here. The same team have put together versions for Jeeps, Honda Civics and Audi A3s all of which get boring very quickly if you don't own the vehicle in question.

If you know of any more, drop us a line (via the comments box below) and we'll check it out.

La Carrera Panamericana 2009

HoTWire — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 03:19:00 -1400

The 23rd October sees the start of the five day Carrera Panamericana, the world famous road race through Mexico, started in 1950 as a celebration of the opening of the Mexican section of the Panamerican Highway the race is one of the most spectacular and challenging road races in the world.

Covering a distance of over two thousand miles along the new highway the race run in its original form until 1954, the 1955 event was cancelled due to the massive accident at Le Mans. From its start until the cancelation the race had moved from become an amateur affair to a much more professional endeavour in both its running and the cars in competition. Ferrari, Alfa Romeo and Lancia were hugely popular European makes represented, with American cars such as Lincoln, Chevrolet and Dodge competing also. Over the five years it ran the race claimed twenty seven lives, it existed in a time when speed was far and away ahead of safety for racing drivers.

The event was resurrected in 1988 as a retrospective event, covering a slightly altered route, but about the same distance using the classic cars. The modern event has become a huge spectacle and the popularity of it has been added by the film La Carrera Panamericana with it's Pink Floyd sound track.

Over the years many famous people took part in the race, Mickey Thompson, Carroll Shelby, Jerry Unser, Alberto Ascari, Juan Manual Fangio and Phil Hill to name a few of the people that competed in the original race. The modern races have seen their fair share of famous faces with Alain De Cadenet winning the event in 1990 and the various members of Pink Floyd competing also.

The current class structure is separated into Competition and Historics. The Competition group is made up of cars built between 1940 and 1954, a lot of these cars are heavily modified, including the Sports Mayer class which allows modern engines to be installed in older cars. The other group is Historic which is from 1955 to 1965, these are less modified and separated out into sub classes based on the number of cylinders in the engine. There is also a class for cars that originally competed in the Pan Americana, this allows replicas but they must be the same body material and basic configuration as the original car.

For a real flavour of the event check out the brilliant Flickr photostream and be sure to check out the official website.

We'll give you and update once the race has run its course. Until then, enjoy this video :

Race Engine Technology Magazine Review

HoTWire — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 07:30:00 -1400

As regular readers will be aware, we love magazines here at RSM and have a fairly broad taste when it comes to our paper based reading. Our individual collections cover a wide variety of subjects and countries, but there is one area of automotive magazine that has remained beyond reach, the trade mag. Until now.

Trade magazines tend to be much more focussed than your average high street news agent supplied fare, they also tend to cost a bit more as they have a much smaller distribution than most magazines. High Power Media were kind enough to supply is with a copy of Race Engine Technology to check out, rather than selfishly enjoying this I thought I'd share with you my thoughts, who knows it may prompt you to order a copy.

My first thought was that I'm going to be very much out of my depth very quickly, sure I can tune a Webber and keep my car maintained nicely, but it may not have escaped your notice we spend a lot of time enjoying ride height and wheel adjustments here, not gas flowing heads and examining heat profiles of engine components for potential weight savings. When reading through the magazine this showed, I'm not their main target audience, however I did find much of interest to read, the issue I received (September/October 2009) has their nominations for Race Engine Of The Year, it is great to see inside the engine building industry at what is impressing their top engineers, I also learned that the Corvette Le Man GT1 engine is a pushrod, just like my Datsun. Okay so it is a 7 litre V8 direct injection engine, unlike my Datsun, but still... a pushrod engine, in this day and age, outstanding!

Other features included a detailed history of the Aston Martin V12 engine, Direct Metal Laser sintering as a manufacturing method and a 7 page feature on fasteners (screws mainly) which sounds like it should be the dullest subject on earth, but actually proves fascinating. My biggest take away from the magazine is the advertisers, as someone who desires to build a racing engine the people in there who can supply valves, cams, engine management, coatings and a whole host of other services is great, sure they aren't going to be cheap, but you know you are using some of the best there are.

This isn't a magazine I would be served by with a subscription, as I mentioned I'm hardly the target audience, but definitely something I think those more serious about their engines should pick up, particularly those on engineering university courses and those already in the industry. High Power Media also produced a one of Drag Race Technology issue which would be a great read.

Race Engine Technology is availble from : www.highpowermedia.com

RSM : Linklog 151009

HoTWire — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 06:51:00 -1400

Time for another RSM Linklog I believe, again we've built a mountain of cool links recently, so without further introduction we'll get into things...

The Carrera Pan America is one of the greatest motorsports events in the world. This blog celebrates that fact along with photographs of current events from a team that put together a documentary video of 2007 event. As it says on the blog title "An ongoing look at the people, places and machines of the worlds most demanding open road race" excellent stuff and worth checking regularly. http://lacarrera2007.blogspot.com/

From road races to hot rods, such is the spread of our interest, and this time we get to go to Italy for a change to check out The Custom Sickles Diaries, a site dedicated to hot rod and custom motorbike culture, it is picture and link heavy (just how we like our foreign language sites). This blog is the best of two worlds, firstly it picks up some excellent cars and photos from around the world, secondly it give us a glimpse into the world of Italian hot rodding. A great double delight. http://customsicklesdiaries.blogspot.com/

Flying out of Italy and heading to one of our favourite spots for the last few links, the land of the rising sun. The L-power website is a bit of a motley assortment of links and pictures from the "old car" show in Japan. A good browse around the site following links and checking out the magazine scans and show panoramas can knock out a good hour or so and find some really interesting cars. The associated BBS has some of the panorama photos in very large formats. Both pages are worth a bit of your time if you are feeling adventurous.

Staying with Japan, we found the following via the excellent Riverside blog. They recently did a bit more digging around a Japanese modifying group called Liberty Walk, it seems that not only do they like to modify Ferraris and Lamborghinis, but they also do pretty good work on shakotan and bosozoku inspired cars, you can check out the Riverside entry about them here.

We'll be sticking with Liberty Walk for our youTube video, from their youTube Channel we found this rather delightful clip.

Mini at 50 DVD Review

HoTWire — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 05:10:00 -1400

When I first caught sight of the cover of this DVD I wasn't sure what to expect, sure the title implied it was about the last 50 years of Mini, but the cover prominently showed two new minis with an original mini tucked behind one of them. However we're not ones to judge anything by its cover, so into the player the DVD went. After the Duke video ident we got to a modest menu whereby we could view the whole film, select individual chapters or check out the extras, nothing scary or unusual here, but easy to use and get what we wanted.

The main film is really a documentary of the Mini's 50th anniversary celebrations at Silverstone, whilst it occasionally goes off to details certain aspects of the mini world the show forms the real heart of the DVD. The film starts with an introduction to the mini, a bit of history, showing cars that are present at the event, some archive footage and retelling the initial story of the mini and its success. Famous faces are present to give some meat to the stories with Paddy Hopkirk, Rauno Aaltonen and Mike Cooper all giving some choice opinion. The Cooper name also connects the original Mini nicely with the new Mini in the first section on the new Mini, showing a linage and connection between the two in terms of their choice of tuning partners. This juxtaposing of old and new happens throughout the video and really helps connect the two sides of this particular scene.

I thought the controversy between old and new would be a bit of an elephant in the room during the film, however it is tackled head on and all sides of the discussion are represented, really though it is all about uniting mini owners old and new in their enjoyment of their cars. A section on modified cars shows some cool modern minis as well as some interesting old minis. I feel the section on the racing could have been a bit longer, but it was great to see some footage of the exciting three abreast action which really give you a feel for the atmosphere on the track.

Alongside all this there is a fun section with Russ Swift doing his thing in new and old minis and some quick interviews with show attendees. The extras menu gives us a glimpse into the world of two guys coming over from the Isle of Man with their classic mini, from the fun of getting it running, through the journey and onto the show. This is a really nice addition it shows how we all generally experience our car ownership and show attending. I'd like to see more of this kind of thing from show DVDs, the stories behind the show, as well as the obvious show coverage.

If you were at the Mini United 09 event you should definitely own this memento, for everyone else, I'd say it was one to add to your Christmas list, the mixture of old with new is really well handled and there are some gems on here. Hopefully we'll see more coverage of events like this, I'd love to see something like this produced for something like the Hayride.

To grab your copy head to the Duke Video website.

Icons Of Speed and Style Auction Report

Dan Haines — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 03:16:00 -1400

Most of us are familiar with the name Von Dutch, even if it is through the bastardisation of his name into a clothing brand. Many of us will also know the names of Ed Roth, John D’Agostino and Al Teague. Offerings of all of these and many other famous car builders were present during the Icons of Speed and Style Auction at the Peterson Museum, Los Angeles, September 26th. This huge collection of vehicles and memorabilia was under the ownership of just one lucky guy.

Over the years, he had cherry-picked some of the most stunning and sought-after customs, hot rods, and race cars ever built, but a growing family and a recession-hit industry played a big part in his decision to auction the collection off.

Having never been to an auction of this type before, my only experiences were from watching the Barratt-Jackson auctions on television, but suffice to say this was a very civilised affair, with none of the ‘whoopin and a-hollerin’ that I was expecting. In fact, the whole auction was pretty intimate with perhaps no more than 200 people in attendance and far fewer actually placing bids.

Whether it was a result of the recession, or the over expectations of the auction organisers, few of any of the lots reached near their estimated values once the hammer had dropped, indeed there were ‘bargains’ to be had. A 75% finished Ed Roth ‘Tree Viper’ original trike went for just US$3300 (£2062), and the stunning ‘La Jolla’ (pronounced La Hoya) 1951 Chevrolet Custom Coupe built by Harry Bradley only fetched US$24,750 (£15,470). Even the attendance of an original 1969 ‘General Lee’ Charger, used in the television series and signed by George Barris and John Schneider (Bo Luke) sold for a ‘meagre’ US$27,500 or just over £17k. When you look at the value some people put on General Lee replicas, with the heritage of this car, it seemed an absolute steal.

There were many famous faces in attendance, notably D’Agostino and Teague, as well as Larry Alexander, one half of the Alexander Brothers, famous for building the Dodge Deora concept truck which had been heralded as the star of the show, with even the estimated auction price being kept under wraps. Many whispers throughout the auction hall predicted that bidding would top US$750,000, however the Deora failed to claim the top spot with the hammer falling at US$324,500 (£202,820). The king of the auction went to the ‘Little Red Wagon’, the 1965 Dodge A100 wheeler-stander, which almost doubled its estimate with a final bid of US$550,000 (£343,750).

In total, the 80 vehicles and many memorabilia lots raised almost $7million for the owner, with many of the new owners getting the chance to talk with the original builders and drivers of the cars at the event. It was a genuinely inspiring occasion to be in the presence of such an eclectic collection. My personal favourite was D’Agostino’s Firestar 1961 Ford Thunderbird, which again fetched a very reasonable price of US$31,900, or around £20k. Given the huge sums of money that are passed around in America for Rods and Customs, it really does seem a lot of car for the cash.

Needless to say, my relatively empty wallet stayed firmly in my pocket, but at least I came away with a collection of photos and memories from a great day. You can see the photos on the RSM Flickr stream.

JCCS 2009

rmad — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 02:44:00 -1400

A few years ago the Japanese Classic Car Show had that 'local' look to it, which is no bad thing but as the years progress, the standard gets higher and higher and the rides keep getting better and better. The shots I've found this year are all saying the same thing - this show has grown to become THE place to see cool J tin. A few years ago would you have thought to go anywhere other than Japan to see the sort of cars we're seeing now at JCCS? I'll answer that for you: No.

JCCS 2009 took place last weekend (October 3rd) and the pictures and reports are coming in:

As ever, the guys at Japanese Nostalgic Car are on the button with part one of their report, part two following shortly, hopefully.

Our next port of call has to be Flickr, where the sets are pleasingly common:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/maakuruii/sets/72157622394669275/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/llafranca/sets/72157622394148917/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/haigo_g/sets/72157622517573138/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/picturebot/tags/2009japaneseclassiccarshow/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/75986479@N00/sets/72157622510585836/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jojiluz/sets/72157622393428141/

Obviously those guys have an advantage over me in that they actually went, rather than viewed from the other side of the world. But just before I leave you to go and check 'em out yourself, I'm going to post a few of the faves that I found;

Hopefully one day, I'll be there taking shots myself.

Don't Get It?

rmad — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 03:26:00 -1400

This picture has appeared on various forums and gathered various reactions. I get the nagativity, the car is clearly ridiculous...what I don't get is why people don't get the point. The owner knows it's stupid, stupid!

Do people really not get this?

The guy did it for fun, he did it to be on the extreme edge of current fashion. Not to be safe, not for speed, not for economy and, in some respects, not because it looks good. People come onto these threads with the same arguments, but those arguments don't say anything the kind of people who build these things don't already know.

This, as you probably know, is my car. I don't need anyone to tell me the exhaust is restrictive, illegal, dangerous, stupid looking or pointless...I already know. I put the pipe on in the campsite and drove around at the weekend and made some people laugh, some (who got the reference) nodded their heads, some scratched their heads and some (who just didn't get it) thought I was a w*nker.

If you want to apply normal thought to things built to be different then go the whole way and suggest we all drive Volvo D5 Estates: fast, spacious, safe and economical. I'd also expect pople who drive them to go 'ooh, that'll wear the tyres out quickly' when thay see a car like that. People 'in scene' should know better.

Wendover by Night

rmad — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:07:00 -1400

Following on from our California Scrapyard feature is the second of those USA photosets taken in 2007 now uploaded to the RSM Flickr account. Wendover is the town on the border (literally) of Utah and Nevada which just so happens to be closest to Bonneville Salt Flats. It's proximity to Bonneville means that it's where the majority of Speed Week fans and racers eat, drink and sleep. It means that hotel, motel and casino car parks are full of hot rods, push trucks, trailers and salt and everywhere you go there's gearheads; the supermarkets and restaurants inevitably contain groups of guys wearing colourful team shirts and discussing their day out on the flats.

The photoset on Flickr is the result of a midnight prowl around the town on the night I arrived.

Find the pics here.

California Scrapyard Pictures On RSM Flickr

rmad — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 02:18:00 -1400

Some of you may remember the early days of RSM when we used to construct arty 'pages' as features, a practice now superceded by the combination of an entry here on RSM with a link to our Flickr account. The picture above is the front page of a feature on a California scrapyard shot back in 2007 when I spent four weeks out there. Whilst long-term RSM devotees have seen a few of the shots in the feature the rest of the set has lived on my hard drive - until now.

This week should see the Flickr account endowed with two more sets from the same holiday - Bonneville Speed Week and Wendover by Night. In the meantime, get yoursellf over to Flickr and check out the first lot.

Rare Car : VW 1500 Convertible

HoTWire — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 06:05:00 -1400

We seem to be keeping an aircooled VW theme going for a bit. There are many rare aircooled VWs, lots of coachbuilders took the Beetle chassis then built custom bodies on top. familiar names like Hebmuller and Rometsch through to Ascort and Kaiserslautern. These would some low hanging fruit for a quick rare car feature, one day we may well run through the VW coach built cars, today however we're bringing you something a bit different.

When VW announced the Type 3 line up in 1961 at the Frankfurt IAA it included a rather nice four seater convertible built by Karmann. Essentially it is the same as the notch back with its roof cut off, because that is exactly what it is. Anyone that has tried to build a convertible out of a four seater saloon may well spot the immediate problem that this caused for the engineers at Karmann. When you remove the roof of a saloon you affect its torsional stiffness, not even the skills of Karmann could overcome this issue, at least not cost effectively, so the car never went into formal production.

Just eleven of these cars were produced, although VW printed up brochures for the car and a price of 8,200 Deuschmarks had been set. Volkswagen have one on display at their Wolfsberg museum, what happened to the other ten I've not been able to find, given their rarity and interest I'd be surprised if there aren't some lurking out there in a private collection somewhere. Have any of our readers ever seen one in the wild?

Ian Brown's VW Beetle race car

HoTWire — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 06:34:00 -1400

Considering the popularity of the VW Beetle in the UK I was always a bit confused why I never really saw many out circuit racing, sure it isn't the most perfectly set up car for racing, but given the right class and set up they could be competitive. What’s more given all the developments for drag cars the performance and tuning inventory is there for someone to build a really quick circuit Beetle.

There have been a handful of VW Beetle's racing in the UK, particularly in their one make series, but really their home would be in historic racing, competing against cars that can be considered their peers. Ian Brown spotted this and took up the challenge. Coming from a drag racing his knowledge and experience of setting up a high performance Beetle was very good. Circuit racing is a different discipline though, with more time invested in such items as cornering, braking and reliability.

Externally the car has been styled to be like Darrell Vittone's Beetle circuit racer from 1963, keeping it period correct, it is also a nod to the VW drag scene where Ian came from as Darrell's care eventually turned into the famous 'Inch Pincher'. Once the shell had been restored the racing set up began in earnest, the Beetle is running a slightly wider track by virtue of the brake set up, in order to aid cornering and stability, the suspension was an infinitely trickier proposition. Beetles are known to under steer, what with the big weight thrown out back behind the rear axle, but they also over steer due to the lack of weight at the front, this can cause some issues with setting up suspension. What is more a lot of the thoughts on the best approach conflict. Ian and his team picked the pragmatic approach of choosing to go a bit lower and soft with the suspension then gradually fine tune through the season to get the best performance overall.

Engine wise it is a heavily breathed on 1300 making between 130 and 140bhp as the set up is improving. On the track the car is proving competitive with the rest of its class, which is what we'd hope to see from a historic racing Beetle, not just a novelty but something that really gets in the pack and makes a race of it. Considering it is his first season on the track Ian is doing really well in the championship and things will only get better as the car is dialled in and Ian gains experience.

Ian keeps a comprehensive blog on the Just Kampers/Just Beetles website, make sure you check it out to see more of the prep work and get some insight into competing in the HSCC Saloon Car Championship. Better yet, if you get the chance, get out and support Ian or any of the other drivers in the championship when they are competing near you.