'Twas Tue, 4 May 2004 23:19:08 +0100, when snipped-for-privacy@italiancar.co.uk (SteveH) decided to declare:
Had a 999cc FIRE once, with a dash display with Blackpool Illuminations, except you could never be sure in what order they'd light up Let's face it it's just a Panda in a better suit :o) I like this though:
It was somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Geoff Mackenzie" saying something like:
Istr that Volvo did indeed buy the rights to make a British engine under licence, but wasn't that a Triumph lump? Or was that Saab?
Saab bought the Trumpet lump to replace their farty twosmoke and did what Triumph would have liked to do with it, making a decent engine even better.
Volvo bought the B-series and didn't do a great deal with it, it being solid and reliable anyway, but they eventually took it out to 2 litres. Didn't they designate it as the B-series also? B20, B40, etc.
It was somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember snipped-for-privacy@jaceeprint.demon.co.uk (marc) saying something like:
That's the one with the greenhouse back end, isn't it?
No idea, but the Japanese can't say their Ls and the Chinese can't say their Rs so certainly plausible. WTF does "Starion" mean anyway? Or "Lantra"? Or "Camry"?
Correct language wise, can't speak for the story. Plausible for sure.
"Mist" does indeed mean "dung" in German. "Silver" in German = "silber", so the car's name would have sounded like it meant "silver poo" to a German.
The MR2 was just the MR in France, supposedly because MR2 in French = "em-air-duh", which sounds uncannily like the French phrase "eh, merde" - or in English, "aw, shit!"
Synapse Syndrome ( snipped-for-privacy@NOSPAMhotmail.com) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :
Yep, see my other post. My old man had a B-reg 604 GTi.
The thing I remember best about it is, bizarrely, the exhaust back boxes.
The pipes curled round the box to enter at the back. The tailpipe itself had a small notch in the underside, akin to the reed on a recorder or similar woodwind instrument.
On idle, on a cold morning, the exhaust clearly exited through that notch rather than the end of the tailpipe. Wierd. Sounded LOVELY, though, especially on full chat.
I've always called it Coon Tash, but may be wrong. Scored wonderful brownie points years ago in a Sunday lunchtime pub argument about how to pronounce Lamborghini, i.e. with a hard or soft G - Lambogeeney or Lambojeeney. A paricularly know-it-all type insisted it was the latter. I insisted it was the former. When challenged about how I was so certain, I was able to say "well, that's how Ferruccio (sp?) Lamborghini introduced himself when we met last week...."
Drifting a bit, thinking of French phrases and what they sound like, the late lamented Roy Kinnear once claimed on a radio programme that the motto of the French marines was "A l'eau, c'est l'heure" (literally, it is time, to the water). Try saying it a few times with your best schoolboy French accent - comes out remarkably close to "Hello, Sailor" ! (For younger readers, this was a well-known introduction by certain professional ladies in the Portsmouth area when looking for punters).
I thought the successor to the two-stroke was a V4 of Ford origin, later replaced by a slant four which was half a Triumph V8 as per Stag. But this is just the gaslit end of my memory bank, I'm not an expert. Was just around at the time.
Yes, my 1800S had twin SU's which made it visually close to the B Series in MGB form. But I think the internal dimensions of the engine were also remarkably similar.
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