It was a champagne week for Daniel Sexton Gurney back in mid-summer of 1967, when he won the Le Mans 24-hours for Ford one Sunday and was a winner again the next weekend when he took the laurels in the Belgian Grand Prix in his own Eagle.
Reid Railton was the most important figure in the field of high-speed performance engineering in Britain between the wars yet he never really received the credit he deserved for his amazing achievements. He was always the slim figure in the background, in a fedora and prescription sunglasses if the background was the Bonneville Salt Flats. Railton engineered the final and fastest versions of Malcolm Campbell’s Bluebirds and he designed and built a twin- engined 4-wheel-drive Land Speed Record car for John Cobb that was amazingly advanced yet devastatingly simple. It was the first car to top 400mph.
In practice for Le Mans in 1952, Mercedes experimented with an air brake that rose up at the rear of the coupe top. The air brake not used for the race but the idea re-appeared on the 300SLR for Le Mans in 1955 with a full-width flap behind the open cockpit.
The scrutineers asked for the window area to be doubled to the regulations for the rear window of a saloon car at 84 square inches.
