Stuart Bladon - No Speed Limit: Sixty Years of Road Testing Classic Cars

To my wife, Jennetta, so often left looking after the children during my long absences abroad on international motor shows, rallies or new model launches, and to my daughter Rachel, an editor at Oxford University Press, who checked and edited the material.

The author is grateful to Autocar for providing the basis for a most interesting career driving the worlds cars and travelling to fascinating destinations, and thanks for the use of some of the pictures from the early days. He is also indebted to the friendliness and hospitality of many firms in the motor industry who over the years have taken him to often exotic locations.

BY L ORD M ONTAGU OF B EAULIEU

My first meeting with the author was in Monaco in 1959 when I had just completed driving in the Monte Carlo Rally, and Stuart Bladon was covering the rally for The Autocar ; but I came to know him better when he came to Beaulieu in 1972 to cover the formation of the National Motor Museum. We were in a state of organised chaos, with step ladders and dust sheets everywhere, but Stuart and his photographer Peter Cramer produced a fine article in Autocar , 6 July 1972, introducing readers to the new museum and showing the variety of exhibits on display in those early days.

Since then he has been a frequent visitor to the National Motor Museum, and when he was chairman of the Guild of Motoring Writers in 1977 he organised an official visit to the museum for members of the Guild.

In his twenty-six years on the staff of Autocar he has driven and tested many thousands of cars, and this book relates some of the fascinating experiences and sometimes harrowing adventures in the life of a road-tester. The story of the Simca 1000 is sure to bring a laugh from anyone on reading it to the end, and one may be amused at the account of sinking a Singer Gazelle in the military vehicles deep wading trough.

Even more exciting is the report of the race to catch the last available ferry to get back to the Italian mainland from the Isle of Elba in a Lamborghini Miura, and another hair-raising adventure was bouncing a Rover 3.5-litre across a railway line where there was no level crossing, in a bid to escape the Swedish police.

I am sure you will enjoy reading No Speed Limit , which will take you back to the days when there wasnt one outside built-up areas, and it charts the development and history of motoring over sixty years with graphic accounts of such landmarks as the arrival of the first parking meter in London, the Suez oil crisis, and the imposition of the 70mph speed limit in 1965.

In June 2015, I completed sixty years as a motoring writer, having started work on The Autocar in June 1955. I have enjoyed a lifelong passion for cars ever since a fond aunt started teaching me to drive, working the steering and gear change from the passenger seat at the age of 7, and in my job over the years I have driven and tested almost every car on the road. An important part of car testing was always finding out how fast they would go, and in 1970 with a colleague in Italy I set what was for a long time Autocars fastest road-test maximum speed, at 172mph. I left Autocar in 1981 and set up as a freelance motoring writer, contributing to a wide range of motoring magazines.

As well as driving fast, I have long been fascinated by economy driving, squeezing the maximum distance out of every litre of fuel, and set three world records for fuel economy listed in The Guinness Book of Records as well as driving fourteen trials observed by the RAC.

Many of the cars tested over the years became involved in great adventures such as the opening of the first major length of the M1, the switch to driving on the right in Sweden, the car that went into the wrong water trough at the Motor Industry Research Association proving ground, and the attempt to drive a Rolls-Royce through a wood to escape the German police.

Each chapter deals with one or two cars of special interest, recounting the events with which they, and I, were involved.

Stuart Bladon

Out of the back window I saw huge flames leaping into the sky from the city

Water was running somewhere and keeping me awake. It could have been a tap left on at the hotel we were staying in at Barmouth in North Wales, or perhaps rain overflowing from a blocked gutter. But it didnt matter, I was too excited to sleep anyway I had driven my first car, and I was only five! It wasnt a real car, of course, it was an electric bumper car in the amusements area on Barmouth seafront, and I had to stand up to be able to put my foot on the little shiny button on the floor that made it go; but it had kindled an excitement in feeling the response of the steering and the movement of the little vehicle which was to dominate my life.

My first memory of a real car was my fathers Vauxhall 14, which he had purchased in 1938 after seeing it at the Motor Show in London, and it was quite advanced for its time, with a 6-cylinder engine and independent front suspension. It was in this car at the end of August 1939 that we went up to Scotland for a short holiday, and the car was well filled, having me and my sister plus my grandmother and the maid in the back, and my father driving with my mother in the front. We never travelled light, so all the baggage was in a trailer towed behind the Vauxhall.

An early addiction to cars.

In Scotland it rained every day for several days, but then on a Sunday the rain had stopped and the sun was shining. There was great excitement after the boring few days in the house, and we were going down to the loch. There was not much to do except throw stones in, and then on the way back there was a sudden drama, which I didnt understand at the time. We stood outside a little cottage where the window was open and the wireless, as they were called in those days, was on. The news we were hearing was the outbreak of war on Sunday 3 September 1939. It prompted the immediate decision to return to our home in Coventry, amid horrendous fears of what the next few days may bring. My father thought that petrol might become unobtainable, and that road transport would be stopped, although as a doctor he would have had priority.

The return journey was very fraught. There was no wireless in the car, of course, so the grown-ups were full of anxieties and out of touch with developments, perhaps imagining things to be worse than they were, and then a disaster occurred: the trailer broke loose from the car, and I remember seeing it bounding like a mad thing across the moorland before the tow bar dug into the ground and it came to rest.

Somehow my father managed to connect it to the car with wire, and it was towed very slowly to the next town where everything was emptied out of it and the trailer was left at the station to be transported back to Coventry by rail. A little hole existed between the piled up luggage on the back seat and the roof, where my sister, three years older than me, and I were to squeeze in. At Edinburgh my grandmother baled out to continue the journey by train, but there was still not much room in the car.