Category: Historic Racing 911

It’s Wednesday afternoon and I’m on my way back to Amsterdam from a foreign assignment. My plane has just come in so there’s good chance I’ll be arriving in Amsterdam as scheduled. Tomorrow is T-2 for our Winter Trial adventure and I finally have time to consider how close our departure is now.

My friend Lex and my son Daan have been keeping an eye on the finishing touches to the rally car in my absence of the last 10 days. Our mechanic has been honing the wiring to the kill switch, which seemed vulnerable to chafing by the fuel tank. The Messerschmitt fuel pumps have been connected and double checked and to avoid risk around the ignition set up, Ton has downgraded it from optical to points-based. The logic being that we don’t know the origins of this ignition system (not OEM), so bringing spare parts is not a short term option. I didn’t [...]

The Mechanical Fuel Injection set up on early Porsches was allegedly derived from the need to fly upside down. In the Second World War aerial combat developed into serious forms of aerobatics and there was an advantage to be had by those pilots who could manage their throttle and therefore acceleration, irrespective of the position of the plane. Traditional carburetion was inadequate as carburettors rely on gravity to keep the float chambers filled. Trust the German engineering cadre to come up with a solution. Their Messerschmidt aircraft could pull negative G’s thanks to this technology and the British Spitfires could not follow their trail without stalling their carburetted engines.

The constant fuel pressure combined with excellent fuel atomization, leading to a maximum fuel burn ratio in gasoline engines, had Mercedes, Porsche and later BMW, apply this expensive and complex technology on their race and production cars. MFI was overtaken by Electronic Fuel Injection only 20 [...]

Joost Cohen, my co-driver, and I collected Silverado from the Blankemeijer Brothers today, who had niggled the final details on the car. The rattling sunroof now behaves nicely and has gone quiet and the spare Messerschmitt fuel pump went into the smuggler’s box. Frans found a blister on the inside of one of the rear tires, both got replaced by SnowTrac 3 Vredensteins. We had two outside mirrors RS style fitted and what a difference in visibility!

At scrutineering one of the officials thought we were running modern bulbs in our headlights and driving lights, but once they warmed up the blue glow disappeared. That was all they could find…

As a snowstorm was arriving we left Veenendaal with all our goodies and I drove Silverado to its birth. On a quiet strip of highway I could dip into the power of the 2.7 RS engine and managed to shoot a few seconds of [...]