A Matter of Compression

With the Royal Mail in a death loop, letterboxes will soon be redundant. I doubt if future houses will have them. And future generations will, if they think of them at all, marvel at a curiosity as distant for them as gas mantles and ducking stools are for us. ‘You mean people used to send a message in ink on paper and someone in uniform stuck it through a hole in your door? Wow. That’s cool,’ I can hear my grandchildren say.

It will be the same with cars, and especially racing cars. When these grandchildren are old enough to drive, private cars will have become redundant. As J. G. Ballard predicted, their use will be restricted to ‘motoring parks’, where they might briefly be enjoyed only under psychiatric supervision. And imagine explaining the origins of motor-racing! A sport employing petrol-gobbling, rubber-burning, air-sucking, deafeningly noisy, hot, smelly deathtraps driven by men with over-abundant testosterone, wearing Aertex shirts and leather helmets. To kids brought up with the unexamined conviction that extraction industries are the work of Satan, the historic racing car would seem a herald from Hell. I belong to the last generation when ‘going for a drive’ with parents was a leisure pursuit, a recreation. My father was not bookish, but he was very dapper. Bespoke suits and pocket squares were unusual in the Liverpool of my youth. On summer evenings, we would go for a drive to a pub in Skelmersdale. There was no traffic. Ever since, a car interior has suggested to me well-being and serenity. The very first photograph of me does not show an infant with a cuddly toy, but one sitting next to the giant headlamp of my father’s Georges Roesch Talbot. They say le style c’est l’homme and this was so with him and his car. The Anglo-French Talbot was dashing, but it did not work very well since it was bought second-hand without much diligence and found to have a piston missing, which compromised its performance. My adolescent world was framed by the view from the back seat of such cars. And one day, while we were going for a drive, I saw my first racing car being trailered to the Aintree circuit. I had never seen anything so perfectly beautiful. I did not at the time have the vocabulary to describe it, but the effect was ravishing. It was dark blue, composed of subtle curves that were both elegant and, evidently, functional – a masterpiece of what I would later call ‘design’. The car I now realize was a Lotus XI, engineered on sublimely simple principles by Colin Chapman, wrapped in gorgeous aerodynamic bodywork by Mike Costin. Soon I was deep into my autodidact period in which my instructor was Penguin. The brilliant design of Penguin Modern Classics was by Germano Facetti who, again with Lotus-like elegance, between 1962 and 1971 gave new life to old titles with a combination of modern typography and adroit picture-research for the covers. I cannot, for example, separate a memory of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars from the Paul Klee painting Facetti chose for the cover. Ditto Thomas Mann and Lovis Corinth and so on with Camus, Sartre and Alain-Fournier. But I never separated my fascination with cars from my enlarging love of literature and art. On the contrary, they all seemed elements of a seamless project to understand and influence the forces which move us, whether dynamic or aesthetic. And when I discovered Laurence Pomeroy’s The Racing Car Explained, it confirmed this belief. Pomeroy (1907–66) was the author of The Grand Prix Car (1949) and co-author with Stirling Moss of The Design and Behaviour of the Racing Car (1963). His father, Laurence Pomeroy Senior, was automobile aristocracy, promoting himself from an apprenticeship at the North London Locomotive Works to the Thornycroft Steam Carriage and Van Company, and then on to Vauxhall in its heyday. There he designed engines, much influenced by avant-garde French combustion theory. Then to the Aluminium Corporation of America, Daimler and de Havilland. The Racing Car Explained (1963) is a masterpiece of technical exegesis. Although directed at young people, there is not a whiff of condescension in the writing. On the contrary, while superbly lucid in his explanations, Pomeroy expects a mature level of literacy and numeracy in his readers. And, I think rather beautifully, does not even question for a moment the importance of understanding what a ‘scrub angle’ might be. Or ‘the geometry of linkages’. And this in the era of the Beatles’ first LP. Rereading it now, I get a disabling nostalgia not only for my teens before I discovered the distractions of girls and beer, but also for a lost age which might have been more polluted than ours but which was also more innocent and optimistic. After all, a ‘sports’ car is a concept that aligns gasoline with grass, fresh air, water and snow as a means of facilitating human athleticism. Pomeroy begins with a succinct account of the history of motor-racing, noting that since 1895 every European country except Norway has staged motor races. This was the year of the very first, between Paris and Bordeaux. The entries consisted of seven petrol cars, four steam-engined examples and one driven by electricity. Competing cars included Mercedes, Fiat and Peugeot, and other makes now obscured by history: Nazzaro, Gregoire, Hotchkiss and Schneider. The race was won by Emile Levassor at an average speed of 15 mph. It took two days. In 1906, the French organized the first ‘Grand Prix’ for cars, a title that had hitherto been used for events involving horses. Of course, horses have made their own semantic contribution to the culture of the car, at first understood as a coachbuilder’s carriage defined by its horselessness. And the measure of a vehicle’s puissance was for a long time what the French call cheval vapeur or ‘horsepower’. One horsepower is defined as the capacity to lift thirty-three pounds a hundred feet in six seconds. (Nowadays, we prefer watts.) And in 1961, the motoring authorities established ‘Formula One’, the pinnacle of motor-racing. Formula One today is a garish, media-managed pseudo-event, flush with celebrity which, as it gains popularity, loses its connection with sporting character and technical purity. It is the great charm of Pomeroy that he shows us another world. In Chapter Three, ‘The Bases of Engine Power’, we read his stately prose: ‘Let us consider this matter of compression.’ Let us indeed. The most familiar form of internal combustion engine works in four ‘strokes’ nicely known as suck/squeeze/bang/ blow. Pomeroy invites the teenage mind to envisage a sixteen-cylinder engine sucking, squeezing, banging and blowing at 12,400 revolutions per minute. That means an oily little piston is moving up and down its constraining cylinder 207 times every second. The valves that feed the beast and exhaust its effluent open and shut in just one five-hundredth of a second. My teenage mind found this obscene mechanical inferno enthralling, if terrifying. Pomeroy takes us through all the elements of the racing car. When we are done with camshafts and piston speed, he moves on to independent suspension and shock absorbers. With absolute clarity and confidence, he presents the ability to design a single-seater to go ever faster as a metaphor of progress. Perhaps nothing dates him more. But he is not innocent of aesthetics. Of racing car shapes and the need for them to penetrate air with the least resistance, he explains: ‘Fish travel somewhat slowly in a relatively thick fluid and birds fly fast in a rather thin fluid.’ Accordingly, the jacket is illustrated with a photograph of Colin Chapman’s Lotus 25 which won the Formula One World Championship in the year the book was published. Chapman had trained as an aeronautical engineer and his philosophy was ‘simplify and add lightness’, which sounds like good advice to authors as well as racing car designers. The Racing Car Explained was, with Penguin Modern Classics, a complete education for me. I learned more from Laurence Pomeroy and Germano Facetti than I ever did at school. And the book contains some nice drawings of brakes, hub-carriers and wishbones, which I admired so much that I copied them with great reverence for my first published article. I was 15. And I still believe that oversteer and understeer have an almost moral character. Clive James agreed. He enjoyed the significance of vehicle dynamics and wrote a wonderful lyric, ‘Lay off the brakes and steer into the skid’. Pomeroy could explain the physics of that advice. It’s the same with ‘unsprung weight’. It is an education in itself to explain this concept. So let me try. Cars of any sort need suspension so that bumps in the road may be absorbed, otherwise they might turn over. Suspension is normally provided by springs connecting the wheel to the vehicle’s frame. The weight of the whole vehicle is therefore ‘sprung weight’ while the wheel itself is ‘unsprung weight’: it is the engineer’s objective to reduce unsprung weight to the minimum so as to make the wheels subject to fewer forces and, therefore, more controllable. Thank you, Laurence Pomeroy, for giving me an enduring ability to explain such mysteries. There are other sources of insight and beauty here. If you can understand that in any moving body, weight is transferred in the direction opposite to acceleration, then you are well on the way to understanding Newton’s Principia. Here Isaac modestly stated that he laid bare no less than the entire state and frame of the Universe – as Laurence Pomeroy did in this noble little book. The 1944 Education Act had such an effect on the schooling of his readers that Pomeroy was able to write: ‘It is a commonplace of physics that the coefficient of friction between two smooth materials cannot exceed 1.0’, and be certain that his readers would not be dumbfounded. I doubt you can be certain of such commonplaces sixty years on. What’s the lesson here? For all the gross silliness of Formula One today, I sometimes think the design of racing cars should be on the National Curriculum. Children would learn about physics and design, materials science and aerodynamics – as well as marketing, schmoozing, fundraising and PR. But then I recall something Laurence Pomeroy Senior said to his son, the author: ‘Well, my boy, always bear in mind that you will never be a really good driver until you have had three big accidents.’ I suppose my fascination with this book is based in a yearning for a simpler past when mechanical forces presented great danger – as well as great beauty.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 85 © Stephen Bayley 2025