Aston Martin Rust Oration

I do apologise for the complete absence of the blog over the last couple of days (I hope you enjoyed the photos of Nigel on the error page - I’d been trying to find an excuse to post those for a while).

There was a vulnerability in the blog software and someone had hoped to exploit the bug to send emails, though fortunately all they did was break the blog.

I’d like to make it clear that MI5 were in no way responsible for causing the disruption. It was the Finnish security services.

Malcolm

Pirelli are doing the viral marketing thing. Put something cool on the web and hope people to link to it in their blogs. It’s worked:

http://www.pirellifilm.com/thefilm/viewFilm.jhtml

Pirelli’s “The Call” is an excellent 8 minute film. John Malkovich is a priest in Rome who is called upon to exorcise an unruly TVR Sagaris, represented in spirit by a rather naked Naomi Campbell. In the film the TVR’s wheelspinning antics are finally calmed by a set of Pirelli tyres.

Of course in real life a TVR doing doughnuts in Italy would normally be cheered on by the locals (even the priests), but don’t let that detract from the excellent film.

You’ll need to select a movie format and quality from the menu on the left before it’ll play. It’s a real movie, so if you end up looking at a sequence of freeze frames then try the middle quality for the windows player (the one that looks like a flag with 4 squares) as that’s the one that worked for me.

Not an Aston Martin problem but food for thought.

My company in the garage most weekends is Robert. He’s supposed to be restoring a Rochdale Olympic (strange glassfibre monocoque car from the early 1960s) but more often gets distracted by his Davrian (strange glassfibre monocoque car from the late 1960s).

Robert’s Davrian has engine trouble. The problems started off with a head gasket failure, due (we think) to crazy cooling pipe routing which didn’t allow the cooling system to be blead. A lot of modifications followed and the car now has a problem with cold starting.

Robert spent several weekends investigating and replacing all the obvious things, but still the problem presisted.

Finally we’ve twigged. “How long has the car been standing here?” The petrol in the car was bought in September when it was lovely and hot. But petrol companies change the petrol grade through the year as it gets colder, and winter fuels are much more volatile than summer fuels. Add that to the petrol being stale (the useful hydrocarbons having evaporated) and we have our answer.

A new tank of fuel and the car now starts.