In my heart of hearts I don’t think that Datsun should have changed their name to Nissan, the name Datsun evokes so much racing heritage it seems a shame to have lost it all.
Ben Branch has had his work featured on CNN, Popular Mechanics, the official Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with millions of readers around the world and hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
The Vincent Black Lightning was the fastest and most desirable motorcycle in the world when it was released in 1948. A factory-delivered Black Lightning was capable of 150 mph if you were brave enough, and no small amount of bravery was required as braking technology hadn’t yet caught up with rapidly increasing horsepower levels. The…
How to Build a Car – The Autobiography of the World’s Greatest Formula 1 Designer is an essential read for any racing fan – Adrian Newey is by far the most successful Formula 1 car designer in history, his designs have won 10 Constructors’ Championships, with 3 different teams, and in the ’80s he spent…
The Yamaha XT500 won the first two runnings of the Paris-Dakar Rally as well as the Paris-Abidjan-Nice, it also surprised everyone by winning the 1977 500cc Motocross World Championship (in significantly modified form) against the formerly dominant two-strokes. Today the XT500 is remembered along with motorcycles like the original BMW R80GS as a godfather of…
This Husqvarna Model 30 A is a custom motorcycle of sorts – it was built by a privateer racer before Husqvarna offered their own factory-built version – the Model 350DT (DT for “dirt track”). The 1920s and ’30s were an important, formative time for dirt track racing – also called flat track, circle track, and…
The 1965 Pontiac GTO Chief Camino is a one-off vehicle that should almost certainly have been built and offered for sale by Pontiac in the mid-1960s. It never was, but this is probably due to the fact that there’s no indication Pontiac even considered building it. The car you see here wasn’t built by them,…
The Shelby Series 1 Personally, I think the Shelby Series 1 is a significantly underrated car. It was the only blank-slate road car ever built by Carroll and the storied American company, it has looks influenced by the Shelby Cobra and the Shelby Daytona Coupe, it’s fitted with a highly-tuned, all-alloy, double overhead cam L47 Aurora…
