Genevra Delphine Mudge is widely considered to be the first ever female racing driver, having started her career all the way back in 1899.
She was acclaimed as a talented driver and interestingly, she chose a Waverly Electric as her first car in New York City. A year later she took up gasoline powered racing in her own Locomobile and was the first woman in US history to be issued with a drivers license.
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.
In the 1960s both Steve McQueen and Evel Knievel owned Triumph TT Specials, McQueen often raced his Triumphs with notable success, and Knievel used his in the life and death world of stunt jumping. The most famous Triumph TT Special was undoubtably the example used by Evel Knievel for the Caesar’s Palace fountain jump on New…
The Ner-a-Car, known as the Neracar in the United States, was a revolutionary motorcycle design from 1918 that could very well have forever changed the trajectory of motorcycle design and engineering. As it stands today the Ner-a-Car was the most prolifically manufactured motorcycle with hub-center steering right up to the modern day, with over 15,000…
The story behind the design of the Volvo Amazon is quite complex and takes in influences from a number of sources. Volvo had recruited Jan Wilsgaard from the Handicraft Society School (which is nowadays called the HDK, School of Design and Crafts). The young Wilsgaard’s first design work for Volvo was a large V8 powered car called the Volvo Phillip made in 1950.
When it was first unveiled in 1964, the Peel Trident was the smallest car in the world. It was developed by the engineers at the Peel Engineering Company on the Isle of Man to be a fuel efficient personal transportation vehicle with seating for two, and a top speed of 28 mph. The post-WW2 years…
The Steyr-Daimler-Puch Pinzgauer is renowned as one of the toughest and most capable off-road vehicles of its time, particularly among the military service members who used them extensively on deployment. The Steyr-Daimler-Puch Pinzgauer Engineers at Steyr-Daimler-Puch developed the Pinzgauer in the late 1960s as the off-road military transport solution for the future. They left almost no…
In 1979 the famous American actor James Brolin, also a prolific amateur racing driver, was offered a place on a team being assembled to launch the first ever American assault on the gruelling 24 Hours Of Nurburgring. Perhaps the only asphalt-based race in the world that makes the 24 Hours of Le Mans look a…
