This film, titled Niki Lauda Explains Formula 1, is a 1985 documentary that explains the F1 cars and technologies of the era. It’s a remarkable opportunity to see Lauda in the post-Rush days and listen to him explaining car balance, transmissions and engines from the midst of the original turbo era.
It’s just under 20 minutes in length and is well worth the time, especially if you’re a Formula 1 fan currently undergoing withdrawals. The narrator covers almost every aspect of the mid-80s cars including a fascinating look under the skin of Lauda’s McLaren.
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.
This formerly classified CIA training film covers techniques used to surveil cars using multiple vehicle-based teams communicating by radio. The quality of the film’s production came as a bit of a surprise, the camera work is excellent but perhaps most surprisingly the soundtrack includes both the Shaft theme song and the Star Trek theme song….
Go Grandriders is a documentary that follows a group of larger-than-life motorcyclists in their 80s as they ride around the island of Taiwan, covering an impressive 1178 kilometres in 13 days. This film was the highest grossing documentary of all time in both Taiwan and Hong Kong, and it even enjoyed a limited U.S. theatrical release –…
This 40% scale Reynard Indycar model was designed for wind tunnel testing, as such it’s built to exacting specifications to exactly match the full scale race cars. Just two of these models were made in 1998, it took a team of over two dozen people three months to complete the project. Each of the models…
Editor’s Note: We’re now in touch with Stephen’s family and they have the negatives safely in storage. At the moment it’s just a matter of them finding time to have a look through the boxes. We also picked up two more leads on some other historically important Britten images. If you have any Britten-related images…
The television show Torque was an Australian institution, watched religiously by petrolheads in the country throughout the 1970s. The show was presented by Peter Wherrett, now remembered as an Australian icon, whose review could make or break a car – a bad review from Wherrett could be the death knell for a new model. This…
The Fliteboard The Fliteboard is a personal electric hydrofoil, or eFoil, designed to take riders at speeds of up to 40km/h on journeys of up to 25 km/h. As a point of reference, the average speed a wakeboarder travels at is approximately 27 km/h, and a water-skier might travel at speeds of 35-40 km/h, so…
