Englishman Raymond Mays was an avid racer and through a deal with a Bugatti importer he managed to finagle himself a Type 13 to go racing with. He was so obsessed with performance that he had the engine tuned an order of magnitude higher that it could reasonably handle (6,000rpm), which resulted in the above mechanical failure.
His luck wasn’t totally absent though, the 660 lb (300 kg) car remained upright and skidded to a halt just inches from a precipice that would have almost certainly killed him had he gone over.
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 Rickman Metisse Triumph is one of the most thoroughly British motorcycles we’ve featured in some time. Not only does it have a British engine and transmission thanks to Triumph, it has a Rickman frame and bodywork, and just to cap things off, it’s parked outside the Ace Cafe in London – the original home…
The new Bremont U-2/51-JET is a development of the Bremont U-2 range that has been updated with design cues from RAF’s 100 Squadron and their Hawk T1 Jet. The 100 Squadron is famous for being the first squadron formed for night bombing – all the way back on the 23rd of February 1917. The squadron…
The Vault of the Petersen Automotive Museum The overwhelming majority of people driving down Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles have no idea that the unusual red and silver building they’re passing has a vault below ground level that contains well over $150 million USD worth of cars. Remarkably, the vault at the Petersen is more…
The story of Elspeth Beard is legendary within the motorcycle community, in 1982 aged just 23 she set off on a round the world adventure with nothing more than a tent, some meagre savings from her job in a bar, and her trusty 1974 BMW R60/6. This was many years before GPS, email, cell phones,…
Bill Devin is a man who should doubtless be far more famous than he is, he’s credited with being the first person to use toothed belt in a timing belt application, an invention he came up with in order to get a pair of Norton Manx barrels and heads working after attaching them to a two-cylinder Panhard…
This series of photographs by Benedict Redgrove showcases vintage safety gear worn by drag racing drivers, borrowed for the photoshoot from the world famous Don Garlits Museum of Drag Racing. Drag Racing is one of the most dangerous forms of motorsport, in fact if measured in fatalities per mile, it’s possibly the single most dangerous…
