Slow Life Blog from the Lake District
  • Home
  • About Me
  • Contact Me

Bond’s Ford Thunderbird

9/12/2010

0 Comments

 
Picture
My Ford Thunderbird is lying there wrapped up for the winter, forlornly waiting for me to get round to restoring her. I will do so one day, when my life slows down sufficiently. In the meantime I was intrigued to learn that Ian Fleming was an enthusiastic Ford Thunderbird owner. Here’s what he wrote about his Thunderbird for the Spectator:
“True, it isn’t a precision instrument like English sports cars but that I count a virtue. The mechanical margin of error in its construction is wider. Everything has a solid feel. The engine, a huge, adapted low-revving Mercury V8 of 5-litre capacity, never gives the impression of stress or strain. When, on occasion, you can do a hundred without danger of going off the edge of this small island, you have not only the knowledge that you have 20mph in reserve, but the feel of it. As for acceleration, when the two extra barrels of the 4-barrel carburettor come in, at around 3000 revs, it is a real thump in the back.”
​
According to Alan Judd, who now writes about motoring in the Spectator, Ian Fleming’s wife, Ann, complained to Evelyn Waugh that the car’s acceleration was so fierce that it gave her “Thunderbird Neck”. No doubt she emerged from the ride shaken, not stirred.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.


    ​About Slow Life

    The idea of Slow Life is to take the principles of Slow Food, which are “good, clean and fair”, and extend them to life in general.

    Here in the Lake District, the air is clean, the pace is slow and the atmosphere is calm. If we don’t grow food ourselves, we can buy it in friendly small shops, where you know the quality is going to be the best.

    This blog is a celebration of the Slow Life, with forays into the world of design, music, the arts, gardens, and my particular weakness, Japan.

    Archives

    August 2015
    May 2015
    January 2011
    December 2010
    November 2010
    October 2010
    September 2010
    August 2010
    July 2010
    June 2010
    May 2010
    April 2010
    March 2010
    February 2010
    January 2010
    December 2009
    November 2009
    October 2009

    RSS Feed

Home   |   About Me   |   Contact Me

Jonathan Denby's Slow Life blog from the Lake District

© Copyright Slow Life 2020. All rights reserved   |   cookie policy    |   Site by Treble3
  • Home
  • About Me
  • Contact Me