Tuning needs to be learned
11/10/2011
Some of you will probably recognize this photograph. It has gone down in Bugatti history as a witness to the chassis and drive technology of the time and shows the astonished Raymond May at the very moment when he lost a wheel during the Shelsley-Walsh hill climb in 1924.
What was he thinking at that moment? "You picked a fine time to leave me, loose wheel", is one of the speculations on the Internet, the author's imagination stimulated by May's expressive facial expressions.
But how did this come about? The young enthusiast had big ambitions and ventured into high revs (around 6,000) for the first time, which the old half-shafts were not up to. He forgot that a good vehicle requires not only a powerful engine with high performance, but also an appropriately adapted chassis. The result: the loss of a wheel and brake drum.
But no master has yet fallen from the sky and you learn from your mistakes, because fortunately this mishap turned out to be a minor one: The car came to a hair's breadth stop on the edge of a slope.
