Part of my Motorsports in Academia crusade is about the quality of the sources, specifically film, and especially the free film on youtube. My refrain is that this is a dynamic history, where a few hours on youtube puts you on equal intellectual footing with the crusty historians and...

Historiography sounds very ivory tower academics, but really it isn’t. The Oxford English Dictionary defines historiography as “The study of the writing of history and of written histories”. So, it is about how the story is told: not just who won the race, but whether we...

I am about to get on a plane for a NASCAR Conference at the International Motor Racing Research Center, at Watkins Glen in upstate New York. I was digging around some old photos looking for illustrations for my presentation, and stumbled upon these. Firstly, they show how gung-ho the old...

This piece first appeared in Autoshopper in Feb 2013. I’ve sampled four or five of these large Mopars now, and am struck by how different they manage to feel. I was going to change the bits of this article which echo bits of my Hemi Charger piece, but decided to leave them, the...

10pm, July 4th, at the harborside, in Portland, Maine. The Boy and I are parked up in a dark car park, he fast asleep, me awaiting the arrival of a Lobster roll. Lights off, engine off, surfing my phone. Three African American gents come around the corner, clearly a little the worse for wear,...

We stayed in San Sebastian during this trip, and even in the winter it still felt glamorous, a less well-known Monaco. Although the heating was broken in our hotel, the steak at the Michelin star place out of town was recompense enough. It is significant how much of what I say about diesel...

All of us doing the car hobby have moments of self doubt – just why am I doing this? Money and energy expended achieving what? Standing in a muddy field at 11.30 on a blustery, rainy winter night having just got my new Kawasaki ZX10r so stuck I could dismount without needing the side...

This article appeared in Autoshopper, September 2016 There was some hubbub in the press a few months ago about Cadillac moving to New York, to be re-imagined away from Detroit, the town Antoine de Cadillac himself founded back in 1701. Has this move altered the products? Rather than the...

The practice of art isn’t to make a living. It’s to make your soul grow. – Kurt Vonnegut https://jonsummers.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/VID_20160916_132348.mp4 The Rather Dramatic Arrival of the ’77 Lincoln Town Car Copart are a nationwide salvage auction company. This is...

This was my third car, and my third Cortina. As observed before, my Dad, anything but a lawbreaker himself, agreed with the public enemy era outlaws that “For sustained speed and freedom from trouble the Ford has got ever other car skinned” As a 1982 example, this was one of the...