Sport: Old Car

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racing and on looking for an ideal spot in which to do it. Daytona's beach—20 mi. long and almost straight—is only 75 ft. wide at high tide, 500 ft. at low. It is less stony than the Verneuk Pan course in South Africa, where Sir Malcolm made a five-mile record last year, and straighter than go-Mile Beach, the best in Australia. Gloomy before a race, irascible, profoundly superstitious, Sir Malcolm patronizes as many soothsayers and fortune-tellers as he can find. He owns 18 dogs, shoots big game for recreation. When not looking for beaches, he sometimes looks for buried treasure. Three years ago he spent a month at Cocos Island, where £12,000,000 was supposed to have been laid down in 1821.

His present Blue Bird, rebuilt and repowered on the chassis in which he broke the late Sir Henry Segrave's record in 1928, has a motor exactly like the ones in British Schneider Trophy seaplanes, with twelve cylinders set in blocks of four. The radiator is separated from the motor, which could not stand a 250-m.p.h. wind-stream, so that the hood is shaped like a blunt crochet-hook. The huge fin at the back helps to weigh the car down, keep it straight at high speeds. Blue Bird's clearance from the ground is 3¼ inches. Its gasoline tank, which works by gravity at normal speeds, has pressure pumps to offset the momentum that would otherwise push fuel backwards away from the carburetor. At 2,300 revolutions per minute —speed of the Blue Bird's wheels at 245 m.p.h.—ordinary tire treads would be torn off by centrifugal force. Last week when he stopped his sand monster by starting the motor that applies the brakes, Sir Malcolm found, embedded in his specially constructed tires, several tiny bits of shell. When news of the new record reached his wife and two children in London, Lady Campbell said: "I think it's wonderful. ... I knew he was driving an old car and I was worried."