LURE OF SPEED

Greymouth Evening Star, 31 May 1928, Page 9

LURE OF SPEED

MAJOR SEGRAVE’S EXPERIENCES. Some of the exciting experiences of Major Segrave, the famous racing motorist, have been published in book form under the title, “The Lure of Speed.” Major Segrave is convinced that “no man will ever devise a machine so fast as to be beyond the control of a human being. Tlie reaction between eye. mind, and muscle is so instantaneous that I believe one could learn to drive habitually at 200 miles an hour supposing road conditions admitted of it.” ' He makes a confession: “Many a time I have done 100 miles an hour on the road—l am not going to specify exactly where —and I hope to do it again very often in the future, for there are conditions, depending upon the road and upon the car, under which such a speed is quite safe.” The Grand Prix of 1924 stands out in Major Segrave’s memory. “Halfway through the race, Lee Guinness, who was ahead of me, suddenly burst a tyre. I saw a. cloud of dust, smoke and stones, with great, chunks of rubber shooting up into the air. “The next moment a flying piece of tyre hit. my mechanic across the head. He collapsed as though he had been sandbagged. I had to drop him at the next stop and take on another.” In the same race a Fiat driver ahead missed the corner, crashed through a fence into a field, and hit an enormous boulder head-on. The car shot into the air, turned over, dropped both driver and mechanic into a gorse bush, and crashed some yards further on. Neither driver nor mechanic was badly hurt. Bordino, who in the author's view, is the finest road driver in the world, had a narrow escape. At. one corner of this route there was a. sheer drop of I.ooft into a quarry. “This was guarded by a palisade of railway sleepers on end, and was safe enough if you did not go round it too fast.. Bordino tried to. His car left the road, crashed into the railway sleepers, uprooted three or four, and hung over the lip of the quarry, its two front wheels resting on nothing, and the whole body rocking to and fro like a see-saw. The slightest, movement, forward would have sent it hurtling down.” 'Bordino. who, by a miracle, had not been thrown out, climbed quietly qnd calmly out. of the back, none the worse.