Amazing, what almost 60 years of engineering progress can produce. Ken Waller   -----Original Message----- From: Pentax-Discuss Mail List Sent: Sep 29, 2021 1:33 PM To: Pentax-Discuss Mail List Subject: Re: GESO British car show     > On Sep 29, 2021, at 9:50 AM, John Francis wrote: > > On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 12:11:40AM +0000, Ken Waller wrote: >> Had my only experience in an E type coupe in the early 60's coming back from a race at Mosport, outside of Toronto, heading back to Detroit, late on a Sunday night. The car was owned by a co-worker who really knew how to drive it. It was almost surreal - like being in a time machine - so smoothe, quiet and comfortable - at high speeds the acceleration was like nothing I had ever experienced. We cruised at triple digits for quite some time. Fastest trip home from Mosport ever. > > A co-worker of mine (originally in the UK, but he eventually also moved out to the US) eventually succumbed to temptation, and bought himself an E-type convertible (early model, before headlight fairings). I did get to drive it once (although not at speed). My most lasting impression is that the (wood-finished) steering wheel was enormous - rather like driving a truck. It didn't handle like a truck, though.   Yeah, they handle almost as well as a minivan. Some years back the folks at Grassroots motorsports noticed that their Honda Odyssey handled pretty well, so they took the Honda and an E-type to their “autocross course”, basically a go kart track, to get some side by side times. They also took a set of better tires for the minivan to see how close they could get to the E-type with a bit of help. It turns out that on stock tires, the Odyssey beat the jag, and with the good tires absolutely smoked it.   OK, so after writing the above I decided to exercise my google-fu:       https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/articles/soccer-moms-revenge/   I forgot about the 356. My apologies to the Maestro, Harry Pellow, but I’m not particularly interested in 3565s.   Though they do end the article with this: And sports cars, we find, are about more than generating numbers—hell, any minivan can do that. They are about the fact that when certain parts are put together in certain ways by certain people, they become something greater than their own sum.   Sports cars—whether they be our 356 or XKE, or a TR3 or an MR2 or an MX-5—are about making the driver feel like he or she is the coolest person on the planet, even if only for a little while. Sports cars aren’t about getting somewhere to have an experience, they are an experience, every time the key is turned.   Go on a trip in the Odyssey, and you’ll remember the destination; go on a trip in a sports car, and you’ll remember the drive.   So, I’ll yank things back on to topic and mention that this seems to be the Pentax strategy, focusing on how it feels to use the camera rather than entirely on the technical specifications.     > -- > %(real_name)s Pentax-Discuss Mail List > To unsubscribe send an email to pdml-leave@pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions. >   -- Larry Colen lrc@red4est.com     -- %(real_name)s Pentax-Discuss Mail List To unsubscribe send an email to pdml-leave@pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.  

> On Sep 29, 2021, at 12:09 PM, Ken Waller <kwaller@peoplepc.com> wrote: > > Amazing, what almost 60 years of engineering progress can produce. Probably closer to 50, but yes. The Mazda Mx5/Miata/Eunos is considered a rather slow car in performance circles, but if you look at the specifications, it’s not that far off from a V-8 powered Sunbeam Tiger. A lot of the legendary performance cars would be “fair to middlin” by today’s standards. In photography where performance doesn’t matter except for when it does, the things today’s cameras can do are mind boggling compared to the film era. I’ve taken shots at upwards of ISO 10,000 that have less noise than Tri-X had grain. Very few of my astro-landscape photos would have even been possible not that long ago. I didn’t really have the budget for lenses until fairly recently, but I suspect that what we consider “OK performance” in a modern lens would have blown people out of the water not that many decades ago. -- Larry Colen lrc@red4est.com