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Davegess
| Posted on Monday, September 12, 2005 - 11:36 pm: |
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A moment silence for the greatest of motoring writers, the erudite and elagant if a bit verbose Mr. Setright. Below is the intro to a piece he did praising my car. ..It is time for a paradox; if it is to be admitted to be impossible to make anything perfect, then does the elimination of almost anything bring a total design nearer to perfection? The most beautifully detailed production engine cannot be any Lamborghini or Ferrari, any Jaguar or Mercedes Benz, nor any Porsche. Not even a motorcycle engine can rival the perfected simplicity of the one I have in mind; at the furthest extreme from the elegant complexities of the Honda CBX, the surviving few two-strokes which remain simple are all too far from anything resembling perfection. No, there is in each of these too much detail inviting criticism, and there are too many instances of lapsed logic. Compared with any or all of these, the Citroen 2CV is a skeleton whose soul shines through the bones. |
Road_thing
| Posted on Tuesday, September 13, 2005 - 07:42 am: |
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That's a huge loss for moto-journalism. What a fine writer! rt |
Djkaplan
| Posted on Tuesday, September 13, 2005 - 08:16 am: |
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Always a great pleasure. A great motorcyclist and writer I've read since the mid 70's. Hell, he was an old man back then. The guy had a great run. |
Mr_grumpy
| Posted on Tuesday, September 13, 2005 - 08:47 am: |
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A sad loss, I've been reading his stuff for nearly 40 years, always informative, erudite, & witty, he'll be greatly missed. |
Davegess
| Posted on Tuesday, September 13, 2005 - 01:43 pm: |
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He beleived that God has ordained the time and manner of our death so nothing we can do on earth will change that. As a result riding as a passenger in a car with him was an exercise in terror as he took enormous chances and just plunged on in "Dam the torpedos" style. |
Xlcr
| Posted on Tuesday, September 13, 2005 - 02:01 pm: |
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He was good, I used to read him in the Brit car mags. RIP |
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