During his early years in the English midlands, William Lyons gave little inclination that he would eventually attain legendary status for the creation of sports cars. 
The son of an Irish musician-turned-piano-repairman, Lyons was a motorcycle fanatic who was fond of racing his Harley-Davidson in local events during the gloomy years of the First World War. He wasn’t particularly enamored of working the piano shop, so his father helped him acquire an apprenticeship with Crossley Motors, a Manchester-based car builder. But at just 17, Lyons was not ready to settle into the drudgery of the machinists business. Read more . . .
A torrent of water passed under the bridge between the launch of the Jaguar XK 120 show car at the Earls Court Motor Show in 1946 and the 
Geneva Auto Show in 1961. For one thing, equipped with the potent XK six-cylinder engine, Jaguar had gone sports car racing in a most successful way. With the aerodynamic D-Type, the marque had prevailed in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the world’s most prestigious road race, three years in a row. Jaguar had transitioned from offering the public a reliable sports car for the street based on sedan mechanicals to building very specialized sports racing machinery, and then, finding the cost of world-class competition rising ever-higher, it had pulled back from its racing commitments to concentrate again of cars the market could buy. Read more . . .
“Win on Sunday, then, Sell on Monday.” It is one of the clarion calls of NASCAR, the venerable “stock car” racing 
sanctioning body that has become one of the hottest success anecdotes of the Nineties and now the new millennium. But, unfortunately, Hudson Motor Car Company was the exception that proved the rule in the early 1950s. The Hudson Hornet was one of the vehicles that made NASCAR a viable series in its infant and toddler years, but while the Hudson Hornet assisted NASCAR in inestimable ways, NASCAR didn’t really help Hudson, at least not enough to stave off its inevitable death just a few short years after racing domination had thrust it into the limelight. Read more . . .
The conventional wisdom says that the original Ford Thunderbird was a direct response to Chevrolet’s launch of the Corvette. 
The Corvette was displayed at the 1953 Motorama, and immediately Ford designers pulled out their drafting pencils and went to work. But the real story is that the Ford Thunderbird was just the kind of car that many designers dream about, so when the formal call to work on a 2-seater came from management, Ford designers just reached into their desk drawers. Read more . . .
How the dreams of youth become the monotonous remnants of middle age. 
So it is with the retractable hardtop, a phenomenon that made the mid-1950’s boy consider that in America, everything is possible, from putting a satellite up in space to creating a convertible out of a sedan before one’s very eyes. Sadly, today the retractable hardtop car, like many of our youthful symbols, has lost its novelty. They are, in fact, getting to be more common than the canvas-topped convertibles of old.
Modern hardtops in abundance
Mitsubishi was the car company that initiated the latest retractable top trend. It started selling its 3000 GT Spyder Read more . . .
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