Tom McCahill
 

As a kid in the fifties/sixties I read his road tests avidly; his descriptions, to say the least, were colorful: "handles like a hippo in a mud slide".

At any rate I found one I thought I would share. This is the "car for the guy who pays $1,500 for a Purdy shotgun and $250 for a business suit."

MI Tests the German Porsche | Modern Mechanix

Thanks for posting this...an entire generation loved "Uncle Tom"...and his black Lab!

I grew up waiting at the mailbox for Tom's articles.....

Thanks, great article. I too read this guy in Mechanic's Illustrated when I was a boy in the '60s but he was already an old veteran w the bulk of his career behind him by then. I found him really amusing but obviously of a previous generation at the time.

$4500 was an absolute fortune in 1952 for a tiny sports car. People were building small houses in Los Angeles for not much more. :cool:

My dad was a Popular Mechanics and Popular Science guy.

Smokey was sharp. He could balance your drive shaft with a piece of chalk.

Tom never did it for me.

There's not much information about the engineering of the 356 in that article. Lots of mistakes, though. What's this about a 114 liter Porsche? Did we jump to a test of a train locomotive? And wasn't magnesium being used in VW engine cases in 1952? How is that heavier than Pre A 356 magnesium cases? To be fair, everyone knows Tom McCahill's automotive 'tests' were just for entertainment - much like the cheescake pictures of Mimi. (I have a copy of MI from February of 1959, my birth month and year. It cost a quarter, and there are 192 pulpy pages(!). Tom 'tests' the Studebaker Lark.)

(It's interesting that just 7 years after the end of WWII, Tom totally glosses over Ferry Porsche's many contributions to Hitlers war machine. Read "Professor Porsche's Wars" by Karl Ludvigsen for an interesting story of the way that Ferry made a living during WWI and WWII. I would imagine the bitter taste still lingered for a lot of ex-GI's.)

And, one last thing, if you click on the thumbnail of the MI cover in the upper left hand corner of the web page from the link, you're treated to 3 photos of a beautiful blue 1952 Cunningham C-4 with silver Halibrand wheels. "America's fastest sports car" I'd like to read that article! My Google-fu is weak, though.

Try this... Scroll through here:

Tom McCahill | Modern Mechanix | Page 2

Thanks!

That was actually a decent read! Did TM write the 356 test in the bar a few days after meeting Briggs Cunningham?

Anyway, thanks for the link.