Oh dear department

There were two misprints in my article on John Walker’s 1908 GP Panhard-Levassor last month. The person who bought the Bugatti “Black Bess” before the war was not Brig.-Gen. Miles but the late Brig.-Gen. G. M. Giles, and the third control in the car’s cockpit, the ignition change-over switch, was described as a “lower”, which doesn’t make sense — I wrote “lever”. In mentioning pre-war Edwardian racing in that article it might have been thought that I should have referred to Mavro’s GP Opel (fully covered in Motor Sport quite recently) and the 22-litre Fiat “Mephistopheles”. But the former is hardly an Edwardian giant and the latter, when owned by Peter Wike, mostly lay dormant, until Naylor got it going on the circuits for a while, after the war. Also the 12/30 Talbot of Peter Moores started life as a tourer and was converted into a 2-seater, not vice-versa. The VSCC Pomeroy Trophy rules specified cars are the minimum, not maximum capacity of 2¼-litres, so this year’s victory by a 2-3-litre Bugatti is very appropriate. There are a few more of our celebrated errors scattered about, such as Esson-Scott clocking under three seconds at Chalfont hill-climb but I hope the original meanings are obvious! — W.B.