The Car of the Century was chosen in a multiple-stage process over a three-year period beginning in October 1996. A list of 700 cars, drawn up from recommendations made from within the car industry and from car clubs, was offered by the COTC organizing committee as candidates for the award.
This was reduced down over two-plus years by selections of panels of experts to a final list created by a combination of public internet voting to select ten cars and an additional 25 cars to be selected by the jury of professionals. As it turned out, 9 out of the 10 cars selected by the public were also among the 25 selected by the journalists, so 26 cars were announced at the Geneva Motor Show in March 1999.
It might be interesting to note that out of the 26, only four were American-made — Ford was represented twice with the Model T and the mid-'60s Mustang, while General Motors claimed one position with the mid-'60s Chevrolet Corvette Stingray. The fourth American-made vehicle was the original Willys Jeep from the WWII era.
Finally, members of the jury were asked to nominate five finalists which would go through to the last round of voting, using a points system. The final five nominees, announced at the Frankfurt Motor Show in September 1999, were the four cars listed in the post above along with the Porsche 911, which finished fifth in the voting.
According to Wikipedia, the AC Cobra / Shelby Cobra, a joint UK-US car powered by a Ford V-8 engine, was also among the 26 cars on the list of nominees for Car of the Century. All told, the cars came from the following countries:
3 - Italy
8 - Germany
6 - UK
5 - France
1 - UK-US
4 - US
None came from Japan.
In the Wikipedia article, they list ‘the 26 nominees’ and then proceed to have 27 cars in their list.
[QUOTE=Bullitt;22341748In the Wikipedia article, they list ‘the 26 nominees’ and then proceed to have 27 cars in their list.
The discrepancy is not explained.[/QUOTE]
Wikipedia is incorrect when they say the jury selected 25 cars.
I found a November 1999 Chicago Tribune article online (https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1999-11-04-9911040100-story.html) which listed the group of 100 from which the selection was made; however, this article says that the jury selected TWENTY-SIX cars(and they are designated in the list by asterisks). Maybe it was their original intent to only select twenty-five, but when the dust had settled two vehicles were tied at the 25th position so they included both?
Thus, when you add the Shelby/AC Cobra, it gives you the total of twenty-seven listed in the Wikipedia article.
Here’s my play: one of the cars in the list is the NSU Ro 80, a car manufactured in Germany from 1967 to 1977 (here’s an image, https://is.gd/OKz5W7). It was Motor Trend magazine’s Car of the Year for 1968 and was powered by a rotary engine.
The Wankel engine is an internal combustion engine, developed by German engineer Felix Wankel, which uses a rotor in place of the traditional piston design. He received his initial patent for the engine design in 1929, but did not have a working prototype for the engine until 1957, when he was working for the West German vehicle manufacturer NSU.
While NSU produced several cars using Wankel engines, including the Spider and the Ro 80, the engine may be best-known for its use by Mazda in the 1960s and 1970s in its line of cars. Mazda soon returned to using piston engines in most of its line, due to several issues with the Wankel, including poor fuel economy and high emissions, and focused its use of the Wankel engine to its sports cars. The Mazda RX-8, which was discontinued in 2012, was apparently the last production vehicle to use a Wankel engine.
Ahura Mazda is the creator and highest deity of Zoroastrianism. The literal meaning of the word Ahura is “lord”, and that of Mazda is “wisdom” or “enlightenment”. The Mazda Motor Company website notes that the company name “was associated with Ahura Mazda, with the hope that it would brighten the image of these compact vehicles” and also derives from the name of the company’s founder, Jujiro Matsuda (the u in Matsuda is almost silent)
The Mazda car company is headquartered in Hiroshima. The rotary engine powered RX-7, a 2-seater coupé*, was manufactured from 1978 to 2002 through three generations. The 1st-generation RX-7 was manufactured 1978–1985, the 2nd-gen from 1985-1992, and the 3rd-gen from 1991–1997.
— the second generation RX-7 was also a 2-seater coupé but it offered a 2+2 option.
On August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb nicknamed ‘Little Boy’ was dropped from a B-29 bomber on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, another atomic bomb nicknamed ‘Fat Man’ was dropped from a B-29 bomber on the city of Nagasaki, Japan.
At the Wendover Historic Airfield in Wendover UT, the special, modified loading pit used to load Little Boy and Fat Man into the “Silverplate” B-29s for their transport to Tinian Island is still there and can be seen to this day. The Silverplate B-29s were the modifications made so the bombers could carry the atomic bombs.
The Enola Gay hander is still there, too. I’ve stood inside it. But it is falling apart due to age and lack of care and maintenance.
The Bonneville Speedway is located on the Bonneville Salt Flats just to the north and east of Wendover, Utah. Five major land speed competitions take place at this location each year, as well as other events. These events are generally scheduled beginning in May through October.
North America’s Great Basin area covers nearly all of Nevada, much of Oregon and Utah, and parts of California, Idaho, and Wyoming. Its topography varies from North America’s lowest point, Badwater Basin in Death Valley, to the highest point in the contiguous United States less than 100 miles away, Mount Whitney. The Great Basin was named by explorer John C. Fremont.
The largest ice age lake of the Great Basin area was Lake Bonneville. Its old shoreline can be seen by marks above Salt Lake City on the western edges of the Wasatch Mountains. Lake Bonneville receded about 13,000 years ago.
The Bonneville Salt Flats lie west of the Great Salt Lake in northwestern Utah, and are a remnant of the Pleistocene-era Lake Bonneville.
The flats are the site of the Bonneville Speedway, an area which is used for various motorsports, and where numerous land speed records have been set. Due to deteriorating conditions of the salt flats over the past few decades, the available area for racing has has declined, and some race meets in recent years have been cancelled.
The current holder of the Outright World Land Speed Record is ThrustSSC, a twin turbofan jet-powered car which achieved 763.035 mph over one mile on October 15, 1997. This was the first supersonic record as it broke the sound barrier at Mach 1.016.
ThrustSSC is displayed at the Coventry Transport Museum in Coventry, England.
The Coventry Blitz of November 1940, aimed at munitions and weapons factories, destroyed two thirds of the city, including the historic Cathedral. It was such a new and severe level of destruction that Joseph Goebbels later used the term coventriert (“coventried”) when describing similar levels of destruction of other enemy towns.
Coventry is where the term Peeping Tom came from. Coventry is also where Lady Godiva famously rode her horse naked, clothed only in her hair. The two, from the 11th century, are linked.
Lady Godiva’s husband had imposed a stiff tax on Coventry’s citizens. They complained, to no avail. Lady Godiva took up their cause and complained incessantly to her husband. Her husband said he would grant her request if she would strip naked and ride on a horse through the streets of the town. Lady Godiva took him at his word, and after issuing a proclamation that all persons should stay indoors and shut their windows, she rode through the town, clothed only in her long hair. Just one person in the town, a tailor named Thomas and ever afterwards known as Peeping Tom, disobeyed her proclamation.
The legend of Lady Godiva’s nude ride was first recorded in the 13th century.
Lady Godiva died sometime between 1066 and 1086, which means she likely saw Halley’s comet when it came in 1066.
Peter and Gordon were a British pop duo, composed of Peter Asher and Gordon Waller. In 1964, their first single, “A World Without Love”, sold over a million copies and reached number one on the charts. The song was written by Paul McCartney, who dated Peter’s sister Jane Asher for several years in the Sixties.
The duo had several other hit songs, including “Lady Godiva”, which reached as high as #6 on the charts.
Later in his career, Peter Asher was the manager for both Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor.
Lady Godiva’s husband, Earl Leofric of Mercia, was buried in St Mary’s Priory and Cathedral in Coventry, 1057. Mercia was one of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and Leofric and Godiva had built that church there in 1043 to be a Benedictine monastery. It was the only English cathedral to be destroyed during the Reformation of 1517.
The Benedictines are a Catholic monastic order, which follow the Rule of Saint Benedict, a book of precepts for monastic life which was written by Benedict of Nursia in 516.
Unlike most other religious orders, the Benedictines do not have a single hierarchy; although there are loosely-organized congregations of houses, and a “Benedictine Confederation,” each Benedictine monastery is fundamentally autonomous, governed by an abbot.
(Side note: the Catholic high school which I attended was operated by a Benedictine abbey, and several of my teachers were Benedictine priests.)
Saint Benedict, or Benedict of Nursia in Umbria, wrote the Rule of Saint Benedict in the year 516, a collection of monastic precepts based on an anonymous document called the Rule of the Master. Benedict extensively revised the Rule of the Master, calling it simply The Rule and it formed the set of rules for communal monks living under the authority of an abbot, the head of a monastery. Charlemagne distributed several copies throughout Europe.