Taken from MOTOR TREND
July of 1969


TWICE THE TRACTION FOR YOUR NEXT CAR?

Long a dream of auto engineers, four-wheel-drive for road cars is now a reality.
It could soon become an option that would create an unbeatable drag-racing stocker.

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By Karl Ludvigsen

The closest many of us come to four-wheel-drive is the classic 4x4 of our Army days: the tough, unstoppable Jeep. It's covered a lot of ground since then, through the first and second Jeepsters, the Wagoneer and today's Jeep Universal, giving Kaiser better than 40% of the growing market for four-wheel-drive sports vehicles. Already crowded with Rover, Datsun, Toyota, Kaiser, Harvester and Ford fighting for space, the traditional four-wheel-drive market is getting even more competitive with the arrival of the Chevy Blazer, in name, though not in its conservative engineering, a successor to an independently-sprung 4x4 built by Vic Hicky in 1961.

These are all-wheel-driven strictly for off-highway traction. If you don't declutch the front hubs or shift out of four-wheel-drive on the pavement, your bills for worn-out front tires will skyrocket. But it was the lowly Jeep, the original off-road stormer, that helped a British racing driver prove to his own satisfaction that drive on all fours was the right way to go for the highways, too. Since then he's fought almost single-handedly to advance the cause f 4wd and at last it looks like he's gaining ground.

Tall, dark, brisk and British, Major A.P.R. Rolt was in His Majesty's service before the last war when he and another well-known racing driver, Freddie Dixon, found the had a commone interest in four-wheel-drive cars. In 1940 they founded Dixon-Rolt Developments, Ltd. to try to back their ideas but the war interrupted that, including a spell in a POW camp in Germany for Tony Rolt. But after-ward, in some mysterious way, Major Rolt found himself with a jeep on which he was free to conduct some experiments. In 1945 he took it to a frozen lake with a toolkit and propulsion by all four. These trials confirmed his prison-bred notions that a four-wheel-drive road car could be the nicest kind of all to drive.

From a Jeep on a frozen lake Tony Rolt has come many a mile. Today he's one of the most eloquent advocates of drive to all four wheels, traveling anywhere he can rivet an automotive person with 4wd ideas, expressed on behalf of his employer, Harry Ferguson Research, Ltd. of Coventry, England. And through this firm, a leader in four-wheel-drive development for 20 years, Rolt has brought his idea a long way from that Jeep to today's Jensen FF, the only production passenger car with drive to all four wheels, all the time.

First of all, in spite of its bulk the FF is no slowpoke. It can get to 60 in 7.7 seconds, cover the quarter in 16.1, and reach a maximum of 130. So the power is there. But with the right foot hard down and the TorqueFlight in low-low, it won't spin a wheel from standing start. Okay, so the rear differential is limited-slip. Still, it won't spin the wheels on wet roads. And when I tried it with two tires off on a muddy shoulder, it scooted straight ahead anyway. Its magnificent grip gave a marvelous feeling of confidence.

The Ancestor List

Are we related? Is your great-grandfather our mother's cousin's grandma's nephew once removed? There's only one way to find out . . . . In this list, names and dates are indexed by surname:

Smith
Jones
Smithe
Jonesy
Smiite
Joons
Sith
Jons
Smiithee
Jonees

About the Family Roots

The Smith side of the family hails from Munich, Germany, and came across the ocean to Massachussetts in the mid-1800s. The Jones side comes from Wales and more recently immigrated in 1910.

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