Heroes and dummies

Have you ever wondered why taller folks find it so hard to fit into older sports cars? Take Ti’s own Andrew Frankel. He’s a tall, but not off-the-scales 6ft 3-ish (192 cm). He tells me that he can only fold himself into (original) GT40s when they are fitted with the Gurney bubble. To fit into a Porsche 917, the seat cushions need to be removed to drop him low enough in the chassis to scrape a helmeted head under the roof.

A Jaguar XK120 coupé ‘defeated him completely’. Our taller readers will now be nodding sympathetically – you may not have faced Mr Frankel’s truly first-world problem of having to slot yourself into a priceless Le Mans winning uber-classic, but you have probably experienced driving older cars with bent knees cranked up on either side of the steering wheel, doing your best not to mix up brake and throttle pedals crammed into diddy little footwells.