Categories
Classic Sportscar

Pursuit

Nice little split-window back and forth on So-Sos.

Categories
Vintage Racing Advertising

Giaur: I’ll Take Them All, Please

How would it be possible to choose from among the Berlinetta, 750 Sport Internazionale, and 750 Corsa models offered in this Giaur advertisement?

Berlinetta
Mod. San Remo
Carrozzeria | Lega leggera | Telaio tubolare | Motore Giannini | Mono alber CV 45 | Carburante super | 80 N.O. | Velocita km 160 | Peso kg 419
750 Sport Internazionale
Mod. Champion
Motore Giannini | Doppion Albero | A cames in Testa | CV 68 | Telaio tubulare | Carburante Super | 80 N.O. | Velociata km 170 | Peso kg 360
750 Corsa
Mod. Red Blitz
Motore Giannini | Doppion Albero | A Cames in testa | CV 68 | Carburante Miscela Ternaria | Valocita km 186 | Peso kg 300

updated to include the second page (and better resolution) from Etceterini

Categories
Porsche

Porsche Classic Restores a 911T


The team at Porsche Classic, in conjunction with the Porsche Club of America, are restoring a well worn patinaed beat to shit 1973 911T to be raffled off at the August 2011 Porsche Parade. Unlike their usual projects restoring vintage Porsches, they’re documenting the restoration and sharing it on porsche.com. The team recently posted some updates and this series of photos illustrating the gearbox spread out for rebuild are simply gorgeous. Gearboxes are notoriously fear-inducing, but when you lay everything out like this it looks like a manageable, albeit puzzling task.
via Things Organized Neatly

Categories
Historic Racing Photos Lost Track Porsche

Ricardo Rodriguez at Meadowdale

Ricardo Rodriguez at Meadowdale, 1959


Imagine the nerves that a 17-year-old (!) Ricardo Rodriguez must have felt climbing into his Porsche RSK Spyder for round 3 of the USAC Road Racing Championship at Meadowdale Raceways on May 31, 1959. Imagine how you’d have felt at 17, waiting for the start of the race, thinking of the daunting nature of the track with it’s Monza-style banking and lack of runoff areas. Now realize that Ricardo probably didn’t feel any of that because he was Ricardo Rodriguez. Even after he rolled the Porsche near the silo turn, he attempted to enlist the help of corner workers to right the car so he could continue.

After practice Rodriguez had a small incident as well. The nose was replaced before the race.
After practice Rodriguez had a small incident as well. The nose was replaced before the race.
Meadowdale, May 1959 Program Cover

The race report at Chicagoland Sports Car Club Memories sums up the performance of the then relatively unknown Mexican driver nicely.

“That young Mexican we mentioned was 17-year-old Ricardo Rodriguez of Mexico City. His astonishing ability as a driver had almost every one cheering him along as the David chasing the Goliath. Certainly all we had heard about this lad’s ability was founded on fact. He certainly proved it here at Meadowdale. It was unfortunate that he ‘lost it’ coming through a turn at the northeast corner of the track. While he flipped and completely rolled over in the car, he was able to crawl out from under with only minor bruises. Rodriguez was a comfortable second place and challenging the leader when he went out of the race.”

Chicagoland Sportscar Club Race Report
Categories
Grand Prix Racing Ephemera

Remaking Grand Prix. Wait… What?

Deadline Hollywood reports that Indie production company Vincent Pictures is undertaking a series of remakes, including Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix. I’m not an enormous fan of remakes, and in this case I think it’s a particularly daunting task. No one has adequately stepped into Frankenheimer’s shoes as being able to capture automotive footage in the beautiful, naturalistic way that is the hallmark of some of the great car chases (and races) in his work. Recent automotive films have relied on computer generated cars for the more harrowing action, which continue to look fake regardless of the budget behind it—Transformers, anyone?

I can understand the draw of remaking older films. The common sentiment is that younger viewers don’t watch old movies, which presents the opportunity to recreate a time-tested product and release it without as much of the risk. Racing geeks, however, are notoriously loyal fans to the older flicks, and continue to seek out catalog titles. The tops of the lists of greatest car flicks has remained remarkably steady over the past few decades. You don’t, for example, see The Fast and the Furious knocking LeMans off of the top of anyone’s favorites.

We’ve also had the fairly recent phenomenon of Stallone’s racing movie Winning Driven. Originally the film was supposed to, in the spirit of Grand Prix, take place in the Formula 1 circuit. Ultimately Bernie et al weren’t interested and the film was relegated to lesser series. I suspect that the same would be true today.

What do you think? Is Grand Prix remake-able? Should it be?

Categories
Video

Oscar Koveleski’s Lap of Road Atlanta

I’m a huge fan of projected 8mm home movies shot to video and uploaded to YouTube. I’m an even bigger fan when the film is from Oscar Koveleski collection and he narrates a lap, describing the obscured driving line, elevation changes, and corners of one of America’s great tracks. So let’s take a spin around Road Atlanta with Oscar in his Auto World McLaren M8B. I’d take his advice, this was probably filmed the weekend he took 4th in the Can-Am Road Atlanta race in September 1970.

Categories
Porsche Vintage Racing Advertising

Not an Experimental Model But a Real Production Car

From the brochure for the Porsche 917:

Porsche Approaches the Higher Limit of Cylinder Capacity.
Since 1967 the limit of the cylinder capacity for the World Championship Endurance races has been 3000 c.c. for sports prototypes and 5000 c.c. for homologated sports cars with a minimum production of 25 items in twelve consecutive months.
Previously, the cylinder capacity of 5000 c.c. was fully utilized only in sports cars with engines of American origin. At the 1969 Geneva Motor Show, Porsche will be the first European automobile factory to present a large-volume sports car, the type 917, which is to be homologated by the F.I.A. (Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile) at the beginning of the current racing season for the classic endurance races.
The 917 has the largest cylinder capacity and is the fastest Porsche which has ever been built. Particularly remarkable is the fact that it is not an experimental model but a real production car. This, because on March 31st 25 cars will be finished and ready to race.
With a top speed of over 320 KPH, a maximum performance of 520 HP, and a body designed in acoordance with the latest aerodynamic principles, the 917 ranks among the high points of the 1969 automobile year.

See the complete scans of Porsche’s 917 brochure at the Old Car Manual Project

Categories
Historic Racing Photos Porsche

Then and Now: 911S TG-1514

TG-1514 as raced by Ernst “Hunter” Seiler in 1969.

Bob Tilton’s photo of TG-1514 on Werk Crew, and to be included in his upcoming Porschegasm text, Book One.

Categories
Reviews

Reviewed: Legendary Race Cars

Legendary Race Cars

Let me preface this review by saying that I’m not a fan of Greatest Hits albums. Usually when I like a band, I dive headlong into their catalog; collecting all the LPs, digging through crates for 45s with unreleased B-sides. I usually find that my favorite songs by an artist weren’t one of their ‘greatest hits’ and that the album cuts are the heart and soul of a musical act. I’ve always thought that Greatest Hits albums were for people that like the radio, not people that like music.

As more of a completist, my tastes in automotive books tend to run to the specific and detailed. I’ve always loved a heavy tome about a single make—even better, a single model—of car. On the surface, Basem Wasef’s book Legendary Race Cars seems like a Greatest Hits. Skimming the racing cars covered in the book revealed that things start off with the platinum records: GT40, Lotus 49, Senna’s McLaren MP4. This was definitely greatest hits. But then things got very interesting: The Greer-Black-Prudhomme dragster, Colin McRae’s Impreza rally car, Petty’s Plymouth Superbird, The 1937 Delahaye 145 speed record car. Now these are deeper cuts. These are B-Sides. This was something I could dig my teeth into. It is the variety and surprises in Legendary Race Cars that make this book so unexpected and fun.

Ecurie Ecosse Jags in Legendary Race Cars

Sure, there are familiar stories here: the yarn about stripping the white paint from Mercedes “Silver Arrows” to satisfy the weight restriction; the Ford/Ferrari wars; Wyer racing’s sorting of the aerodynamics that turned the Porsche 917 from a death-trap into a world beater. Of course, the reason these stories are so lasting and perennial is that they truly are the great myths and legends in the history of auto racing. When I encounter stories like Parnelli Jones’ Big Offy Baja racing rig, though, it makes the stories—even the common ones—all the more interesting for what they’ve collectively brought to our sport.

This isn’t a greatest hits album at all. Greatest hits records dive into a single artist and show a simple introduction to a single act—a single point of view. Legendary Race Cars gives us an introduction to an entire sport. Not a single point of view, not a single venue, not a single type of competition. There’s lovely choices here from every vein of auto racing; F1, World Sportscar Championship, Baja, NASCAR, Drag Racing, Land-Speed Records, Hillclimbing, Rally. Representatives from each of these disciplines each tell their individual stories, but they also tell the story of the automobile through the fierce competition that so rapidly drove its evolution.

I suppose you could call this a coffee table book, but the quality of the text and the research that Basem has put together for each of these machines elevate it to so much more than a typical coffee table book provides. Each car’s story is accompanied by a wide assortment of marvelously reproduced photography—both historic shots of these cars in action and, when possible, contemporary images of the cars as they exist today. Basem’s introduction tells a wonderful tale of his trip around the world with his wife tracking these cars down, visiting them in the manufacturer’s museum or private collections, and gathering their stories. It’s a trip that many of us have fantasized about taking, and living vicariously through this tour of legendary machines is a satisfying way to make a small step towards that promise we’ve made ourselves. You know the one, where we round the German and Italian museums, drop by Goodwood for the Revival, then wrap our way up the Pacific coast of the States, with long wanders around Pebble Beach and the Quail, as well as quick stops by the personal garages of prominent collectors. Since it’s not looking likely that this yearlong jaunt is in my immediate future, I’m glad that Basem has done the legwork for me.

Whether that trip would result in the same list for me is questionable. Whether any of us would make the same list is questionable. Thank goodness for that! As Sir Stirling Moss mentions in the book’s forward, these types of lists are always prone to argument. After reading Basem’s list and the stories behind them, I feel better acquainted with the breadth and variety of machines that have changed racing. It’s true that few can agree on what the most legendary racing cars are. But, if we all agreed on the same handful of machines, what the Hell would we debate about over pints after a race weekend?
Legendary Race Cars, by Basem Wasef, would make a fine addition to any car nerd’s library, and makes for good ammunition at your next impassioned back and forth over “the greatest”.

Categories
Lost Track Video

Another Way to Still Drive Meadowdale

Reconstructing lost tracks as playable environments for video games should be considered a charitable donation.

Jesse Laakso’s build of Meadowdale for play in a variety of racing simulators is just that; a race-fan community service. While the track is still under construction, it will ultimately be available for play in a variety of games, including popular titles such as RFactor and GT Legends. I can hardly wait to boot this up in GTL and take a spin around her in a Alfa GTA or 911 RSR. Jesse’s level of commitment to the details is what is really selling this for me. He has scoured the web, and reached out to the community at The Nostalgia Forum for assistance in ensuring the accuracy of everything from the iconic “PRAY” graffiti at the top of the hill, to the textures of the signage that separated the pit lane from the straight, to the construction methods of the pit garages.

Pray at Meadowdale

For a work in progress, Jesse’s track looks remarkable complete. In the hands of a lesser developer, this would be considered finished and pushed out to the racing sim community. That Jesse is reserving release until it is as accurate as possible is fantastic—if nerve racking. Keep up the great work!

Check out the Nostalgia Forum thread for an indication of the level of effort and research that Jesse has been putting in to the project; as well as how eager the vintage racing community has been in helping him along.