Categories
Historic Racing Photos

Sports Illustrated Visits Riverside, 1957

Head over to SportsIllustrated.com today and run a search for “SCCA”, you’ll find that there isn’t a single article about this year’s racing season. The only article that even mentions the term is about a retired basketball player that owns a Sprint Cup team. It’s almost difficult to imagine an era when back-yard engineers and amateur racers would be featured in a multi-page spread in America’s premier sporting magazine.

Reading the article though, it starts to fall victim to the same pitfalls that today’s mainstream press does when it bothers to cover motorsports: A focus on the personalities and the celebrities attending events. “The meet that doesn’t produce a bosomy Hollywood starlet to top off the black oil grime on the faces of the winners with a scarlet smear of lipstick is impoverished indeed.”

It’s an admittedly short piece, but this photograph of Chuck Daigh’s Troutman-Barnes special trailing Pete Woods’ D-Type Jag more than makes up for any puffery in the text. Also funny now to see Richie Ginther identified as “Ferrari Salesman” and not as the racing legend he would become.

FScheff has the article scanned over on his Riverside page.

Previously: Sports Illustrated’s Racing Covers.

Categories
Video

Early 70s Vees at Holtville

Clementeski, the YouTube uploader, says, “this is from the old HAIR (aerodrome) days. Not sure of the exact date, but it was probably the winter series ’73 or ’74.”
It never hurts to watch Formula Vee. It’s one of my favorite series for tight battles.

There’s always a lot of passing and repassing in one of the few series that actually managed to keep cars pretty balanced. Keeping the cars evenly matched is a great opportunity to see some serious development of driver skill. Even in today’s vintage runs, they keep together well and don’t become a parade. Hell, NASCAR drivers could learn about drafting from these dudes. Plus, it’s nice to see a clip from the disused WWII era bomber training strip at Holtville, CA in her racing prime.

Categories
Grand Prix Historic Racing Photos

World Champion in Training

You can almost see Senna’s passion and drive through his helmet—and his years.

Categories
Racing Ephemera Vintage Racing Advertising

Shopping the 1960 Heuer Rally Timer Catalog

Whenever I stumble across these old ads and catalogs I’m reminded how temporal value is. It seems obvious, of course, that today’s highly collectible and rare racing part or accessory was yesterday’s common off-the-shelf product. Today any of these dash-mounted Heuer timers would cause a bidding frenzy on eBay or Pelican Parts. In 1960 one of them could have been yours for about fifty bucks.

I’m reminded of a scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark which describes this phenomenon so wonderfully. The villain, René Belloq, holds up a pocket watch and says, “Look at this. It’s worthless. Ten dollars from a vendor in the street. But I take it, I bury it in the sand for a thousand years, it becomes priceless! Like the Ark. Men will kill for it; men like you and me.”

Now I don’t think anyone is going to kill for a Heuer dash timer. Maybe give it a few more years.

See the complete catalog at On the Dash.

Categories
Automotive Art For Sale

Stefan Marjoram’s Automotive Advent Calendar

Stefan wrote in to tell me about his latest wonderful automotive art project. Each day leading up to December 24th, he’s releasing a different postcard-sized pencil and watercolor sketch. If I know Stefan’s stuff, they’re bound to all be fantastic. But then he does us all one better—he’s selling the original piece each day through his new Etsy store for a paltry £24. The images above are the releases for December 1 and 2—each with their respective racing number. Fun!

Hey Stefan, if you do one, set aside the Porsche 550 one for me, eh? 😉

Check Stefan Marjoram’s sketch blog for the fresh calendar item daily, and try to be the first to that Etsy shop each day.

Categories
Porsche Video

The Magnus Walker Collection

Clothing entrepreneur and car guy par excellence Magnus Walker has the early Porsche 911 bug. Bad. Real Bad. Thankfully, he’s created a pair of threads on the Early 911S Registry and on Pelican Parts as a sort of support group for the rest of us afflicted with this dreaded obsession to help him through it. If you’re a fan of early 911s—and why wouldn’t you be?—head on over to both threads and marvel in the glory.

Edit: Hmm.. it looks like the video has been pulled from Vimeo. Alas. I’m leaving the include here in case it resurfaces.

Edit 2: The video is back online! Re-embedded for your viewing driving pleasure.