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.
0 replies on “Sports Illustrated Visits Riverside, 1957”
Agreed that SI was often a little shallow with written content, but like Playboy made up for it with the pictures.
I just wish I could see the rest of that roll of film.
When Robert Jones and Brock Yates wrote for SI there was some great coverage.
In May of 1971, Robert Jones devoted SIX pages of coverage to our First Antique and Classic Car Auction, in Radnor, PA!
In late 1971 SI published a terrific, very comprehensive article by Brock Yates covering his and Dan Gurney’s win in my Ferrari in the first Cannonball coast to coast race!
I’m told it remains the single most requested reprint in SI’s history.
All of these great days are included in my, soon to be published memoir: “Don’t Wash Mine” . . .
Best wishes for the Holidays,
Kirk F. White
I’ll be waiting to see what “don’t wash mine” means–perhaps (as I related on an earlier Chicane) he had an experience as mine when Phil Hill’s Ferrari spewed wet carbon on my blue demims in 1953? Anyway, I, too, want to see the rest of that film. I believe in that lap 1 pic, Ginther lies 3rd in the Edgar 410S, then Mickey Thompson’s Kurtis 500SX, Gurney’s Arciero Bros. 4.9, Bill Murphy’s red 500SX and Pollack’s Lister. Then it gets too blurry. Michael Jacobsen