Maybe it’s not quite the same as watching Enzo race his own Ferrari, or Henry race his own Ford, or Ferdinand race his own Porsche, but there’s something romantic about this footage of Berardo Taraschi piloting a car of his own make through the streets of Brindisi. Berardo took the win for the event, running the 69km race through the seaside town on Italy’s heel in just over 40 minutes: a 102 km/hr average isn’t bad at all for a 750cc powered Giaur.
With so little information out on the web about the Brindisi race, it makes me all the sadder that I can’t understand more than a few words of the commentary the goes along with this video. But I think I hear mention of the legendary Anna Maria Peduzzi as a participant in the race as well. I can’t remember ever seeing any footage of her in the car before. Is she driving the ’52 Stanguellini we wrote about in 2010? What a treat!
As always, if it’s little, Italian, and beautiful, Cliff has you covered.
A few weeks ago I received my favorite kind of email. Gary wrote in saying these simply beautiful words: “I have found many photos I took from 1957 to around 1962. I am thinking about sending them to you.”
Gary, this is exactly the kind of thing that keeps me inspired to keep this site going. I’m sure you can imagine my excitement when a box of slides and photo prints arrived with races ranging from The Race of Two Worlds to the Mille Miglia to Stateside SCCA races. I had planned to wait until everything was scanned and catalogued to start posting them but I’m sure you’ll understand why I can’t wait for all that. This is just the first of many series of Gary’s photos. I can’t wait for you to see them.
I’m sure there are a few of you that are already puzzled by the title of this post—’58 Mille Miglia? What ’58 Mille Miglia? Sure, the dangers associated with high speed racing up and down the boot were already showing signs of disaster before Alfonso de Portago’s dramatic careening off a stretch of road between Cerlongo and Guidizzolo that killed him and his co-driver Edmund Nelson along with nine spectators. As a result, there would be no proper Mille after 1957. But race organizers (and Brescian businessmen, no doubt) cherished the event and the crowds it drew so as soon as 1958 the Mille was re-imagined as a regularity rally with occasional hillclimbs and speed events along the way. A then-teenaged Gary Mason was perched alongside the route, 35mm Kodak Retina in hand.
Thanks again, Gary. These are fantastic! As always, if this is reminding any of you of a box of forgotten photos in the closet, drop me a line.
In 1908 a 14 year old boy arrived for his first morning of his apprenticeship with a Parisian wagon builder. It’s an almost impossible career trajectory in my mind from that first day sweeping up and sharpening files to crafting the luxurious lines of this staggering French Racing Blue beauty. Then again, Giuseppe Figoni may simply have had beautiful machinery in his blood as a crucial part of his DNA that followed him from his native Piacenza, Italian hometown to Paris.
We tend to think of the notion of a “celebrity designer” as a fairly recent phenomenon but Figoni was not unfamiliar with being the center of a rippling design movement. The eliptical teardrop fender and body arced enveloppantes on a Delahaye 135 he presented at the Paris Auto Salon of 1936 caused a minor design explosion. His bodies borrowed from the burgeoning aerodynamic sciences in the airplane industry and gave his machines a slippery silhouette that suggested high speed even when standing still.
If we turn our attention to his Talbot-Lago T150C SS, you can’t help but wonder if it was this particular car of Figoni’s or an amalgamation of the era that helped inform much of the design aesthetic that we so associate with American hot-rodders. The crossover appeal of the 1930s GP cars and voiturettes should be obvious for fans of 1930s Fords—fenders removed or otherwise.
Look at the details of this Figoni’s creation and you’ll recognize many of the design hallmarks of the American hot rod. The close-set headlamps that might well have inspired Clarence ‘Chili’ Catallo to modify his ’32 Ford that famously adorned the Beach Boy’s Little Deuce Coupe album cover. Those motorcycle fenders were fairly common on prewar racing cars and voiturettes but were also popular with American hot rodders trying to skirt fender laws designed to squash hot rods.
Figoni Falaschi Talbot-Lago T150C SS Roadster
And can I get an “amen” on those blue headlamp covers?
There’s no question that cars are cheaper to produce in bulk but part of me yearns for the option to deliver a freshly-built frame and drivetrain to a coachbuilder and craft a truly unique machine. In many ways, these kinds of one-off builds are at an all time high today, and command the attention of not only well-heeled buyers, but televisionaudiences who admire their work. Sadly, I haven’t seen anyone take this common business model for custom motorcycles and extend it to (truly) custom cars. More on the Figoni & Falaschi Talbot Lago T150C SS Roadster #90115 at coachbuild.com.
I’m still buried under a foot of snow and I’ve been able to keep the cabin fever from setting in too hard… until No Braking posted their snapshots from the Classic Sports Racing Group’s event opening their 46th(!) season.
The April 5 race weekend drew 150 vintage cars to Sonoma Raceway which looks like it offers some excellent views. Some of these grids look a bit odd, but may have been an enduro or other cross-racing group sessions. Plus I like a mixed racing group—It’s always fun to see a smaller bore Alfa on the track with a Mustang. Fantastic stuff. More photos on NoBraking.com, and check the Vintage Racing Calendar for their next event.
I’m sure you’ll all remember in the first act of Star Wars that fate or accident or simple luck finds our hero/farmboy Luke Skywalker and his mentor Obi Wan Kenobi in possession of military secrets that could bring an evil dictatorship to its knees—if they can get those secrets into the right hands. They seek out a smuggler with a high-performance vehicle to help them spirit those secrets under the dictator’s nose. But when our hero first spots this alleged performance vehicle, he finds himself in doubt. This doesn’t look like a fast machine. In fact, it looks like a piece of junk.
Our smuggler, ever confident, replies: “She’ll make point five past lightspeed. She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts, kid.”
She.
They’re always she.
From sailing ships to sportscars, we’ve always imbued these objects with a feminine mystique. I’d argue that when we look at the sports and racing cars of the mid-century that it’s the most literal we’ve made that connection.
Look at the Jaguar D-Type. Those hips! Look at a Ferrari 875S, a Birdcage Maserati, a Porsche 550. Look at a Triumph TR3 or an Alfa-Romeo Tipo 33 Stradale or an Abarth 750 Zagato or Aston-Martin DB3. Look at any of them and you’ll see slippery shapes of sweeping curves subtly transitioning from one gorgeous corner of the car to another. This is not to say that these machines look bulbous or soft. These are purposeful, powerful shapes. And they are decidedly feminine. Marilyn or Bettie or even Audrey poised to leap; to dance; to race.
Something has happened in the past 20 years of sportscar design. There’s nothing elegant about this Lamborghini. It looks cold and mechanical and dangerous. We’ve stopped caring about machines looking beautiful and settled for them looking angry or dangerous… Mean. A Ferrari 250GTO is all of those things as well but there’s a beauty and a warmth and a grace to her lines that contemporary sportscars lack entirely. These sharp angles and hard edges represent an overt masculinization of automotive design and I think it’s a great loss.
I have a hard time imagining anyone calling this Lamborghini “she”. Alas.
Expectations and reality have this way of clashing spectacularly. I always have a dream, a fantastic notion of what something might be like. Then I’ll discover that the actuality of it is far more simple; far more ordinary.
This, though, is one of the thankful exceptions. This space is exactly what I imagine when I think of the etceterini workshops. Seeing a few gorgeous Stanguellinis in various stages of completion only makes the point that much more clear: This was no production line factory. This was hot-rodding.
The Stanguellini Workshop
The rough-hewn post and beam construction of the Stanguellini workshop is in many ways a perfect metaphor for this era of Italian sportscar manufacture. Its cleanliness and bare walls suggest practical engineering and luxurious, uncluttered design. The mottled walls and old stumps to panelbeat against remind us that it was no more sophisticated than a repurposed barn. I think one of the things that draws me to the barchettas of this period was that they so exemplify this perfect marriage of the engineer and the artisan in ways that larger manufacturers struggled to hang on to. They’ve got soul.
Forget about buying the car, just the brochure for a Toyota 2000GT is a rare and hotly collected item. The thing to remember when you’re walking out of the auto show this winter with arms loaded with brochures is that when you only make 337 examples of a car, you don’t need to print as many brochures for it as Ford needs for the F150. Recently on the Final Gear Forums, GhettoAdam pointed to these images scanned from the brochure. I can’t say it’s quenched my thirst to see the full brochure, but it helps.
With more and more video from last weekend’s Goodwood Revival showing up on the YouTubes, don’t be surprised to see a handful of them here as a sort of self-medication for the depression I’m experiencing for not going.
GoodwoodRRClub says:
To celebrate Carroll Shelby’s magnificent Ferrari beating Cobra’s fiftieth anniversary, the 2012 Goodwood Revival played host to an inspiring one-make race of his fabulous creations. Lasting forty five minutes for two drivers, crowds were wowed by the sound of the biggest gathering of such machines ever in the UK. Victory was taken by the Hall brothers ahead of the Dutch pairing ofTom Colonel and David Hart in second and Ludovic Caron and Anthony Reid in Third.
