Bill Greene’s Newly Discovered 1951 Pebble Beach Races Photos
In the comments of an earlier post on newly-discovered Pebble Beach photos, Bill Greene pointed us to some photos that his uncle captured of the 1951 Pebble Beach Road Races. I love when these types of things come out of hiding; not only because we get to see new imagery of the ’51 Pebble Beach Races, but because each time a new piece of media of these old races surfaces it reminds me of how many bits of vintage racing amazement are still waiting to be discovered.
Thanks for scanning and sharing these, Bill! See the rest of them at Bill’s Flickr Stream.
Brian sent in these unbelievable photos that his father took at the Brookfield Ohio Davis Field Trial in the mid-late 1950s. The event was apparently put on by Davis Volkswagen, but the photos here are even more shocking than seeing a Beetle giving its all on what looks to be virtually untouched field.
If you’ll remember, I was stunned, and pleased, to see a Jaguar XK120 being put through her paces on the dirt hill road of Agoura Hills. Well that’s nothing compared to the scene you see here—this time in what looks to be a Morgan.
The owner of this Triumph TR2 is no less courageous and pushes her for all she’s worth on less than pristine racing surfaces. I adore that these sportscar owners realized that their cars were for sporting purposes—and put them to that end with little mercy. I don’t think we’ll soon see any Lamborghini or Koenigsegg drivers reviving the Field Trial.
Well, I guess we’ll have to get by with the WRC.
Thanks for these, Brian. They’re an amazing artifact, not only of days gone by, but of a spirit gone by as well.
YES! Rudy Dingemans wrote in to point us to his build of a raceable version of the Vaca Valley raceway; ready for you to download and run in the rFactor and GTR2 racing simulators. The track itself may continue to crumble in the lowlands outside of Vacaville, but we can climb back into our digital Cobras for another spin on this great lost American racetrack.
Rudy credits our 2009 post on Vaca Valley as an inspiration: “It was this article that originally caught my eye. And gave me the idea me to bring back this track from the dead (well, at least virtually)”. The Chicane might have brought the track to his attention, but Rudy’s build of the track looks to have far exceeded our little show-and-tell of the venue. The stills look fantastic!
I’ve spoken before about what a marvelous idea it is to use racing simulator and video gaming tools to revive the lost palaces of motorsport, and I’m overjoyed to have played some small part in bringing back another track.
Head on over to the NoGrip Racing community to download the track: either the rFactor version (which has some additional details) or the version for GTR2.
Rudy says, “Hope it will help people enjoy racing this track again, or get to know it (to drive, it’s actually a bit trickier than it looks).” Thanks Rudy, for the service you’ve done in keeping Vaca alive.
The marvelous California racing scene of the 1950s is storied, was a fantastic proving ground for American racing talent, and its popularity has been to our benefit. It was so highly-regarded and well-documented that there’s still plenty of information and photos and film canisters left for us to enjoy today. In fact, I think we probably over-glorify the era simply because it’s easier to find race results, images and footage to write about. The racing communities of other parts of the Americas weren’t as lucky to enjoy such a bounty of media, and an email from a reader recently reminded me that I should be working harder on representing other more forgotten racing communities.
Thankfully, George Kehler emailed me at the perfect time with the perfect solution. George has sourced this fantastic document of an under-represented racing community in Central America and sent a series of films from El Salvador, of which this footage from the April 20, 1958 running of the Santa Ana Sports and Grand Touring Races is the first example. It’s a glorious film shot by Dr. Carlos Alvarez of the Circuito Santa Ana set up on city streets near the capitol city of San Salvador.
As far as I can see, the Salvadoran racing community has all of the ingredients that make us look back so fondly on the California racing scene.
Pedro Rodriguez in the Roberto Reyes Porsche Speedster. Santa Ana, April 1958.
Sound unlikely? The crowd of 100,000 strong lining the streets, craning their heads out farther and farther in to the racing surface speaks to it’s popularity, but was it able to serve as a proving ground for young racers? Well, look for yourself. That Porsche 550 Spyder with the striped bonnet has Ricardo Rodriguez behind the wheel (Ricardo sat on pole and took the race’s fastest lap, but DNFed the race). The white Porsche Speedster is piloted by Pedro (at 18 years old).
It’s that Speedster, entered in the race by Roberto A. Reyes, that is the reason we’re all able to enjoy this footage now. George Kehler is the owner of that car today, and this footage is from his collection of artifacts on the car’s history. Can you imagine a better document of your car’s racing heritage than footage like this of the car winning her class with Pedro Rodriguez at the wheel?
There will be more El Salvador race footage in the coming weeks, hopefully we can help put an end to the dearth of racing footage from Central America. More on the April ’58 race at Racing Sports Cars.
If you’re familiar with El Salvador racing in this era, get in touch. George has identified the major details, but I’d love to find finishing order, programs, photographs, or other items to help document the era.
Quite a mixed field in this footage of the Greenwood Roadway shot by 8mm footage shot by the editor of the Record Herald, the late Richard C. White. Interesting that a Lotus 11, Corvette, and Porsche 550 are in the same grid.
The sweeping right hander at about 30 seconds looks terribly fun.
Pebble Beach. Torrey Pines. Bridgehampton. Indianola, Iowa?
In a lot of ways, it’s the loss of the tracks of the middle of the country that is all the more tragic than the biggies on the coasts. The lack of artifacts make the memory more distant, the tracks somehow more forgotten. It’s almost as if they didn’t exist at all. Certainly history will remember Bridgehampton, and Riverside, and Palm Springs. The races at the big coastal tracks drew a lot of racefans; they drew a lot of cameras; they were well documented. The bigger racing communities have long reams of newspaper articles and magazines documenting the people and the races of California and the mid-Atlantic. Greenwood Roadway, however, wasn’t quite as lucky. Thankfully a few corners of the Internet have collected a fair bit of documentation on the track. A track that their program says was so challenging that the national SCCA recommended dropping their drivers’ school because the track was, “too demanding for the novice.” Now whether that’s true or not I can’t say, but the track map looks like a fun one; full of weaving esses and a nice high-speed straight–90°–straight complex.
Photos from the era show that the track hosted a wide variety of events, with representation from many classes of competition. I see a lot of formula vees, but there’s also plenty of larger machines as well in the form of Cobras (and King Cobras) and Jags and 904s.
The racing surface at Greenwood—like our last look at Paramount Ranch—managed to survived somewhat in tact in the years since it stopped hosting events in 1966. Cobra fan Chuck Brandt has some photos of a group of cars touring the track in 2005. Apparently the fact that the track is somewhat isolated and difficult to access has helped keep developers from destroying what remains. I have to say, it looks neglected, but not beyond hope. I know that vintage racers have bigger fish to fry, but I’m all for preserving whatever remnants of vintage facilities we can. What do you say, Iowans, couldn’t you use another track?
Be sure to head over to Chuck’s site for more photos (including the tour in 2005). As well as some posts here, here, and here by HAMB member 3AMideaz, who has posted some photos of Greenwood that his father took. GreenwoodRoadway.com gathers more information, as well as a recent arial photo of the track.
I’m sure if we catalog everything wonderful about yesterday’s track maps—of which this map of the 1952 Elkhart Lake street course is a perfect example—we could come up with some tips for contemporary track map designers. I would definitely add a few items from this map to the list. The cartoon cars traveling the track for one. The illustrations of people enjoying the recreation on and near the track. the isometric angles with the sketches of prominent landmarks (like the Blatz grain elevator in this map) that can be identified by people at the venue for orienteering purposes. The duotone color palettes. The variation in line-weight. I could go on. Absolutely marvelous.
Hey track map designers! Take your hand off the mouse; turn off AutoCAD; and pick up a brush.
Of course, part of my affinity for this particular map might be my love of Elkhart Lake in general. I don’t think I’ve ever had a bad race weekend there. Just looking at this map makes me long for a Spotted Cow at the Siebken’s bar.
It’s been far too long since we’ve dug into the McClure archives for a look at California’s vibrant racing scene of the mid-50’s. This piece of film is bittersweet, as it captures the January 14, 1956 race weekend: the final race weekend at Torrey Pines before its conversion to golf courses.
John took advantage of this last opportunity to record some marvelous film of some of SoCal’s heroes of the day, Phil Hill prepping his Ferrari 500 Mondial, Jack McAfee strapping on his pudding bowl helmet and climbing into his Porsche 550 Spyder. We see the drivers sprint across the track in a LeMans-style start to begin the 6 hours endurance race. Is that a temporary flame-job on the winning Jaguar D-Type of Jerry Austin? I think he should have sprayed it on, who would have guessed how bad-ass a Jag D-Type looks with flames? The timing is also interesting for hot rod fans, January ’56 puts it right around the same time of the famous Von Dutch flame job on a Gullwing Mercedes.
Some of the most interesting shots, though, aren’t on the track nor in the pits at all. Stirling Moss was scheduled to take part in the endurance race piloting an Austin-Healey 100S. The opportunity was perfectly timed, since Stirling had some time to kill on his way back to England from New Zealand after winning the GP Ardmore in a New Zealand Porsche distributor team 550. Unfortunately, the FIA forbade him from participating for reasons that aren’t quite clear to me—anyone know more about that? Since he was in town, Stirling turned up at the track to take in the race, presumably to cheer on Bill Pringle and Ray Jackson-Moore in the Austin-Healey that Moss was to race (they ultimately finished 4th). That’s not so unusual; after all, why wouldn’t the race-mad Moss take in a race, even if only as a spectator? What makes this footage so valuable though, is that it captures Moss the tourist, donning a set of Mickey Mouse ears fresh from a trip to Disneyland with fellow British driver Roy Jackson-Moore and a pair of American drivers. They took to the Disneyland racetrack ride with vigor—with Moss falling second to Roy’s victorious wife Denise Jackson-Moore. Fantastic!
It was a busy weekend indeed for Moss, as Elaine Bond writes in the January 27 issue of MotoRacing, Moss was inducted into the Women’s Sportscar Club as a lifetime honorary member. She goes on, “he is reported to have said, ‘there is no other club I would rather belong to!’ After all, his affinity for dolls is as well known as his affinity for fast machinery and this is reciprocated on the gals’ part.” Sounds to me like Moss had a great time in California.
Huge thanks again to John McClure for sharing this footage with us, see more film from his collection here. In many ways, this is a remarkably sad piece of film. Bidding farewell to the Torrey Pines track must not have been easy for the racers, I’m glad that John captured the weekend for us to appreciate all this time later.
