Categories
Category: Racing Ephemera
Categories
Snap ‘Em Together
A generous collector has uploaded high resolution scans of his BMW brochures to Picasa. This example of the 1978 BMW Motorsport brochure naturally drew me in.
From the brochure’s text:
Why men race.
Racing is high adventure. And this alone is enough to account for racing’s incredible popularity.The sport is burgeoning as never before. There are now more spectators, more participants, and more events than the sport has ever seen. In Germany alone, for example, there are over 1,000 approved racing events held every year. Road races, mountain climbing, circular-track races, rallyes, rally crosses, gymkhanas – the list is endless and varied.
We at the Bavarian Motor Works believe it is a sport worthy of our attention and involvement. For the simple reason that as more people become involved, more people will be capable of mastery of their cars in the extreme driving situations every driver occasionally faces.
That’s a phenomenal point. The natural instinct among the general populous is that racing drivers never turn off their competitive driving and make roads more dangerous. I think this brochure makes the opposite point marvelously well, a trained racing driver understands the road, understands their car, and understands how they interact. They are safer to those around them on public streets than other motorists.
Apparently San Diego’s racing community didn’t completely fizzle out after Torrey Pines was converted to the golf course. I’ve stumbled across this poster, but can find almost no information about the race. Does anyone know something about this October, ’67 event?
The poster itself is spectacularly beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that I’m starting to consider the possibility that the race itself is fictional and this poster is simply a work of art and not an advertising handbill. Part of me likes that idea that a piece of artwork takes on a life beyond it’s canvas and—like War of the Worlds—creates a mythology of an event that never happened. As time passes and memories fade, who is to say that the race did or didn’t take place.
I’m sure though, that the reality is far more simple: that I’m just terrible at Google.
Also: the SCCA’s “Sportsmanship Demands Safe Driving” slogan should have never gone away, but it seems the trademark on the phrase has lapsed.
Categories
Documenting Disaster
Part of what made the 1955 LeMans disaster so confusing and difficult to understand (beyond the enormity of the tragedy itself) is that it happened so quickly that it was nearly impossible to determine exactly what happened. If it were today, there would be several camera angles in high resolution to capture the event: a shot from at least one ground-based camera, a aerial view, on-board cameras in many of the cars. That doesn’t even account for the fact that virtually every spectator would be carrying a camera with them at all times—a camera phone at least. Investigations would commence and close in comparative short order.
In 1955, however, there were only a few grainy photographs and a single film camera (that I know of) running that caught the tangle between Mike Hawthorne, Pierre Leveigh, and Lance Macklin (with Fangio in the middle of it all as well). Leveigh would ultimately be thrown from his Mercedes which tumbled over the hay bales and into the crowd killing 83 spectators and injuring a further 120. It remains the single worst crash in the history of motorsport—and likely the worst accident in all of sport.
This is why it was so important to determine what happened. To assign blame, perhaps, but more importantly to find a way to keep it from happening again. Some were quick to blame Hawthorne, some rightly faulted the facility’s lack of safety measures, some governments decided that motor racing itself was to blame. France, Spain, Switzerland, and Germany banned motor racing entirely until tracks could be brought up to a higher level of safety. The Swiss ban remained in effect until 2007.
The lack of a visual archive—of a detailed record—made communicating exactly what happened challenging. So we had to leave it up to artists to show the public the details of the LeMans disaster. I find these artifacts fascinating. This type of record has become almost completely obsolete today, and the simple line drawings somehow both communicate what (they thought) happened and at the same time filters it. Looking at these diagrams, the LeMans crash becomes a cold, matter of fact, sequence of events; not a horrific and bloody nightmare.
These renderings omit the human tragedy; the emotion; the panic. They simply communicate the clinical facts of the crash—which car went which way, and when. In that way, you can argue that it’s more effective than the horror of looping the video feed back and forth.
These photographic prints of vintage car model decal sheets are an amazing collision of my interests in car culture and typography. I’ve long been a fan of these old decals and have spent way too many hours in Photoshop trying to reproduce the vintage printing techniques that make these artifacts so soulful. I’d be on-board with Mark’s project in any capacity, but when I see the scale of the reproductions, I’m simply smitten with them.
I love the colors and the type and the cartoony appeal of these decals at their original size; but the prints are startlingly detailed and textured when reproduced at 4×5 feet. Each little crackle and discoloration becomes so painterly and weathered and beautiful. I’m sure that even the artists that Revell and AMT employed when these decals were designed would be startled by the depth and vibrance of them at this scale.
There’s something about playing with scale that makes us notice things. When we see something familiar at a radically altered size, it makes us notice it again; and we start to look past the idea we have of it and see more closely the details and the construction. I think 3 or 4 of these prints running the length of a garage wall would be an absolutely fantastic display.
The series, appropriately titled Displacement, is being exhibited through the end of July at the JAGR Projects gallery in the Rittenhouse Hotel in Philadelphia. More images at Mark’s site.
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.
Hard work has its rewards 
Amazing shots from various runnings of the Detroit News Soap Box Derby throughout the 1940s. More at Rivet Head.
