One of my favorite lines from Grand Prix. Of course, virtually any of Françoise Hardy’s lines as Lisa are good. Why she’s wearing Pete Aron’s helmet in this shot though, I don’t know.
Category: Racing Ephemera
The piece of whimsy that is the Little Big Mans is almost reason enough on its own to attend the LeMans Classic. It’s absolutely marvelous, and it looks like there’s still room on the grid for a few more entries. Is it wrong to envy a 10-year-old?
The phenomenon of miniature sportscars for children is absolutely fascinating. There are a handful of workshops crafting high-quality reproductions of some of the world’s most desirable autos in 1:2.3 scale—marvelous!
Blanc Chateau seems to be heavily involved in the running of the Little Big Mans race and offers their junior versions of the BMW 328, the Ferrari P-2, and Porsche Speedster. Porsches abound from Pennewitz Design, who offers their own version of the Speedster, plus a 550 Spyder and Porsche 904 for good measure. They are all absolutely incredible, if you look quickly you’d be convinced it’s the genuine article and not an extravagant plaything. Although if I were to spring for one, I’d be too tempted to keep it for myself rather than hand the keys over to Junior. Maybe it’s best, hard to tell if this would make him the coolest kid ever or the wicked preppie in a John Hughes movie.
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Entry Level Vintage Racing
My friends have all told me that Vintage Formula Vee is the way to go for a first vintage racecar. They’re reasonably inexpensive. They’re relatively easy to maintain. They’re lightweight, so you don’t need a monster tow rig. Most importantly they’re the most affordable to run.
Up until now I believed them.
This is the REAL cheapest entrée into the world of vintage racing: the old school go-kart. I’m not talking about the shifter karts that have been the foundation of our last few Formula 1 World Champions. I’m talking about the heavy steel frame your grandfather welded together in the workshop, with a hot-rodded lawn mower engine (or twin chainsaw engines).
They still look like endless fun.
More at VintageKarts.com. Or check out this fantastic article or these plans in the Popular Mechanics Archive.
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Masterful Swiss Porsche Garage
There’s a fine line between a really beautiful garage and a lovingly curated museum. Garage Journal member and classic 911 fanatic, Milou, is really flirting with the edge of that line, or he’s leapt right over it. If you spend any time at all browsing the endlessly luxurious garage galleries on the Garage Journal forums, you know that a humble 3-car detached garage is fairly run-of-the-mill. The garages that typically attract a lot of attention have square footage in the thousands, more than one lift, and more cabinet space than 10 kitchens. This garage though, is an absolute thing of beauty—and that’s before the ex-Siffert 2.2 liter rally 911 saddles up next to the ex-Wicky racing team 2.3 S/T and street 2.2 Targa.
As is so often the case, Milou’s collection goes beyond the cars and into Porsche collectibles. Vintage Porsche racing posters are a fantastic high-water mark in automotive graphic design and look good in any garage, but what about the Butzi Porsche designed sled? A retail display of Porsche touch-up paint pens? Heuer timekeeping devices? They all come together as a showpiece that would be an excellent place to kick up your feet and watch a race, or alphabetize your brochure collection.
You can read Milou’s garage build thread at the Garage Journal. Fantastic!
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Happy Birthday, Steve.
Steve McQueen would should have turned 80 today. I bet he’d still be whipping his XI around the corkscrew at the Monterey Historics every year.
As a non-traditional sports fan, I’ve always thought Sports Illustrated had a difficult relationship with sports that aren’t Football, Baseball, Basketball. But these covers from the 50s and 60s show that auto racing was once a cherished pillar in the temple of sportsmen. In recent years, there has been occasional NASCAR covers, and a Danica Patrick cover, but I think it’s fair to say that the “auto racing isn’t a sport” crowd are winning out on the editorial staff of SI.
Part of that isn’t the magazine’s fault, it’s the path that auto racing has taken. In early American sportscar racing, the driver was the key component. This was particularly true in the early days, when most drivers were competing in cars that were essentially off-the-shelf product. Pick it up at the dealership on Friday, race it on Saturday.
Today, the real muscle behind a successful racing enterprise isn’t so singular. It’s true that drivers get the bulk of the attention, but if the changing teams of Formula 1 have taught us anything, it’s that the best driver isn’t always the winning driver. What has happened is that, in broad strokes, racing has shifted from being an individual sport to a team sport. Sports Illustrated, as much as anyone else, knows that you aren’t going to sell a lot of magazines to the mass market with photos of aerodynamicists on the cover. And so it has struggled to figure out how to showcase racing on her cover pages.
This wasn’t always the case of course, so let’s check out some great covers from the magazine’s past coverage of our sport. Enough has been said about the decaying state of magazine design, so I won’t comment other than to to say, isn’t it nice to see powerful illustration and photography not have to compete with 25 article callouts. We’ve turned magazine covers from covers to photographic table of contents pages.
We’ve long been fans of the hand-illustrated track maps of years gone by, and that of course extends to this Pit Map of the Tribunes from the 1921 24 Heurs du Mans. (Update: as a commenter pointed out below, there was no 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1921—nor would there be for another 2 years—this material is all from the ACF Grand Prix, which largely used the same facilities as the eventual 24 hour race – Thanks for the clarification, Dan)
It’s graphically beautiful. In a modern world of graphic design software and precision digital printing presses, I’m always impressed by the incredible graphic design expertise of those who did without them. this hand-set type is beautiful, and the lines precise enough to go up against anything the Creative Suite has to offer.
Found at The Nostalgia Forum, which also turned up these printed artifacts from the ’21 LeMans, a track map and program cover. Always great information over there.
This is a big day for The Chicane. We finally get to let you in on something that we’ve been dying to share on the blog for some time.
After months of work, we’re finally ready to debut the first pieces of a line of vintage racing inspired clothing. Chicane Trackwear will ultimately include a variety of garments and accessories inspired by our love of vintage racing: everything from our favorite racing models, marques, teams, races, and eras of auto racing history.
The first items are two t-shirts from two very different parts of our vintage racing heritage. The Riverside International Raceway t-shirt is inspired by the early races held at the track in 1957. There are a lot of tracks that we’d like to feature on t-shirt graphics. But for our first, we though it was important to celebrate one of America’s great Lost Tracks. It would be obvious to have a Green Hell shirt, or a Circuito Palermo (and I suspect we’ll have one of each eventually), but celebrating America’s sportscar racing heritage has always been an important part of The Chicane, and there’s not many tracks more missed than Riverside.
The Yamura Motors t-shirt is our way of showing appreciation for the fictional Formula 1 team at the heart of John Frankenheimer’s legendary film, Grand Prix. In a few frames of the movie, you can see the Yamura pit crews gathering around Pete Aron’s machine wearing coveralls with a graphic very like this one. Most people might not understand it; but when someone does it’s magic.
Available exclusively from the newly launched—and soon to expand—Chicane Shop.
Another brilliant argument for the benefits of body-on-frame building. Are you bored with your Austin-7 or compact Ford? Why not just drop a new fiberglass body on that frame and have a sweet little racing special to take to the track or just cruise around town. See how easy it used to be to become the coolest kid on the block?
These were all from a single 1958 issue of MotorSport. The possibilities were endless, and cheap. Guess what you do if you’re bored with your compact Ford today… You deal with it. Or you glue a horrifically ugly wing on it. Yay! a big stupid wing!
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Tamiya: 30+ Years of Scale Racing
I adore the illustration style of this poster from 2006 commemorating 30 years of Tamiya models. Legend holds that Tamiya started with a Porsche 911 bought from the factory. They tore it apart and recreated it at 1:10 scale – and a hobby shop legacy was born.
Their good taste continued for the next 30 years and beyond. Their current catalog offers such fine vintage racing machines as an Alpine A110 (in 1972 Monte Carlo Rally winning livery), an Alfa Romeo Giulia Sprint GTA, and a rally-ready Mini Cooper.
The poster features more of the fantastic racing models that Tamiya has produced over the years. I can spot the John Player Lotus 79, the Tyrrell P34 6-wheeler, the Rothmans Paris-Dakar Porsche 959, Minis, Fiat-Abarth 500s, Alfas… It just goes on and on.
To commemorate the anniversary in 2006, Tamiya updated and re-released their first model, the Porsche Turbo RSR Type 934; one of which would look absolutely fantastic on my shelf, don’t you think?