It’s only been a few short days since this year’s Mille Miglia and already videos are starting to trickle online. There’s aren’t just quick shoot and post phone-cam videos either. Some of these are quite lovely, like this first short video from Ricky Montalvo. He was able to stake out some of the more interesting areas the Mille passes through—the tiny villages that are ordinarily closed to automotive traffic. These picturesque little towns make for some lovely vantage-points to take in the amazing field of Mille Miglia participants and some excellent atmospheric shots of spectators. Take a look.
Category: Video
Categories
Singapore Grand Prix: 1966
Nowadays, the Singapore GP makes headlines for being the only F1 night race, but I tend to prefer this newsreel of sorts from the 1st race. I adore the fact that a motorcycle race supported the main event (with a win for Honda), I wonder why we don’t see more cross-vehicle race weekends?
Categories
The Green Hell
I’m not usually into “Crash Porn”, but this video of folks taking on the Nurburgring in their road cars demonstrates a few things: 1. road cars of the 60s and 70s were fragile and made an enormous mess when you rolled them (Except for Beetles, which look to
Green Hell, indeed.
And what’s more; the Adenauer Forest esses are still kicking people’s asses today.
Mark Evans hands over the restoration duties to the non-experts in the British show, Wreck Rescue. When 20 year old Lizzy takes on this absolute basket case Sprite for her first-ever restoration project, there wasn’t much to be optimistic about. She did a hell of a job though.
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Let’s take a spin around La Sarthe with Jonathan Palmer in his 962, shall we?
This is probably from 1987, the year Jonathan Palmer shared a car with James Weaver and Price Cobb for team Liqui Moly Equipe. They DNFed after 112 laps.
Follow along with the brave restorers at Gunnar Racing as they tackle the restoration of a mystery 917. So far it looks like it might be 917-021, but apparently Gunnar took on this project without it’s serial number plate, so they’ll be relying on additional details to help establish it’s provenance. I’m willing to give the folks at Gunnar the benefit of the doubt, they’ve restored their share of 917s in the past, as well as examples of just about every other Porsche racing model. Perhaps the mystery is the reason they’ve chosen to document the hell out of their restoration. Whatever the motivation, I’m glad to see the frequent updates. They’re 12 releases into an ongoing YouTube video series documenting the process; everything from grinding down the paint to see the history of liveries, to suspension and transmission and my-word-that’s-scary-to-take-apart removals. Coupled with reams of photos on the restoration team’s blog, this is pure Stuttgart candy. They’re hoping to debut the restored car at this year’s Monterrey Historics, I can’t wait to see how it turns out. It’s nice to not have to wait until the debut to see the car, I’ll be following along closely on their YouTube channel.
You can also follow along on the 917 discussion forum at CKnet.
Categories
Go, Mini, Go!
Some nice old Mini footage here. Was it the only front wheel drive racing car worth a damn?
Here’s more footage — Monte Carlo Rallye 1965
This video of a Lotus 11 at VIR equipped with a Traqmate data acquisition unit is fascinating. The Traqmate system relies on a couple of core modules to provide fairly sophisticated data for your lapping. The heart of the system is a high-accuracy GPS receiver that records your vehicle’s position 4 times per second. Coupled with an accelerometer to measure speed and G-forces, the system paints a picture of your performance throughout the race. Back at your computer, mate the data to the Traqview analysis application to visualize this data overlaid on a map of the track, or when attached to a video camera, watch a video game-esque playback of your race. If your race group has several members using the system, it can marry the data from all of the participants to show the entire racing group’s performance; allowing you to swap notes with your friends on the track. The system allows you to ‘see’ your race from a completely different perspective. Neat stuff.
They also offer a variety of accessories such as bullet cameras to get good camera positioning on the car, and a module to attach your tachometer to the system to record RPM over the course of the race (as seen in the playback video above). Fantastic stuff.
Categories
A Look At Sports Car Racing (1963)
Oh my, yes!
“Honey, will you run up to the gas station and pick me up some soda?“
“Sure thing, dear, let me just get my nomex on.“