Forgive the less than stellar scan of this circuit map for 1933’s inaugural running of the Gran Prix de Pau. Despite the poor resolution, you can see one of the elements I love in old track maps: the small illustrations of nearby buildings and landmarks. The elegantly hand lettered labels and arrows only help accentuate the glory of that little town illustration on the left side of the map.
Playing with points of view is something that seems to have gone away in contemporary track map design, but it’s common in the earlier maps we’ve featured. Having a top-down view of the track alongside isometric scenery illustration seems so illogical when I imagine it, but when I see the results on paper it works perfectly well. Compare to this map of the contemporary Pau map and join me in mourning (Even though it’s pretty good by contemporary track map design standards).
If this photo of Graham Hill isn’t the original photograph, I don’t want to know. I don’t want to believe that this was just desaturated and cooled in Photoshop. I want to continue believing that this photo is the kind of thing Instagram strives to achieve with it’s technology, not the result of digital retouching.
The hues. The angles. The drama. I can’t reasonably articulate why it matters to me whether this shot was composed “in camera” or on a laptop. It just does.
Comic book artist and character designer Jon Haward was commissioned to create this life-size standup of Sir Stirling Moss for the Goodwood Revival this year. We all knew that Stirling drove like a machine, but this may start to explain some things. I flipped through some of the Goodwood Revival programmes and ephemera from this year’s event today and I am continually impressed by the commitment to authenticity and to evoking the period so brilliantly by the entire Goodwood team. Jon’s piece here is no exception.
When he was contacted by the branding and design team at Northstar Publishing, who are responsible for much of the Revival’s graphic look, they already had many of the details sorted. As Jon says, it “had to look as if it was from The Eagle comic from the 1950’s, the idea was to show Sir Stirling as a kind of cyborg with a computer for a brain, gears and springs and engine for his legs and chest etc.”
A bit eccentric? A bit specific? Perfectly of the era? Perfectly perfect?
Yep.
More of Jon Haward’s process on this piece on his blog.
We think of Grand Prix solely as Frankenheimer’s movie. In the basic sense I suppose it was, but I often forget about legendary designer and filmmaker Saul Bass’ hand in the film.
He did the title sequences—which were brilliant—but he also had a hand in the choreographed racing montage sequences as well. They’re handled wonderfully in the film, often as musical interludes that are balletic in parts, raw and evisceral in others. In short, they’re perfect analogues for racing in general. They’re so wonderfully assembled, you’d be forgiven for thinking that they’re the result of months of preparation and storyboarding.
Shooting the races in Grand Prix brought into focus for me the Director-as-Performer mode. Until then I had been directing in the Repertory mode. Small companies, with accumulated experience working together. All in tune with an exploratory point of view. Shifts in concept or staging understood as a process, rather than a certainty.
This all changed when I began directing the races for Grand Prix. The first race was at Spa in Belgium. We had permit problems with the Racing Association. We didn’t know if we could even get on the track. If we did, I would have no advance opportunity to study the track or even to know what part of the track we would have. Suddenly, at the end of one day, we unexpectedly got permission to shoot the next day. I arrived at an assigned section of the track at 8:30am. I saw an unfamiliar terrain, a multilingual crew, a slew of Formula One racing cars and drivers, 1,500 extras, and others—waiting for “the word”. I looked around. What’s my first shot? A race start. I called out my requirements. “Put the cars over there. The No. 1 Camera here. 600mm lens. The crowd…” I had another thought. I started again. “Let’s have the cars further back. No. 2 Camera there. 1000mm lens. Put the 600mm lens…” Pause. I had a better idea. “Here’s what we do…” I stopped. I could see the crew looking at each other and growing restless. My authority eroding. It was a very long day. But, somehow I got through it.
The next day, I arrived on the set. New pieces of track. New terrain. A thousand pairs of eyes zapped in on me. Silence. In a panic, I grabbed my cane. Plunged it into the turf. “OK! No. 1 Camera here. 200mm lens. No. 2 Camera there, 600mm lens. No. 3 Camera in the stands. All cars lined up for a start there. 1,000 extras in the stands. The rest in the woods. And call me when you’re ready!” A beat.
Pandemonium broke loose, and everybody went to work. I hopped into my jeep with my first cameraman, tooled around the curve in the track, stopped where no one could see, and said to myself, “OK. What the hell am I going to do today?” I knew it would take them a little time to get that all sorted out. So I calmed down. Went down the track a bit. Set up some angles and figured out my day’s work… my shot list. My first assistant came running up. They were ready. We drove back to the set. I looked everything over. “Fine. Alright. We’re ready to go.” “Ready?” “Ready.” “Camera ready?” “Camera rolling…speed!” “Action!” VVRRROOOOMMMMM! The cars took off. “Cut. Print. Next shot!” People exchanged glances. “He knows what he wants. We’re in good hands.”
Of course, I never actually used that shot. It was a question of morale… I learned that when you have an army, you may have to ride a white horse.
From green flag to checkers (and more), Ben Adams lets us ride shotgun for the entirety of the Fordwater Trophy race as he pilots a lovely little Turner-Ford MKII. Ben started in 9th and finished 7th. After a very good start, he spent the bulk of the race between the leading pack and the much larger group a ways behind. I’m glad that he chose to let us see the unfiltered video, rather than editing out the warmup lap and gridding up. It lets us really be a part of the whole experience. This is as close as most of us are likely to get to a seat for the Revival, and I send a hearty thanks to Ben for letting us tag along.
Guts. We lay it on the line. BMW builds the best sports sedans in the world. Who says? The drivers do. In poll after poll, men who know cars acknowledge BMW for what it is. A car with an overhead-cam engine built around a combustion system so advanced that a BMW will cruise—cruise—at 110 mph. A car with a suspensions system that gives you roadholding qualities that are simply incredible. So efficient that many racing cars have imitated it. A car for all-out performance, for pure quality of construction, for right-down-to-it guts, has no equal. Do you need only transportation? Then BMW is not for you. There are always the Swedish tractors, or one of those Oriental curiosities, and so on. But if you want the best sports sedan money can buy, if you want a car that makes driving a joy, then visit your BMW dealer. Has he got a car for you!
Swedish tractors and Oriental curiosities? They sure don’t write ads like this anymore… Thanks, Stance.
The bad news: Joe Colasacco’s rather non-dramatic spin in Lawrence Auriana’s Maserati 151 at Goodwood banged her up pretty badly.
The good news: It probably won’t be cheap, but she looks pretty repairable.
I can’t imagine how nerve racking it must be to drive someone else’s £10Million car in these events and how overcome with guilt I would feel if I followed Joe’s line here. There’s not too much to fault him for either (although on replay it looks like overcooked it a bit—he can’t really have been trying to pass on the outside here, can he?).
It was a wet(JJ and Automobiliac have said in the comments that it was dry despite the gloomy appearance) race and he just nudges the rear onto the grass, spinning immediately. In a lot of tracks, this wouldn’t be that big of a deal. It’s part of what makes Goodwood so precious, but it also illustrates why the rest of the tracks in the world have changed so much in the meantime.
It’s become a bit of a tradition here to feature some of Stefan Marjoram’s sketches in the days following the Goodwood Revival. I just popped over to his sketch blog to see if he made the rounds this year.
Did he ever.
The volume of amazing racers at Goodwood might prove overwhelming for anyone; particularly for someone trying to take it all in. The temptation to take a few quick snapshots and run to the next GTO or GT40 or insert-amazingly-iconic-racecar-name-here, must be strong indeed. That’s why I so appreciate Stefan’s patience to sit down for 10 or 15 or 30 minutes and focus on a single machine from a single view and pull out a sketchbook.
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.
