I sure am missing sitting at a sweeping turn with a bratwurst watching some old iron go around.. Settling in with a YouTube video of old races is a poor substitute, but I’ll take this look into 1950 Rallye International des Alpines any way I can.
Then it struck me. Rallys and Hillclimbs are the perfect social distance racing experience for spectators. It’s easy enough to stay several feet away from others when you’re perched on the inside of some sweeping bend or switchback turn. (Pro tip: don’t sit on the outside of these turns unless you want to tempt fate with a very high-stakes game of dodgeball).
Car restoration is dirty business, and you feel that grime intimately: There will be chunks of rust stuck between your neck and your collar. There will be endless layers of paint slowly being sanded away. Twisted pieces of steel will be stuck in the soles of your boots from every stupid broken-off bolt you’ll have to drill out. I can understand why restoration shops would rather wait until the car is finished, polished, and with the proper beginnings of a sunset behind her before they get out the camera. What ends up happening, though, is that restorers web sites all tend to look the same: beauty shots of the finished car. There is rarely even a single photo of the car before restoration began.
Germany’s AlpineLAB shows us the kind of beautiful documentation that can happen when a truly passionate restoration workshop has someone on staff that knows a thing or two about curating a web site. Of course, there are miraculously beautiful photos of the finished product worthy of any of the glossies on the newsstand. But the commitment to documenting the restoration and the race history of their Alpine 110 projects is so very refreshing. What I appreciate most, however, is their opening the archives to show us the specific period articles and photography of these cars’ race history. People spend a lot of time establishing a car’s provenance, it’s very appreciated to see those archives opened up for all of us and not just prospective buyers.
The Alpine 110 was an astoundingly capable little machine. I’ve read it described as a car that you wore rather than drove. That kind of machine deserves the treatment that AlpineLAB has given it. I imagine that as more and more restorers enter the community having grown up on the web, the more of this kind of wonderful storytelling we’ll see brought to the world. Clear your afternoon and click over to their site for more of their build stories. These images are but a taste.
Usually I don’t categorize something under Video AND Audio, but I’m going to make an exception for this ridiculously lovely sounding clip from the Gstaad Classic 2011 rally. Check out Sports Car Digest’s event report and marvelous gallery of Julien Mahiels’ shots from the event.
