It looks like there are more and more options for the vintage racer that doesn’t want to look like a NASCAR driver in the pits. OMP has renewed their vintage offerings with a line of excellent FIA compliant, fire-resistant garments worthy of your vintage racing car. They look absolutely brilliant and offer another good alternative to Dunlop Blues (always a good choice).
Their Vintage Superleggera one piece suit is three layers of, as the name suggests, very lightweight knitted material weighing only 280 grams per square meter. Race suits that look tasteful are always hard to find. And always expensive. I’m glad to see more companies entering the vintage market. It was only a few years ago that the only option for vintage-styled race suits were small boutique tailors that made suits of excellent quality, but at extremely high prices. While I’m a bit mixed on yielding the entire market to the mass producers of the world, I am glad to see some price competition from the likes of larger producers like OMP and Sparco.
The boots in the new line are, arguably, the real highlight of the group. Although we’ve looked at vintage-styled offerings from Puma in the past, and Piloti offers race boots that don’t interfere too much with a vintage aesthetic, these Carrera boots look almost as if Jim Clark just kicked them off.
I find it amazing (and disappointing) that ‘super obnoxious colors’ has become such a shorthand for “racing” that we have to commend racewear makers for their restraint in choosing the simple, streamlined, unadorned lines that have been the hallmark or motosport since its inception. That’s always been the point, strip away the unnecessary; yank off the bumpers, remove the chrome strips — this is the defining characteristic of racing aesthetic. The Carrera boots are an excellent example of extending this philosophy.