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?
Koni should just re-run this ad in current magazines. It’s fantastic.
Well, the much-hyped 1965 Shelby Daytona Coupe CSX2601 failed to sell at this weekend’s Mecum auction (bidding stalled at $6.8Million), but that’s no reason not to check out AutoBlog’s wonderful photo gallery of the machine on the track and off.
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
The mighty Bring a Trailer is along for the ride with the California Mille. I suspect these photos are just the tip of the iceberg and that coverage will continue over the next several days. Take a look.
Oh my, yes!
This photo from the January 1980 issue of MotorSport Magazine shows Maserati 250F Lighweight #2527 as she was being prepared for a season of vintage racing. There’s no denying that this 250F is a very special car, having taken Juan Fangio to a pair of 1957 wins in Argentina, with further successes for Harry Schell. Today, driver Jeff O’Neill keeps 2527 in good practice and fighting trim on racetracks around the country, appearing recently at the 2008 Monterrey Historics.
It’s good to see that, despite the radical increase in the value of this machine between these two photos, a car like this Maserati 250F has avoided becoming a showpiece in a speculator’s warehouse and has instead maintained a presence on the racetrack. The stratospheric rise in the values of vintage racers, particularly the incredible price jump of the mid 1980s, has been both a blessing and a curse. These cars have been rescued from the junk heaps of history, but have all too often fallen into the hands of investors and kept off the track and out of view of the fans of vintage motorsport.
Thank you, Jeff, for keeping this example of one of history’s finest racing cars well within public view.
The Photo above is from a series of Monterrey pit area shots at TrackThoughts.
Photographer Michael Plitkins has several images of 2527 on AtSpeedImages.
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.
My dear friend Eric Dean spent his winter restoring his Merlyn Formula Ford and it looks absolutely marvelous. The car wasn’t in desperate need of the full restoration job either, and I swear I left it in as good a shape as I got it when he graciously let me squeeze behind the wheel for a few laps of Road America last fall. Compare the photo from my post on that weekend with the series of photos below. They tell the tale better than I ever could of the quality of his craftsmanship in a restoration project that saw every hole in the frame patched and ground down, powdercoated, supplied with new hardware from nose to tail, and meticulously prepared. I must admit I was nervous about his livery choice until I saw these photos of the tremendous quality of the paint, which looks much more like a perfectly preserved 30-year-old paint job than it does a new respray.
Enough of my rambling, I’ll let the photos tell the story. I think it’s absolutely perfect. Something tells me Eric won’t be so quick to hand over the wheel this year, nor should he. Congratulations, Eric, on a job very well done.
Thankfully, more and more old home racing movies are being pushed onto YouTube. This time, it’s a double whammy of some early Road America laps and a hillclimb in Rockford, IL. We also get a little time under the hood with a favorite of mine, the Austin-Healey 100.