A rebranding with an unerring Motorsport focus

Over the August Bank Holiday weekend, the three days of historic racing, formerly known Silverstone Classic, now rebranded into the all-encompassing Silverstone Festival, albeit with the beating heart of classic Motorsport still at the forefront of its focus, but with an array of other attractions, seeking to spread the appeal to a wider audience. Huge car club presence sees the infield awash with eclectic collections of rare, unique and quirky motors, indeed, one could easily spend a day wandering around the seemingly endless lines of immaculately presented cars, basking in their elegance. The prestigious Silverstone Auctions, now operating under Iconic Auctioneers saw some spectacular lots offered with many auction world records broken, the undoubted star of the show being the ex-Colin McRae Subaru Impreza 22B, Chassis 000/400 selling for £480,500. One of three prototype 22Bs built, and offered on the open market for the very first time.

To celebrate the 75th anniversary of motorsport at Silverstone, the expected partnerships with Masters Historic Racing, HSCC, HGPCA and Masters Racing Legends offered a bumper timetable throughout the weekend, with grids seemingly offering more depth and diversity than has been seen over the past couple of editions, certainly a fine way to celebrate this landmark year in the history of Silverstone. The HGPCA in particular, holding the 75th Anniversary Trophy  for front engine Grand Prix cars from 1948-1960, harking back to the very start of Silverstone’s racing history, with a field featuring imperious cars such as the Maserati 250F, Ferrari 246 Dino and Talbot Lago T26 to name but a few.

Formula One Celebrations

Some of the most mesmerizing and spellbinding moments of previous Silverstone Classic events have been provided by the special demonstrations that form an integral part of the on track action over the course of the weekend. There was no exception this year, with a superb demonstration of some of the loudest and dynamic Formula One cars to have graced the circuit in period to celebrate 75 years of action at Silverstone. The deafening roar of the Williams FW19, and screaming Dallara F191 rolled back the years as the grandstands reverberated to the sound of the now unthinkable V10 engines, while the gracious Mercedes F1 W04 in the hands of the supremely talented Esteban Gutierrez brought a more contemporary celebration. They were of course joined by a diverse grid of other Grand Prix greats, reaching back to the halcyon days of the 1970s, where cars like the sublime Tyrrell 001 wowed spectators with the raw blend of speed and innovation.

75 Years of NASCAR

A rare treat on these shores, but a welcome follow up to the superb NASCAR demonstrations at the recent Goodwood Festival of Speed, a wonderful display of NASCAR Stock cars, ranging from the 1958 Ford Thunderbird, through to contemporary giants, like the 2017 Ford Mustang and 2012 Chevrolet Impala, showcased the brute force and thunderous rumble of the iconic American race cars. In a year when the Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 wowed crowds at the 24h of Le Mans, running under the Garage 56 rules, and an expanded programme for the Whelan Euro NASCAR Series, European fans have been treateSd to a special year in chances to witness the powerful V8 powered stock cars, paying tribute to 75 years of the highly successful race series. While the weather curtailed the chances for the NASCAR display on Saturday, those who stuck around til Sunday were treated to a wondrous display, with a soundtrack that epitomized the drama of this thrilling race series.

Race Winners

• Historic Formula Junior (Races 1&2) – Sam Wilson, Cooper T59
• MRL Historic Touring Car Challenge – Wim Kuijl, Ford Capri
• HSCC Thundersports – Michael Lyons, IBEC 308LM

• MRL Big Cat Challenge Trophy – John Pearson & Gary Pearson, Jaguar E Type
• The Derek Bell Trophy for HSCC Formula Libre (Races 1&2) – Henry Chart, Trojan T101
• MRL RAC Woodcote Trophy & Stirling Moss Trophy – Olly Bryant, Lotus XV
• Masters Racing Legends Race 1 – Ken Tyrrell, Tyrrell 011
• Masters Racing Legends Race 2 – Michael Lyons, Lotus 92
• Masters GT Trophy – Craig Wilkins, Lamborghini Huracan Super Trofeo Evo
• Masters Endurance Legends (Race 1&2) –  Steve Brooks, Peugeot 90X
• International Trophy for Classic GT Cars – Julian Thomas & Callum Lockie, Shelby Cobra Daytona
• HGPCA Pre ’66 Grand Prix Cars – Charlie Martin, Cooper T53
• HGPCA Front Engine Pre ’66 Grand Prix Cars – Mark Shaw, Scarab Offenhauser
• HGPCA Rear Engine Pre ’66 Grand Prix Cars – Charlie Martin, Cooper T53
• Adrian Flux Trophy for Transatlantic Pre ‘66 Touring Cars – Sam Tordoff, Ford Falcon Sprint
• Yokohama Trophy for Masters Sports Car Legends – Gary Pearson & Alex Brundle, Ferrari 512M
• HSCC Road Sports Trophy – Kevin Kivlochan, Shelby Cobra

Gallery

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A mere hundred years have passed since the first Grand Prix d’endurance de 24 heures, a somewhat humble beginning for the race now considered the ultimate test of man and machine, a grueling challenge set over 24 hours where the world’s best drivers fight for one of the ultimate prizes in motor racing. It was back in May of 1923 when the first race was contested, with no official winners prize to fight for, the field of cars fought to see which team could cover the most distance over the 24 hour period. The field comprised of predominantly French cars with the notable inclusion of a single Bentley and two Belgian Excelsiors, the overall winners were Andre Lagache and Rene Leonard, who piloted a Chenard-Walcker Type U3 15CV Sport one hundred and twenty-eight times around the track, covering an astonishing 1372 miles over the course of the 24 hours.

The track itself has evolved over the years, but unlike many of its contemporaries, retains most of the charm and mystique, which have characterized the race over the years. The Mulsanne Straight, now punctuated by two chicanes, introduced in 1990 in an attempt to curb the ever increasing speeds along its former 3.7 mile grandeur, still offers a scintillating thrill, where top class prototypes can realize their top speed potential, as the track cuts through the forests which lead into the French countryside south of the circuit. Still considered a pure test of both driver and car, the fast sweeping corners, tight chicanes and blisteringly fast straights combine to offer a challenge unlike any other, more raw than other circuits used for the World Endurance Championship.

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The son of a wealthy Tennessee family, Pete Kreis had grown up during the time that European manufacturers dominated automobile racing at the Indianapolis 500. When he broke into big-time racing in 1925, Pete and his American compatriots were eager to demonstrate that cars and drivers from the U.S. could successfully compete against Italian, German, and French roadsters.

Pete quickly became known for his track speed as he drove a Duesenberg to eighth place in the Memorial Day Classic at Indianapolis in his rookie season. He was delighted when he was chosen by the team to travel to Italy to test his car against the best that the Europeans could offer. He gladly packed up his roadster and prepared for competition in the Grand Prix near Milan.

Although the season was only half over, Pete had quickly made a name for himself. He had shed his youthful shyness, and his newly adopted bonhomie gave him the ability to make friends easily. His personality, however, was not what attracted attention to the young driver.

When racing veterans saw him on the track, they quickly learned that the boy could fly. Speed—that’s what attracted the race crowd to Pete. The veterans watched, and they knew. People like Tommy Milton, the first two-time winner at Indy; Harry Miller, the mechanical genius; and Harry Hartz, an early convert to the Millers and one of the few who later would make the difficult transition from driving a car to managing a team. Like the Duesenberg brothers, these men had witnessed Pete’s ability to reach the sustained speed needed to win on the fastest tracks.

The young driver’s growing reputation paid off when he was named one of two drivers to represent the Duesenberg team in the European Grand Prix, an 800-kilometer, 496-mile race in Monza, Italy. American racing was coming into its own, and the Grand Prix circuit (today called Formula 1) had seized on the growing rivalry by announcing that it would encourage American entries to test their machines against the best the Europeans had developed.

Pete would soon learn that the captain of the Duesenberg team, Milton, was one of the strangest men ever to grasp a steering wheel. He was blind in one eye, and, to compensate, he had developed a habit of tilting his head back and shifting it quickly from left to right like a nervous sparrow. He never acknowledged his disability, and few had the nerve to ask him about it, but he adopted the odd physical strategy to ensure that his single eye could keep him fully informed about his surroundings.

Milton had learned his moves by racing on the county roads and dirt tracks of the Midwest, and that probably played a role in the selection of Pete, who had mastered his driving skills in a similar rural setting. Tommy was widely recognized as a hard charger, not only behind the wheel, but also in the garage, where he hovered over mechanics shouting instructions in rapid-fire staccato.

Seeing a great opportunity to trumpet the mechanical achievements of their cars internationally, the Duesenberg brothers immediately jumped at the opportunity by registering two drivers: veteran Tommy Milton would drive one of the Dueseys and Pete Kreis the other. Indy winner Peter De Paolo had decided to enter Monza in a home-grown Alfa-Romeo, a brand celebrating his Italian heritage.

Although some have described Milton as somber, intense is a more precise adjective, and he exhibited that defining quality throughout his life. In advanced age when poor health precluded his fulfilling a long-standing retirement job at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, he shot himself in the head to end his frustration. In 1925, Pete knew he could learn a lot from the veteran, and he eagerly joined the trip to Italy even though it would require missing a few races on the American circuit.

The men and their cars sailed to Genoa on the SS Colombo, the luxurious ocean liner that F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda took to Italy a few years later. After docking, the race crew shipped the cars to Monza, northeast of Milan, which was the site of a royal park and summer retreat for the kings of Italy.

The Monza racecourse was set amid the park’s huge trees, gardens, fountains, and rolling hills. When the Americans arrived, they found that the track consisted of a road course and an oval, totaling six miles in length. Twisting like Italian spaghetti, the road course had ten curves, both right and left; some of them were complex with blind entries and double apexes. At one point, the track even passed over itself on a bridge. At the head of the home stretch was the notorious Parabolica, a right-hand, steeply banked curve. Like the turns on board tracks, the banking enabled cars to generate tremendous speed just before they were propelled down the home stretch, the longest on the course.

The third purpose-built track in the world after Brooklands in England and Indy, Monza was known to be a fast course, and drivers who had raced on it had a healthy respect—some might even say fear—of the facility. Living up to its reputation well into the modern era, the course has claimed the lives of fifty-two drivers and thirty-five spectators. In one of the worst accidents, Italian champion Emilio Materassi lost control of his roadster in 1928 and plowed through a flimsy barrier, killing himself and twenty-two spectators and injuring thirty more fans.3 As horrific as the accident was, it failed to dampen Italy’s enthusiasm for the sport, nor did the course’s reputation deter the Americans from giving it a try.

When they arrived, the Yanks quickly recognized that they weren’t in Indiana anymore. Italy was in the fervor of the Fascist revolution. Only three years before, Benito Mussolini—self-dubbed Il Duce, The Leader—had commanded his black-shirted Fascisti on the march to Rome, where they seized power. By 1925, the revolution was well established and growing stronger as Mussolini applied a powerful jolt to a country he perceived as an international sluggard. Throughout his career, Il Duce preached advancing—and even more so, accelerating. Sensing the worldwide spirit of the age, Italy placed a premium on speed.

But the Fascist revolution was more than a nationalistic political movement; it sought to infuse every facet of the nation’s life—even automobiles and racing. Mussolini loved powerful, speedy vehicles, and he purchased one of the fastest for his personal use, a two-seat Alfa-Romeo Type Two painted in the national tone, Italian racing red. Equipped with a supercharged straight-eight engine, the car could carry the dictator from Rome to his birthplace in northern Italy in record time.

The central role that racing played in Mussolini’s revolution was made clear in the wake of the Materassi accident at Monza, when one of the dictator’s ministers defended the sport from attacks by Catholic critics bemoaning the violence, carnage, and death. Party Secretary Augusto Turati declared that “Fascism has taught us that we need to live and win dangerously. The new Italy salutes its dead with pain, but from that pain we gain the strength to continue the battle to the summit.”

Using the prophetic rhetoric of the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti, the Fascists linked the growing cult of speed to the cult of death, a new alliance in which “living dangerously” on the track became a heroic act that encouraged other Italians to accelerate national progress. Those who died in the process became martyrs that energetic, determined citizens would emulate to advance Italy’s fortune. They were destined to become what Mussolini called “the new Fascist man.”

Il Duce wrote personal letters to Pete, Tommy Milton, and Peter De Paolo welcoming them to Italy and wishing them good luck at Monza; during practice, he visited the Americans in their garages. Following the dictator’s lead, scores of influential Italians journeyed to the track to examine the American cars, and Pete was photographed with King Victor Emmanuel, senior army officers, and many Fascist elite. As much as the Americans hoped to show the Europeans how their roadsters could perform, the Italians were sure their cars would put the entries from the United States in the shade with a swift surge of nationalistic pride.

As the Yanks sorted their cars out, they soon became the objects of scorn from their European competitors. Many of the jibes were aimed at the Americans’ lack of experience on road courses.

“What do you have to do to win Indy?” shouted one glib French driver. “Just get on the track and turn left . . . and turn left . . . and turn left . . . and turn left,” answered his compatriot, lampooning the Americans and their ubiquitous oval tracks. Such jokes were invariably accompanied by every European in the garage hoisting and twirling his index finger to mock the American “roundy-roundy” drivers.

The crowning blow was when another driver made a mock-heroic announcement that Pete’s last name, Kreis, was actually the German word for circle, something the American had never before heard. “Young Mr. Kreis is always going around in circles, getting nowhere,” shouted the rival driver with malicious irony.

A few days later, Kreis and his friends would have their revenge against the European tormentors, thanks to Kreis’s penchant for practical jokes. The culminating event was so hilarious that Peter De Paolo remembered it years later.

The drivers were scheduled to have dinner at a hotel located on a circular plaza in a nearby town. Pete had alerted his American friends to find parking away from the plaza, while the Continentals eagerly grabbed the reserved VIP spots surrounding the central fountain. As the Yanks entered the banquet hall a bit late, the European drivers welcomed them warmly with cheers and raucous shouts of “roundy roundy” emphasized by whirling index fingers—taunts aimed at the oval drivers from across the Atlantic.

After the laughter died down, the rivals enjoyed a feast of the finest Italian pasta, sauces, and wine. As the drivers shared their experiences and chatted about the upcoming race, no one noticed that Kreis had left the hall and returned inconspicuously sometime later. The conversation and drinking continued well past midnight even though the crews faced an early morning call for practice the next day.

As they finally finished and walked out of the hotel around one in the morning, the drivers found an amazing sight waiting for them. Dozens of taxis were clogging the plaza by driving around it bumper-to-bumper, with the hacks enthusiastically blowing their horns and waving their index fingers in “roundy-roundy” circles. The cars of the European drivers in reserved spaces were trapped by the noisy circular parade organized and paid for by Pete Kreis.

When the Europeans finally deduced that the Americans had organized the rolling blockade to delay their going to their beds, they looked across the plaza and saw the Americans doubled over in laughter. Pete, Tommy, Peter, and friends had taken their nationalistic revenge.

The Europeans were in for another surprise on September 6, race day in Monza. From what the Continentals had heard, the Americans knew how to race only on ovals; they supposedly had no experience on road courses. What the Europeans didn’t understand, however, was that most US drivers grew up in rural areas where they had learned to deal with backroads, narrow rural lanes that swerved left and right into irregular, bumpy curves. In this manner, the Americans had undergone the same kind of grueling training the Italians had earned on the demanding Mille Miglia, a thousand-mile race on public roads that began and ended in Rome.

During days of tuning and practice, the Yanks adapted quickly to the challenges of the Italian road course, and Pete had shown amazing speed around the circuit. Impressed Italian crowds soon cheered the young Tennessean as il valoroso corridore americano (the valorous American driver).

Pete and the rest of the Yanks, however, were up against Europe’s best drivers, among them Gaston Brilli-Peri and Giuseppe Campari, Grand Prix champions piloting brilliant red Alfa-Romeos, at that time the dominant marque on continental tracks. Descendant of a noble Florentine family, Brilli-Peri cut his teeth on motorcycle racing before switching to four wheels. He was an Italian favorite who ran the Grand Prix circuit for years before his death in a Libyan race in 1930.

Giuseppe Campari was also a national hero, having won many races in Italy and abroad, including two victories in the Mille Miglia, which attracted an astounding five million spectators along the way. Besides his racing ability, Campari was also adored by fans because of his enormous appetite for pasta—confirmed by a Pavarotti-sized stomach—as well as his Pavarotti-toned voice, which led to a second career as an opera singer. A master of the Italian passions for opera, eating, and racing, he died in a crash at Monza in 1933, the perfect final aria that enriched the national cult of death.

While the two Alfa drivers dominated the scene in pit lane, standing in the background was a young mechanic who later became world-famous for his ability to construct speedy cars. Enzo Ferrari had originally driven for the Alfa team, but the deaths of so many of his racing friends convinced him to join the safety of Alfa’s team of designers and mechanics. After Enzo founded his own company in 1947, his red Ferraris dominated the Formula 1 world for decades and fulfilled his fervent dream: “I want to build a car that’s faster than all of them, and then I want to die.” In the end, he built thousands of the fastest cars in the world, and when he died in 1988, his cars had won an unprecedented sixteen Formula 1 championships.

For obvious reasons, the national press billed the 1925 Monza Grand Prix an “Italo-American Duel,” a face-off between the two nationalities that attracted thousands of fans from all over Italy and around the globe. A British correspondent observed that “If the French are enthusiastic over motor racing, the Italians are delirious. Milan did not sleep the night before the Grand Prix . . . and the masses of spectators were quite satisfied to spend a few hours noisily and joyously in cafés and music halls, hotels and restaurants.”

Shortly after daybreak, a massive crowd of three hundred thousand fans began the twenty-mile trek from Milan on trains and buses to the track, dwarfing the 180,000 spectators who had attended the Indy 500 earlier that year. As the gates opened a short while later, drivers began assembling their roadsters on the starting grid, giving the fans a good chance to examine the cars that entered the race.

The differences in the designs of the teams’ cars were stark. Both featured roadsters with straight-eight-cylinder engines, but the Alfas contained a supercharger spinning at only 6,000 rpms, while that of the Duesenbergs revved to an astounding 27,000 rpms, forcing a much larger volume of powerful fuel-air mixture into the cylinders.

As it turned out, however, the most significant difference was not the engines, but the gearboxes. Designed for oval tracks, the American cars had three-speed transmissions because little shifting was required once the roadsters attained speed on the roundies. The Alfas, however, were developed for European road courses requiring many more shifts through the curves; as a result, the Italian cars had four-speed gearboxes of stronger design to accommodate the mechanical stress of frequent shifts. Because Monza was a course that required many shifts, Alfas had a built-in edge.

The American cars arrived at the starting grid sporting new livery: white bodies with blue numbers: Milton number 7, Kreis number 11—a not-so-subtle tip of the hat to the Goddess Fortune, who ruled the risky game of auto racing. Small American flags were emblazoned on the rear quarter panels of both machines in a nod to national pride.

The start was from standing positions, and the first to get away was the crowd favorite Campari, followed in order by Guyot, De Paolo, and Kreis. Poor Tommy Milton stalled his engine and got away last, angry steam rising from beneath his cloth helmet.

Campari had the lead when the pack passed the grandstands to finish the first lap, but on the second lap, Pete Kreis had planned a surprise to kick off the anticipated “Italo-American Duel.” When the fans expectantly looked to their right to catch the first glimpse of the cars coming out of the sweeping Parabolica curve at the head of the homestretch, they didn’t see the expected Alfa red, but the American white. Flying around the course, Pete had passed Campari and gone on to establish the fastest lap in the race—three minutes and thirty-five seconds.

This was Kreis at his absolute best, running the race he always envisioned: ahead of the pack, drifting curves with grace, and roaring down the homestretch of his dreams. Drivers often describe this unusual sensation as being “in the zone,” a space magically out of time and place in which racing is easy, effortless, and intuitive. All negative thoughts are vanquished.

“Suddenly I realized that I was no longer driving the car consciously,” Brazilian Formula 1 champion Ayrton Senna said of a similar experience years later. “I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension.”

Pete reached that mystical dimension right on time to bring Monza’s crowd to its feet, cheering his achievement. The Americans had likely planned to send Kreis out as a rabbit to tempt the Italians into some hot laps to test their mettle. Then, according to the scheme, Tommy would charge to the front when the forerunners backed off to save their engines. The strategy worked out perfectly, except for Milton’s stalled engine, a disadvantage that Tommy’s skill would soon erase.

As the crowd looked up the homestretch to see who was leading at the end of the third lap, however, they were amazed to see not Kreis in the lead, but Campari. They waited several tense moments, but when Milton’s white roadster appeared before Kreis’s, Italian racing aficionados concluded that Pete had suffered a breakdown or an accident.

Kreis’s crash happened at Porto Lesmo, a blind, complex curve with dual apexes where he lost control in the first bend. Pete ended up broadside against a tree just off the racing surface; multiple spins had scrubbed off much of his speed so that there was virtually no damage to the Duesenberg. The American driver leapt from the car and put his shoulders to the wheel to push the roadster back on track, but it was wedged too tightly for him to budge it.

Noting his plight, enthusiastic spectators who loved the Americans broke down the restraining barrier and gleefully joined in moving the car back to the track. It was then that Pete envisioned the dreaded black flag in a racing official’s hand: it was forbidden for the drivers to receive assistance from spectators. Kreis would be disqualified. Before that action was taken, however, Pete managed to withdraw from the race, a move that ensured that his new lap record would be preserved for the time being. The crowd gave the American driver a huge ovation for his speed and sportsmanship as he walked back to the pits.

Track officials blamed the accident on excessive speed, but Pete clarified the matter later. Under the pressure of frequent shifts, the Duesenberg’s clutch had broken, and Kreis had entered the curve in neutral. When he tried to reengage the gear to negotiate the second apex, the gear seized and spun the car out of control. Meanwhile, Milton carried the American reputation into fourth place with Campari, Brilli Peri, and De Paolo leading the way. Soon, however, Milton’s Duesey passed De Paolo, and when the two other Alfas pitted for fuel and tires Tommy forged into the lead with an average speed of 96.7 miles per hour. Very shortly, however, things began to fall apart for the second American car, when Milton’s transmission stuck in third gear and slowed his acceleration coming out of turns for the duration of the race.

At the halfway mark, Milton pitted—and the time the stop required demonstrated the valuable experience of the Italian team. The Duesenberg crew took four minutes and fifty seconds to get Milton back on the track, while the Alfa team accomplished the same task in less than a minute and a half. The European cars once again took the lead, never again surrendering it. With only ten laps to go, Brilli Peri had a seven- and-a-half-minute lead over the second-place car and won by the same margin. Milton finished fourth, with De Paolo in fifth.

At the conclusion, fans poured onto the track and hoisted the hefty Brilli Peri, Campari, and the diminutive De Paolo on their shoulders and marched to the royal box where the trio was presented to Prince Umberto, the oldest son of the Italian king. Standing in front of the royal party, the huge crowd broke into an enthusiastic version of the Italian national anthem.

Amid the jingoistic fervor, European newspapers were quick to declare that the “Old World had beaten the New.” Even so, the Americans had raced well: Milton and De Paolo finished in the money, while Kreis had established the fastest lap. But given the steep learning curve and the logistical challenges the Americans faced, the Duesenberg team felt that they had represented their nation well, and they looked forward to another opportunity to test themselves against the Europeans—one that would come in 1927.

After a team celebration that extended well into the evening, Pete slipped away to downtown Monza where he located the local telegraph office. On a single white sheet, he scribbled a few words that profoundly confused the Italian telegraph operator but made immediate sense to the US recipient that Pete craved most to please.

“Broke track record and car. Love, Pete,” read the telegram that was delivered to the owner of Riverside Farm.

After a promising start to his career, Pete began to experience a series of increasingly serious accidents. He died in a crash in Indy’s first turn in 1934. His car had no mechanical failures, there were no impediment on the track, and Pete apparently did not attempt to steer or brake his car out of danger. An unofficial “coroner’s jury” declared that the incident was “the strangest death in all racing history.” Pete’s career and mysterious accident are thoroughly investigated in The Last Lap, a new book to be published on May 28. The book is available from Octane Press at: https://bit.ly/PeteKreis

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On May 9^th, 1992, Roberto Guerrero earned the pole position for the 76^th running of the Indianapolis 500-mile race. Piloting a Buick-powered Lola T92/00 for King Motorsports, the 33-year-old Colombian became the first man in Speedway history to officially break the 230-mph barrier as he set new track records for single-lap average (232.618 mph) and four lap average (232.482 mph) for the four-lap, ten-mile run into the record books.

Guerrero would be the only driver in the 33-car starting field to record all four qualification laps over the 230 mph barrier as the 1984 Indianapolis “500” Co-Rookie of the Year award winner would log what would prove to be the sixth and final pole position of his Indy-car career.

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The Ford Motor Company recently announced its entrance into a technical partnership with defending Formula One World Champions Red Bull Racing, opening what the company’s executive chairman William Ford termed “an exciting new chapter” in the firm’s long and illustrious motorsports history.

New FIA engine regulations for Formula 1 are scheduled to take effect for 2026, rules whose intent is to alter the distribution of motive force from F1 power units so that the greater portion will come from the hybrid system rather than the internal combustion engine. The next generation of these turbo V6s will still provide in the region of 1,000-hp, but they will generate less of it from internal combustion, and more via the hybrid electronics, making Ford’s expertise in the latter technology a most valuable commodity.

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Four days, four countries, more than 1,000 kilometers, in cars that are the envy of every petrolhead. From historic streets and piazzas to snowy mountain passes, the third edition of the Coppa delle Alpi rolled through Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Austria.

The Coppa delle Alpi (“Alpine Cup”) is produced by the same organization behind the legendary Mille Mille. Think of it like the Mille Miglia…with snow. Before everyone hit the road, there was final prep and scrutineering at the Mille Miglia Museum in Brescia, Italy.

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Formula One, by its very definition, is often seen as the pinnacle of motorsports. This holds true in many aspects, especially in the fact that the circuits that the cars race are some of the best in the world. Many tracks have been on the calendar for decades, and are world renowned, such as Spa-Francorchamps, which shares its status as a mecca of speed with the Temple of Speed, aka Monza. There are other tracks that have been built and certified by the FIA to Grade 1 status, which is needed for Formula One to race there.

Yet, through economics, mismanagement, or simply bad timing, many tracks have come and gone throughout the decades of the world championship. Some were dropped for safety reasons, such as the “Green Hell” that is the Nurburgring Nordschleife, or the old Kyalami circuit in South Africa, which saw multiple injuries and even a fatality occur on its slithery, snaking tarmac. Others, however, have simply been forgotten, lost to the annals of time and rarely, if ever, talked about, even amongst F1 enthusiasts.

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PRELIMINARIES

The 2023 Daytona 24 hours was the 61^st year of the event. It was once again a watershed year, as this was the first year of the new GTP (Grand Touring Prototype) cars. These of course are the new prototypes that came out of the combined rule set between IMSA and the ACO (Auto Club l’ouest at Le Mans). This was their first actual race after some four years of development. They are named as GTP in memory of the last great era of GTP cars, which were the mainstay of IMSA in the 1981-1993 time frame.

NEW GTP

These new cars are Hybrid powered Prototypes, of which nine were entered. Two from Porsche, Two from BMW, Two from Acura/ Honda and Three from Cadillac. Several additional cars will probably enter the series later this year, with Lamborghini also joining the series in 2024. These are brand new cars which have undergone massive testing during the latter part of 2022. They all use a standardized Hybrid  system consisting of a battery, MGU(Motor Generator Unit) and gearbox developed by the consortium of Williams Engineering, Bosch and Xtrac. The chassis are all new, and once again come from the four makers that constructed the Dpi chassis:  Multimatic (Porsche 963);  Dallara (Cadillac V-LMDh, BMW M Hybrid V8);  Oreca (Acura ARX-06); and Ligier (Lamborghini). The Porsches were entered by Roger Penske,  Cadillac by both Chip Ganassi and Whelen Engineering,  BMW by Rahal-Letterman-Lannigan,  Acura one each from Wayne Taylor/ Michael Andretti (Andretti having bought a stake in Wayne Taylor Racing) and Meyer/Shank.

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These are not happy times for Aston Martin. The British luxury carmaker is fighting ferociously for its survival in a highly competitive space. However, the blows just keep coming. The latest big whack was in the form of hugely disappointing Q3 2022 Financial results. In November 2022, the company reported a pretax loss of $259.4 million compared with a loss of $121.2 million a year prior. Net debt also increased to $1.03 billion, even though Aston Martin raised $776 million in September 2022 partly to offset existing debt.

That’s not all. Like other automakers, supply-chain challenges hit the company hard. Aston Martin was forced to lower its sales growth guidance, by as much as 400 vehicles, for the full year. These unfortunate series of events sent a ripple effect through the company’s books. Share prices plummeted, and industry analysts pinned the hope of a revival on the ability of the carmaker to secure a new partner or additional funding.

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The clubs that organized and sanctioned most of the events were the Sports Car Club of America (Northwest and San Francisco Regions) and the California Sports Car Club of Southern California (Cal Club). Each club continued their search for additional, suitable locations on which to race. Even though some races were held on city streets, the majority utilized municipal airports, creating road courses from a combination of runways and access roads. While the landscape was flat and featureless it was ideal for airplanes but not for race cars, however, until a better solution could be found, airport circuits were the best alternative.

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Drivers first raced these roads in 1906 (Targa Florio history), back when they were little more than dirt paths winding through the hills and along the shores of Sicily.

Danger and liability caught up to the race, forcing a change. These days the Targa Florio is a largely ceremonial sojourn, attracting multi-million-dollar cars, celebrity drivers, and loyal, adoring fans…all drawn to Palmero by the magic of motorcars.

The 2022 Targa Florio began and ended in Palermo, with scrutineering and the official start at the University of Palermo Avenue of Sciences (“Università degli Studi di Palermo Viale delle Scienze”).

Staged as a speed race from 1906 to 1977 (with interruptions for both World Wars), multiple deaths and injuries forced a change for 1978. The Targa Florio went from an all-out race on open roads to a rally racing competition, with points for precision instead of just flat-out speed. But the tradition of traveling through small Sicilian towns and villages endured.

The true beauty of the Targa Florio is best seen on the open roads. Autumn thunderstorms and partly cloudy skies play equal parts in the competition, along with the spectacular Sicilian scenery.

The cars are the stars of the Targa Florio, but like an opera without a conductor, these machines are nothing without the men and women behind the wheel. And the camera.

The most famous driver in this edition of the Targa Florio was very un-diva-like in his actions and activities. Three-time Indianapolis 500 winner and four-time Indy Car champion Dario Franchitti Dario Franchitti greeted every fan, posed for every selfie, and snapped a few of his own photos during his first time at this Italian classic.

We end this Italian production with a photo of the star and his chorus, the team that supported Signore Franchitti at the Targa Florio. Like a great Italian opera, these auto adventurers earned the right to take a bow for a job well done.

Bravo!

The post The 2022 Targa Florio — An Italian Classic appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

There is a road in Bennington County, Vermont, called Skyline Drive. It takes you to the top of Mt. Equinox. The road runs 5.2 miles. You start at 800 feet above sea level, and when you reach the summit, you are 3,848 feet above sea level. The view is spectacular, with vistas at many locations stretching to other states.

The post Running Up That Hill appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

To have these cars returning ‘home’, just a stone’s throw from where they were originally created is a fitting beginning for the latest chapter in these cars’ lives. Hans Matti dedicated his life to building this collection, gathering original photographs, magazine features, books and factory communications relating to them. He hadn’t just collected the cars, but he had completely researched their stories. As the Registrar of the Bugatti Club Suisse, he is one of the most knowledgeable experts in the world on Bugatti Grand Prix cars.

Among the extraordinary collection is Bugatti Type 51, thought to be one of the most original in existence, a remarkably preserved Type 37A, a short chassis Type 49 Faux cabriolet with Jean Bugatti coachwork – the only remaining example in the world, a Type 35B and a Type 35A fitted with the only existing Type 36 engine, gearbox and rear axle to have survived. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime collection that Hans Matti was understandably reluctant to part with. Discussions to acquire the collection had been underway for two-and-a-half years and even Caroline Bugatti – granddaughter of Ettore Bugatti had been involved in the negotiations.

The Type 51 – a dedicated factory Grand Prix racing machine – has never been restored or repainted, bearing the marks of nine decades of motorsport and enjoyment. The original craftsmanship of Ettore Bugatti’s team is on display and each chapter of its life is worn with pride. The Type 49, meanwhile, was the personal car of Jean Bugatti himself, with the initials ‘JB’ on the doors. It’s extremely rare to have a Type 49 with a body designed and built by the Bugatti factory, as this example does, and no other Type 49 in existence wears the unique Faux Cabriolet body. More incredible still, this Type 51 and Type 49 shared a transporter during their delivery to their respective first private customers. To have them reunited is the closing of a circle that started all the way back in the 1930s.

The Type 51 in the collection began life as one of the last Type 35Bs to ever be built, a factory Grand Prix racer, driven in period by Louis Chiron. As Bugatti looked to evolve the Type 35 – renowned as one of the most successful racing cars of all time – it developed a new, advanced twin-cam engine and a new car which it would power: the Type 51. This new powertrain was swapped into this car, at which point it became one of the very first Type 51s, fitted with engine number 1 and raced by Achille Varzi and other contemporary motorsport heroes. Varzi is revered to this day at Bugatti; to celebrate 100 years of the brand a special Centenaire Edition Veyron ‘Achille Varzi’ was produced. With appearances at races in Monaco, Monza, at the Targa Florio and more, this car has an incredible racing pedigree. In another important connection, the factory Grand Prix engine that was originally in this car as a Type 35B was swapped into another Type 35B in this collection by the factory, before later being sold as a new car.

One of the stand-out circuits of the early racing era was the Montlhéry track in France, renowned for its high-speed banking, but also for its extraordinarily bumpy surface. Bugatti’s detailed approach to engineering saw them develop a new model to race at Montlhéry: the Type 36. Featuring a rigid rear axle, it would better handle the demanding conditions of this unique circuit. Two variants were built, the later model with a supercharger, becoming what many believe to be the first ever supercharged Bugatti. But their racing careers were short-lived and the only two Type 36 cars built were destroyed. All that remained was the engine, gearbox and rear axle of one of them, which now uniquely reside within a Type 35A body housed in this collection. Once more, it is another one-off piece of Bugatti history.

Completing the five Bugatti cars in the collection is a Type 37A, one of a long lineage of supercharged Bugatti cars that arguably began with the Type 36. It is again preserved in fully original condition with matching numbers – each era of its ownership and extensive racing history has been meticulously traced right back to its first owner, in 1929, and it continues to race to this day.

The Type 37 was considered a Voiturette class winning car by many of its drivers, but with the addition of a supercharger – becoming the Type 37A – its powerful, four-cylinder engine became capable of propelling the car to more than 120 mph (193kph), up from 90 mph (144kph). Only 76 examples were supercharged by Bugatti, and they went on to race at Le Mans, the Mille Miglia, the Targa Florio and more.

This unique collection of cars now embarks on its third era; their first being when they were sold new and their second under the meticulous care of Hans Matti. Now, they will be kept in their original, unrestored condition, preserved as the important artifacts of Bugatti history that they are. And as they gathered at the Château Saint Jean – a place bought by Ettore Bugatti to entertain his customers, and still a core part of the Bugatti legend – it was almost as though the cars had never left. A sense of history surrounds the Château, brimming with nearly a century of Bugatti heritage.

Christophe Piochon, President of Bugatti Automobiles, commented: “We are a brand that constantly looks to the genius of our founder for inspiration. For Ettore, the most important aspect of a Bugatti was that it be incomparable. It should be in a class of its own. Arguably nothing brings us closer to vision of Ettore than seeing his creations in the condition they left the factory in; the original rivets, paint, and, in particular, the meticulous engineering that came to define his cars and ultimately his success. This collection of cars and the stories that have been gathered around them are absolutely priceless, and we’re honored to have been able to welcome them to home of Bugatti Automobiles. As we look to a new era of Bugatti, it’s pioneering models like these that will be our inspiration.”

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To celebrate this double Golden Jubilee a unique gathering took place at Hethel, Norfolk, UK home to both Lotus Cars and Classic Team Lotus. From 1970 to 1975, Team Lotus constructed 10 Lotus Type 72 chassis, eight of which are still in existence but scattered around the globe. However, all eight made the journey to Norfolk for the party along with Emerson himself.

After launching the “Evija Fittipaldi”, a 2011-bhp (yes, that’s not a misprint!) Black and Gold limited-edition version of the new Lotus hypercar, created to mark this 50th anniversary, Emerson sat down and talked about his time driving for team Lotus and the Type 72 in particular, “I drove many cars during my career, but the 72 was the best, it talked to me, and we understood each other it was consistently fast.”

After winning the Lombank F3 series, in 1969, driving a Lotus 59 entered by Jim Russell, Emerson was offered a seat at Lotus as their 1970 F1 test driver and shortly after joining the team he became the #3 Grand Prix driver alongside Jochen Rindt and John Miles. Emerson’s first Grand Prix start was at Brands Hatch in an ill-handling Lotus 49.  “I qualified at the back of the grid in the Lotus 49, and then Graham Hill lined up in the car next to me. I was thinking: ‘I’m next to Graham Hill. This is a dream! If I die tomorrow I’ll die happy’, because my dream when I left Brazil was to race in a Grand Prix.”

Emerson brought the outdated and misfiring 49 home in 8^th place. How did it compare to the Lotus 72 he would drive later in the season? “A forgiving car to drive it was well-developed, remember it had been around since Jim Clark’s time, there was a lot of suspension travel, I could slide it around or make a mistake when braking and get away with it. The 72 is much more agile, more precise, but nervous, the torsion bars make the suspension much stiffer, good brakes and good turn in. Very different to the 49.”

Fittipaldi showed well at the next Grand Prix, this time in Germany, taking his Gold Leaf sponsored Lotus 49C to fourth place. He continues, “The first time I drove a 72 was in practice at Monza for the Italian Grand Prix, it was brand new and I crashed it. I was only doing a slow lap and as I approached the Parabolica corner, I checked my mirror and saw Jack Brabham catching me fast, but by then I’d missed my braking point and crashed into the back of Ignazio Giunti’s Ferrari ending up over the barrier! When I got back to the pits Colin (Chapman) said `What happened?` I had to tell him”. Tragically, the next day Jochen Rindt’s Lotus 72 crashed at the same corner, but this time with a fatal outcome when the Austrian’s car tobogganed under a badly installed Armco. Team Lotus withdrew from the race.

Obviously still moved by the memories, Emerson pauses then carries on solemnly, “We all went home and I heard nothing for 10 days. I was convinced Colin would hire a more experienced driver. I had only finished three Grand Prix and crashed a new car! Then Colin called me and asked me to be his number one driver, I felt I didn’t have enough experience but Colin said the team would support me.”

Just over three weeks later, Emerson found himself as team leader at Watkins Glen racing the 72 for the first time. “ I felt the pressure but the 72 was very good at the Glen, it was a wet start and I lost places, but as the track dried I could maximise all that was good with the 72. To get my first win there so soon was fantastic and with Jacky (Ickx) finishing fourth Jochen (Rindt) would be Champion.”

The 1971 season did not prove to be successful for the Lotus 72, the best Fittipaldi could manage was a second place in Austria. “Our problem was the instigation of slick tires,” says Emerson. “The 72 was not designed for them, it would only be quick on low grip tracks like Monaco. Our chief designer Maurice Phillippe had to redesign the suspension. On the Firestone slicks, the original suspension was flexing and upsetting the car. It was not until the Victory Race in October that the new suspension was really working and the 72 had good grip.”

However, 1972 was “A Very Special Year” borrowing the title of a book published at the end of that season. John Player increased their sponsorship with Lotus and changed the livery to match their new brand of cigarettes ‘John Player Specialsʼ or JPS as printed on the packs. John Player promotion gurus Barry Foley and Noel Stanbury reputedly came up with that iconic black and gold F1 color scheme sitting around the kitchen table in Barry’s house. When Emmo first saw the car, he told Chapman that it reminded him of a coffin and it should have handles on it! His opinion has softened over the years, now he says, “One of the most beautiful color schemes ever seen on an F1 car, so elegant, so different.”

It wasn’t only the look of the 72 that was right, the chassis had reached the peak of its development and was now the class of the field allowing Emerson to win 5 of the 12 Grands Prix that year and thus securing his title by race 10 at Monza. He remembers, “The team was very solid, working well, the first time I thought I could win the Championship was at Jarama, Spain, in May, the car was good on all tracks. I told Colin, ‘We have a chance for the Championship.ʼ”

The 1973 season started well for the World Champion, now partnered by his friend Ronnie Peterson. “I won the first two races then the fourth and I thought I can be World Champion again in the 72. But then I scored no points at all in the next four races with Ronnie doing well. It came to Monza and I still had a chance for the title. Colin said if we were 1-2 in the race with nobody close I would be allowed to win. We drove away from them all, and with 15 laps to go Ronnie was in the lead but Colin did not give the signal, so with 10 laps left I started to dice with Ronnie but I couldn’t get past. I don’t know why he (Colin Chapman) didn’t give the signal, I was very upset, after that I decided to leave, I felt let down.”

“I don’t know why he did that but let me say that of all the cars I drove in my career, Colin’s designs were the best. He had an intuition for setting up a car, we would sit down and I would say there are problems and describe to him how it was behaving around the track, he would go back to the garage with the mechanics and change settings or the springs or dampers, toe in or out and the next time I drove it the car would be fast again. He was a genius.”

As expected, Emmo chose to drive “Old Faithful”, chassis #72/5, to head all the 72s parade laps around the Hethel test track. It was the chassis he crashed at Monza in 1970, but once repaired it was his mount for most of the lack-lustre 1971 season, 5^th at Monaco, 3^rd in France and the UK, plus 2^nd in Austria. Resplendent in black and gold for 1972 #5 took Emerson to 2^nd in South Africa before being handed over to second JPS driver Dave Walker for a couple of Grands Prix before reverting back to being Fittipaldi’s spare for the rest of the season. Emmo used it to win in Austria and clinch both F1 World titles at Monza after a transporter accident en route damaged his primary racecar. Upgraded to “E” specification, with deformable structures for 1973, Emerson scored 72/5’s final GP victory and Lotus’s 50^th in Spain despite a slow puncture. “Old Faithful’s” racing days came to an end in Zandvoort when a wheel failure caused Emerson to crash heavily during practice for the 1973 Dutch Grand Prix effectively writing the car off.

Colin’s son, Clive Chapman, takes up the tale of 72/5, “All the other damaged chassis that the team has had over the years were scrapped and thrown away but for some reason this one was put in a corner and used as something of a rubbish bin for some time… we stored technical drawings in it. About ten years ago, I thought, well maybe we could straighten her out, we were able to do that and the tub is almost completely original.”

Surprisingly, “Old Faithful” did not secure the most Grand Prix victories for Emerson, that title goes to chassis #72/7 with a total of five under its belt. Built for the ’72 season, it took Emerson to three Grand Prix wins that championship year in Spain, Belgium and Britain, with a further two podiums in Monaco and France. For 1973, in E spec, 72E/7 was used by Emerson to take victory in Argentina and Brazil, though he was also using E/7 when Peterson grudgingly piped him to the post at Monza. This chassis was then sold to Team Gunston and campaigned in South Africa, where it was also raced by Michael Schryver, in historics, during the 1990s. Now owned by Clive and the Chapman family, the car has undergone a complete restoration and wears JPS livery sporting race number 5, as used by Emerson to take the chassis’s first Grand Prix victory at the 1972 Spanish Grand Prix.

Incredibly, by today’s standards, the Lotus 72 line raced in Grands Prix from 1970 to 1975 a testament to the groundbreaking Chapman/ Phillippe design with its side-mounted radiators and wedge shape, which is still mirrored in F1 cars today. It won three Constructor Championships and two Driver’s titles. Gathered alongside Fittipaldi’s favorites at Hethel this day were 72/3 now the oldest surviving complete chassis raced by John Miles, Reine Wisell and Dave Charlton and restored into its Team Gunston colors of 1975. 72/4 originally constructed with some parts from prototype 72/1 for Rob Walker’s 1970 F1 entry driven by Graham Hill but without success, it was then sold to Jo Siffert but never raced again until John Foulston used the car for historic events during the mid-1980s. Now wearing Gold Leaf colors, it pays homage to chassis #1 used by Jochen Rindt. Chassis 72/6 started life in 1972 and throughout that season and the next struggled to achieve results in the hands of Lotus #2 drivers Reine Wisell and Dave Walker, but after it was updated to E spec for 1973 it became Ronnie Peterson’s rocket. Driving it, Peterson finished 3^rd at Monaco, 2^nd at Anderstorp, finally taking his maiden win in France followed by three more in Austria, Italy and the USA. Sold in ’74 to John Love’s Rhodesian Team Gunson the car continued racing In South Africa, 72/6 is still competing regularly now in historic events. 72E/5 was constructed to replace “Old Faithful” after Emmo’s Zandvoort crash. Used by Jacky Ickx for most of the 1974/’75 seasons, the 72 chassis by then had been outclassed by its rivals and retired at the end of 1975, now restored it is also raced regularly at historic meetings. Chassis 72/8, built in 1973, became Peterson’s alternative to the ill-performing Lotus 76 in 1974. Ronnie won three Grands Prix with it, the Monaco, French and Italian. For 1975, it was used as a spare eventually being displayed in the now defunct Donington collection, it now resides in the USA. Last of the line is 72/9, built for Peterson’s 1975 season with modified suspension that didn’t prove successful, the curtain came down on all the 72s at Watkins Glen that year with Ronnie bringing car #5 home, aptly, in 5^thplace.

Due to the limitations of the Hethel test facility and the anticipated response, “All the 72s” was not a public event. As such, invitations were restricted to Lotus personnel, former JPS staff and contributors, plus a limited media presence. Never say never, but it’s difficult to imagine an occasion in the foreseeable future when all these cars will be together again tracing the lineage of one of F1’s greatest marques. It was a grey, damp day but that didn’t overshadow this very special and historic occasion.

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New Zealand motor sport enjoyed a golden age during the 1960s and early 1970s when no less than three drivers from the tiny island nation—thousands of miles from the motor racing capitals— were front-runners and serious contenders for the World Drivers’ Championship crown.

However, one wonders if it had not been for the driving force of one visionary man, working behind the scenes, whether the international achievements of Bruce McLaren, Denis Hulme and Chris Amon, would ever have come about?

The post Kiwi Kingmaker—Ron Frost… Hero or Villain? appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Unleashing the rampant horsepower of its global ‘Total Performance’ campaign, Ford funded many racing stables but could never quite commit wholeheartedly to the world’s most rewarding and highly publicised sports car racing series.

The Ford Motor Company took “Total Performance” seriously. When it stepped into motor racing with fanfares around the globe, it planned for worldwide success. Its 1963½ models in America marked the beginning of Ford’s open defiance of the agreement among the U.S. automakers dating from 1957 that they would not openly use racing to promote power and speed. Now, hot Ford-powered cars were everywhere: Indianapolis, rallying, stock-car racing, drag racing, Le Mans and soon Grand Prix racing. Ford let the world know it was back on the track—and proud of it.

The post Ford and the Can-Am — An Incompatible Marriage appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Actually, it was my idea and I ended up as the promoter. Here’s how it developed: For quite a few years, Johnny Von Neumann, Vasek Polak and I had second homes in Palm Springs. All three of us were on the same street within walking distance of one another. So it was natural that we would get together now and then.

During the 1984 Thanksgiving holiday, we were gathered at Vasek’s celebrating with wine and tall stories, some about races we used to have in Palm Springs during the ’50s.  The first post-WWII sports car road race held in Southern California was at Palm Springs on April 16, 1950. Johnny Von Neumann blew the head gasket on his supercharged MG, so he borrowed a Riley to compete in the production race. He was also a race official along with Chief Steward Ralph De Palma and Starter Peter De Palo! (Some believe this was the first in the West. Not so. On November 20, 1949, the MG Car Club held a race at Buchanan Field near Concord in Northern California.) The first few Palm Springs meets were on city streets. It wasn’t until 1953 that the course was laid out on airport runways.

Having imbibed way too much wine, I mumbled, “Why don’t we do it again?” Vasek thought it was a great idea; Johnny just said, “Harrumph.” With more enthusiasm than sense, the next day Vasek and I drove all around looking to see if there was a possible location for a course. In those days, the city wasn’t nearly as built up as it is now. We knew that a course couldn’t go past private homes, thus blocking ingress and egress. Eventually, we settled on streets between the then new convention center and Sunrise Way.

Now that we had a possible venue, what next? Obviously we needed permission and cooperation from the city. As it turned out, the mayor was a boyhood friend of mine; both of us had belonged to a hiking club. So on the Monday after the holiday, I went to have a chat with Mayor Frank Bogert. He was Mr. Palm Springs then; he’s gone now, but there’s a large statue of him on his horse in front of city hall. Frank had been around so long that he was on the city council during the ’50s and remembered the races. The idea I proposed was to have a vintage event with many of the cars and drivers that were there in the old days.

At that time, Palm Springs was struggling to attract visitors, particularly during the off season. Frank liked the idea and remembered that in the old days, the Chamber of Commerce along with the California Sports Car Club were the sponsors. So Frank called the Chamber manager, said it was ok to use city streets and told him to make it happen. In those days, in Palm Springs, whatever Frank said went.

Having never been to a vintage race, my idea was for it to be a re-creation; something like a live museum exhibit. Obviously, I needed to get a racing club involved. The Cal Club and the SCCA were not into vintage, but there was (and still is) an organization based in Southern California, the Vintage Auto Racing Association (VARA). I was invited to present the idea at the next board meeting. Although I got tentative approval (based on getting insurance), the meeting went on into the early morning. (That made me remember why I had declined to run for another term on the ’50s -era SCCA-LA Region board.)

The VARA board appointed their permanent race chairman, Cliff Jones to coordinate. The Chamber board appointed one of its members, my Palm Springs neighbor, Keith McCormick. We decided that the weekend after Thanksgiving, in 1985, would be a good date. It was a time when the city needed more visitors.

I had never attended a vintage race, so I went to a VARA event at Riverside. It was nice, but there were no spectators! Uh oh, I thought. Frank’s, the Chamber’s and Palm Spring’s idea was to attract visitors who would rent rooms, eat, drink and shop. In order to avoid getting ridden out of town on a rail, somehow I had to attract spectators. Stars and famous personalities are an attraction for most happenings. “So,” I thought, “I’ve got to get stars. But how?”

Even though they stopped racing some 50 years ago, there are two motorsports names known by almost everyone anywhere: Stirling Moss and Carroll Shelby. The two are unique in this respect. Ask anyone the name of that German guy who won so many World Championships. What’s his name? But every aficionado and many of the unwashed have at least heard of Moss and Shelby. Lucky for me, my family and the Moss family are friends. So one of the first things I did was call Stirling and tell him what I had in mind. Maybe because of the time of the year, Stirling agreed to come so long as I could provide first-class accommodations and airfare for his wife Susie, plus Innes Ireland and his girlfriend. “Great,” I thought, “I get Innes too!”

As it happened, the wife of a friend worked at British Airways. Through her, I got BA to provide four comps so long as it could host a party in the infield for local travel agents. The Chamber agreed, so I had the tickets. Having done some PR for the SCCA Region during the ’50s, I knew I had to have media ink to get spectators, So I compiled a mailing list of appropriate news outlets, sent a press release announcing the event and that Stirling and Innes were coming. I got a few hits including AutoWeek and Road & Track.

“But,” I thought, “just having Stirling and Innes standing around won’t make much of a show.  I’ve got to have something for them to do that people will want to watch.” Since both were F1 drivers, how about a feature event called “Vintage Formula One?” But only those two plus a bunch of no-name vintage drivers wouldn’t do it. I needed more stars, as well as appropriate cars for them to drive.

A number of friends lived in Southern California then: Phil Hill, Sam Hanks, Rodger Ward and Dan Gurney. I got them to agree, so long as I could provide expenses and suitable vehicles. I sent out another press release and got more hits. By now, it was getting pretty complex and time consuming. As it happened, I had just sold my business, so I had the time and funds to survive without a day job. Plus I enlisted my neighbors Ginny and John Dixon to help. John had driven with the Cal Club during the ’50s.

Gurney was the only one who had an appropriate car—his Gurney Weslake Eagle—that he agreed to bring and drive. The only way to get cars for the others was to borrow them. I got the most recent Monterey Historics program, looked at the entry list and started calling. One car collector who was most helpful was Ron Kellogg. He had John Von Neumann’s Ferrari Testa Rossa, as well as the Bobby Unser F5000 Eagle. As soon as I got Ron aboard, I called Bobby and he agreed to fly his plane over from Albuquerque. Right away, I sent out another press release. AutoWeek ran another story, so I invited Denise McCluggage, a staff writer at the time. By the time November rolled around, I had been getting a steady dribble of publicity. When my buddy, movie-director Bruce Kessler, told me that everyone in Hollywood was talking about it, I knew we had something going.

One problem we had to address was setting up the course. In order to do so, we had to work with local authorities. Vasek and I had planned a course at something over two miles. But it went by the Post Office. The local Postmaster objected, noting the Post Office was open on Saturday. So we had to shrink the course to avoid the Post Office.

Our original plan had a long straight using Taquitz-McCallum, a wide, divided road going from the center of town to the airport. The police chief objected, so more shrinkage. We ended up with little more than a large block. I thought many would be disappointed, but Stirling Moss later remarked, “This is not about racing, it’s about the people and the cars.”

Next we had to define the course with barriers to protect not only the participants, but also the spectators. Since we were on city streets, there were curbs. A curb is anathema for racing because if a car hits one sideways, it rolls. In the old days, we used hay bales, but we decided that these would not be adequate, not to mention costing a lot of money. Luckily, one of the prospective entrants was a contractor. He had a number of K-rail barriers (Those long, moveable concrete blocks.) that he donated. That gave us a start, but there weren’t enough of them.

Remembering that my friend, John Fitch, was the designer of those barrels seen everywhere on freeways, I called him for advice. He told me that a barrel filled with water was almost as good as his famous Inertial Barriers. He also mentioned that some barrels used for food can be used only one time for that purpose. So we called around and eventually found a source of large plastic pickle barrels. I think they were only 25¢ each, so we bought a bunch and placed them at strategic places around the course. The day before the race, the Palm Springs Fire Department filled the barrels.

One of the members of the Chamber committee was the person in the City of Palm Springs responsible for insurance. She was assigned to obtain adequate liability coverage for the event. But for one reason or another, she fell down on the job. One month before the event, we didn’t have insurance. The president of VARA became very upset thinking he might be personally liable, so he resigned. Nevertheless, other VARA members worked the race including Sy Lauretz, the Race Steward.

The upshot insofar as insurance went was that we never got a special policy. As it turned out, however, there was no specific exclusion of racing in the city policy, so, since our event was an official city happening, we were covered. As it turned out, there was a claim, but more about that later.

Course control was done by the Long Beach MG Club in the old days, so we were fortunate to get it for the same function. And a number of those originally involved participated too. Alan Fordney was the announcer, Arnie Cane was the starter, Bill Pollack was the “Reunion Chairman,” and Dick Guldstrand the Celebrity Coordinator.

As the weekend approached, we were faced with disaster. A huge storm blanketed the West Coast and it rained in Palm Springs all Thanksgiving week. Since rain in Palm Springs is rare, we hadn’t set a rain date or even thought about it. Even so, the course was set up with everyone getting wet. Lo and behold, Saturday dawned with a blue sky and warm weather. And it continued into Sunday. On the Monday after, rain returned.

The storm did cause a few problems. Pete Lovely had agreed to bring his Formula One Lotus from Tacoma, Washington. He set out towing a trailer, but got bogged down in snow. Without chains, he couldn’t continue. But Pete, himself, made it by flying. Fortunately, a neighbor of mine, David Springett, had a spare Lotus 18 he offered for Pete. Actually, Springett had three Loti (plural of Lotus), so I had appropriate mounts for Innes Ireland and Jay Chamberlain too.

The storm also caused difficulties for many traveling south towards Palm Springs. There were numerous accidents and blockages on the freeway. Nevertheless, by Friday, there wasn’t a hotel room to be had in the area and people were staying in nearby Indio and Banning. The Chamber and the City were happy campers.

Probably due to the publicity we had in motorsports media for the months prior to Thanksgiving, there were a large number of vintage entrants. There were so many, in fact, that we could allow them to run only one day: Saturday or Sunday. They were used to racing each day and there was some grumbling amongst the troops. At the end of the day on Saturday, I spied a few loading up and pulling out. I asked about this and the reply was, “Well, I had my run and now I’m going home.” When I pointed out the large number of racing greats that would be in Sunday’s main event, they didn’t seem interested. Obviously, some had come just to race. I was taken aback that these vintage racers were indifferent regarding the history of the sport.

The big event on Saturday was the Fabulous ’50s Reunion. This was supposed to be a parade of more than 50 drivers who had raced during the ’50s, hopefully in the same or similar cars. Again, very few of them had appropriate cars, so I set about borrowing from vintage entrants. Most appropriate, of course, was Ron Kellogg’s Ferrari Testa Rossa for John Von Neumann, who had raced at almost every ’50s Palm Springs including the very first in April 1950.

John showed up on Saturday before the Reunion event. I took him to Ron Kellogg’s paddock and introduced them. John said he wanted to re-familiarize himself with the car, so Ron gave him the key and John drove off. The time for the event rolled around and no John, so the group took off without him. Hours later, John returned with a wide grin (unusual for him) on his face. He thanked Ron and went home.

Quite a few more than 50 showed up. Some of the notables in cars (or same make and model that they drove in the ’50s) were Stirling Moss in a C-Type Jaguar, Phil Hill in an XK120, Mary Davis in an MG, Pete Lovely in a 550 Porsche, Ronnie Bucknum in an Austin-Healey, Andy Porterfield in my Devin SS, Bill Stoppe in a Kurtis, Bob Drake in a D-Type Jaguar, Denise McCluggage in an Alfa Romeo, Dan Gurney in a Porsche Speedster, Dick Guldstrand in a Corvette, Bill Pollack in an Allard, Bill Murphy in a Kurtis, Skip Hudson in a Porsche, Lew Spencer in a Morgan, Max Balchowski in Ole Yeller, Bob Estes in a Bugatti, Al Moss in his TC that he had driven from Arizona, Scooter Patrick in a Porsche, Paul O’Shea in a 300SL, Jack McAfee in a 550 Porsche, Jim Hall in a Lotus and many more names you would recognize.

We had an impromptu drivers’ meeting on the pre-grid conducted by Stirling and Phil. They explained that this was a parade or procession and that there were too many cars for the course. Stirling said he and Phil would lead off, side by side, and the rest were to follow. When the flag dropped, however, quite a few forgot the instructions and started to dice. I had borrowed the Speedster for Gurney from a Gary Fahl of Sunnyvale, CA. I was standing at Start/Finish when Dan came back walking along the side of the course, helmet in hand. It turned out that he had tried to pass both Stirling and Phil in a corner that would only fit two cars. The Fahl Porsche was somewhat worse for the wear. Fahl was furious, yelling at me that his concours car was destroyed. Destroyed was an exaggeration, however. After the event, I was able to get Vasek Polak to restore it without charge and Fahl was molified. At any rate, the rest of the reunion went off without incident. I don’t think many in the audience realized what a truly amazing sight they had just witnessed.

Racing personalities weren’t the only famous faces that could be seen that weekend. Tristan Rogers, star of the daytime soap, General Hospital, Chris Atkins of Blue Lagoon, Perry King, Kent McCord and Robert Carradine are a few that I can recall. Our very own Mr. Monterey Historics Steve Earle was racing in his 1953 Aston-Martin.

The rest of the day went well and that evening, it was parties, parties, parties. John Von Neumann hosted a dinner at this home featuring lobster. He entertained many of his friends who had been at his Porsche/VW dealers in the old days including Jay Chamberlain, Vasek Polak, Pete Lovely, Jack McAfee and George Follmer. I was fortunate to be included.

The only problem I ended up with involved Innes Ireland. I had arranged for a complimentary room in the headquarters hotel. Later, I was informed that Ireland had charged many hundreds of dollars for liquor and the hotel management was quite upset. Of course, by then, Ireland had returned to England. So I left this one for the Chamber to sort out.

On Sunday, Race Seven was for older sports cars. The cars were due to line up at pre-grid, but an official hustled me over to their paddock. All of the drivers were suited up but sitting on the concrete beside their cars. Vasek Polak had entered his 1937 BMW 328 for John Von Neumann to drive. When I got there I was told that the entrants wouldn’t compete against a replica and that the BMW was, in fact, a replica. I talked with Vasek about it and he admitted it was a replica, But, he said, “It’s an exact replica.” I had to pull the car and the drivers climbed into their cars. Vasek was very angry with me for the rest of the day. (We remained close friends until his death.)

In order to generate pre-race publicity, I had invited Road & Track Editor John Dinkel to come and race my 1956 Alfa Romeo Giulietta. In addition, my friend Kent McCord was to drive my Devin SS. But when we three met in the paddock, it turned out that the 6-ft, 3-in McCord wouldn’t fit in the Devin. So I came up with an easy fix. “The two of you can just swap cars.” After his race, Dinkel remarked in the magazine, “I sure have a much better appreciation of what the ‘old-timers’ had to put up with when they raced in the fifties and sixties. My helmet is off to all of them.” He had found that racing the Devin was hard work.

The big event on Sunday was, of course, the Vintage Formula One. Dan Gurney was a favorite in the same Eagle that he had won the 1967 Formula One race at Spa, Belgium. Gurney had accomplished wins in Formula One, Indycars, NASCAR, Trans-Am, Can-Am and sports cars, a record equaled only by Mario Andretti. Another favorite was three-time Indy winner Bobby Unser driving a 1973 Eagle, the same car in which he had won the 500 that year. They were challenged by a host of other top talents, not the least of which was Stirling Moss in a Formula One Lotus. Other former Formula One Lotus Team members Innes Ireland, Jay Chamberlain and Pete Lovely joined Moss in Loti. There were other Indy drivers on hand led by two-time winner Rodger Ward in my 1967 Phoenix-winning Indy Gilbert and Sam Hanks. Bob Bondurant had a ride in a 1967 Ferrari alongside George Follmer in a 1971 Tyrrell and Ronnie Bucknum in a Cooper. World Champion Phil Hill piloted a Talbot Lago once driven by Juan Fangio. Afterwards, Phil said, “I did what I could with the suds left in the old car.”

Notwithstanding the competition, Bob Bondurant won in the Ferrari. Perhaps due to teaching at his school he had more recent seat time than the others. All of the Formula One entries had been padlocked a short distance away from the course in a parking lot. The street from the course to the lot was not part of the course and consequently under the jurisdiction of the Palm Springs Police. After the race, all of the cars left the course onto the street, led by Bondurant. The street was lined by police, keeping a large crowd of spectators at bay.

All of a sudden, a pre-teen boy pushed between two officers, and out onto the street and collided with the Bondurant Ferrari. The boy had been left unattended by his mother, who had gone shopping. We brought the boy into the paddock and, just to make sure, had him examined by paramedics. At that point, his mother returned and, even though the paramedics said it was not necessary, demanded they take him to the hospital where shortly after arrival, he was discharged without treatment.

As I discovered later, however, his mother was a student at a law school. A week or so later and much to my surprise, I received a letter from her asking me to supply her with the name of our insurance agency and that she was seeking damages. I assembled a small committee of lawyers headed by (now-judge) Joe DiLoreto. I was advised to do nothing. In the ordinary course of events, in order to pursue the matter, she would have to file suit within one year of the event. She knew this from law school, I guess. So, hoping to get a large settlement with threatening letters—which continued—she waited until one year minus one day to file. But, as it turned out, the incident involving her son occurred on a City street where the Palm Springs police were in charge. In the case of a municipality, California law requires suit to be filed within six months! So the matter ended with a whimper.

When all was said and done, everyone, except the law-school mother, was happy. The City was happy because every hotel and motel within 20 miles of Palm Springs was sold out. The Chamber was happy because the event was a sell-out. After noon or so on Sunday, the Chamber ticket takers ran of out tickets—they had sold all 25,000 they had printed—so they just opened the gates and let everyone in. And the members did a land-office business. Our big-name entrants were happy because they had an opportunity to hob-knob with friends, plus an expense-paid vacation in a famous resort. Even though they had only one day to race, most of our vintage entrants were happy to have been involved in what turned out to be a world-class happening.

We even ended up making a small profit from the entry fees. So we threw a big, hosted Christmas party at Mary Davis’ Portofino Inn in Redondo Beach, emptied the treasury and closed the account. The effort had taken most of a year out of my life and my wife told me that if I ever promoted another race, she would leave me. A Mexican fellow introduced himself to me at the party and told me that he was involved in racing in his home country. He asked if I remembered the early-’50s Mexican Road Races and I replied that I did. Then he suggested we promote a vintage recreation. But that’s another story.

The post PS I Love You—The 1985 Palm Springs Vintage Grand Prix appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

The fastest track of all was usually the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which measured 2.5 miles in length. Built by developer Carl Fisher and opened in 1909, the four-cornered “Brickyard” gave drivers ample room to explore the limits of their machines. Although starting positions for 1911’s inaugural Indianapolis 500 were determined by the order in which the entries were received, precisely measured qualifying laps — called Time Trials — were soon adopted to set the starting lineup, and in 1916 Indy’s 100 mph barrier was broken by no less than Barney Oldfield, who stopped the clocks at 1:27.70, for an average lap speed of 102.623mph.

When Oldfield cracked the century with his blue Delage, most “Indycars” were stripped-down, spindly creations — with second seats for riding mechanics — that rolled along on narrow passenger-car tires wrapped around tall wire wheels. The badges they wore came from some of the world’s top carmakers, among them Peugeot, Duesenberg, Sunbeam, Maxwell, Premier and Frontenac, as well as Delage. With natural evolution these early expressions of the racer’s art became ever slimmer and sleeker as designers sought to establish whatever advantage they could over their competition.

Four decades of such mechanical progress produced a selection of slick, slipstreamy specials called “roadsters” and, In 1957, the grand Italian autodrome at Monza hosted the first of two annual events — known as The Race of Two Worlds — on the verdant park facility’s steeply banked 2.6-mile oval. Those contests pitted America’s fastest cars and drivers against their European counterparts who, as it turned out, were not quite up to the task.

Because the Indianapolis 500 actually counted as a round of the Formula 1 World Championship during the 1950s, the Europeans were not completely unfamiliar with the Indycars, even though they differed somewhat in essential specification from their F1 equivalents.

Ten Indy roadsters from America were thus sent to challenge a similar number of European machines over three 63-lap heats totaling 500 miles, but the Indycars had Monza handled. Tony Bettenhausen’s supercharged pole speed of 176.818mph in the beloved Novi-powered Kurtis KK500F outlier established a new world closed course speed record in ’57, and the following year Jim Rathmann averaged 166.756mph for the 500 miles in John Zink’s Watson-Offy to win the fastest race yet run, anywhere by anyone.

Back in the USA, Bill France was busy building his Daytona International Speedway — 2.5 miles around, with turns banked at 31 degrees — and wanted the speed record for his new facility once it opened in 1959. He convinced the United States Auto Club to bring its Indycars to race there, and a 100-mile National Championship contest was duly scheduled for Saturday April 4, 1959. Unfortunately, during a test session several weeks before the race, veteran driver Marshall Teague was killed in the crash of his Sumar Special Streamliner, but USAC decided to proceed as planned.

It proved a fateful choice. On the last of the race’s 40 laps, promising youngster George Amick died after losing control of his Bowes Seal Fast Epperly-Offy and hitting the wall exiting Turn 2, which ignited a sickening series of flips and rolls that scattered debris the length of the backstretch. Neither Dick Rathmann’s pole-winning lap at 173.210 mph with the Sumar Kurtis KK500G roadster, nor the 176.887logged by Amick in second-day qualifying had managed to hit France’s target, but it didn’t matter. The Indycars of the day were simply unsuited for Daytona’s high-banked layout, and never ran there again.

France then offered a $10,000 prize for anyone who could lap his Florida tri-oval in 50 seconds or less, posting an average speed of 180 mph or more. Among those answering the challenge was veteran race mechanic Bob Osiecki, who acquired and modified a Kurtis Indy roadster chassis originally built for Firestone’s tire testing program. With guidance from Georgia Tech aerospace professor John J. Harper, Osiecki ultimately installed a supercharged Chrysler Hemi engine, then added side wings and a dorsal fin aft of the cockpit. He called this final version Mad Dog IV and hired young drag racer Art Malone to drive it. In late August of 1961 Malone completed the mission, turning a lap at 181.561mph to better Bettenhausen’s Monza mark and collect France’s cash. He and Daytona would reign for nearly 11 years.

Nineteen-sixty-one was also the year that the rear-engined revolution began at Indianapolis as Jack Brabham and John Cooper entered an over-bored but underpowered Climax-engined F1 Cooper and pushed open the door to the future. The next year — the first that the track’s racing surface was entirely asphalt save for the commemorative Yard of Bricks at start/finish — Parnelli Jones broke Indy’s 150 mph barrier in J.C. Agajanian’s front-engined Watson-Offy roadster. By registering the Speedway’s first sub-one-minute lap in 59.710 seconds — an average speed of 150.729 mph — Jones initiated a nearly annual revision of Indy’s lap record. By 1971, it had reached 179.354 mph, as Peter Revson took Pole for that year’s 500 with a new track record four-lap average of 178.696 in the works McLaren M16-Offy.

A year later, following a broadening of USAC’s aerodynamic regulations, Indy’s bravest drivers began flirting with 200, although none managed to master the necessary magic. Fastest of all, when the clocks were officially ticking, was Bobby Unser, who wheeled All American Racers’ Olsonite Eagle to new one- and four-lap records of 196.678 and 195.940. Such year-on-year increases — more than 17 mph in both standards — had never been seen before nor ever would be again. Bobby’s love for his new car was evident: “It was so far ahead of the competition that it was incomprehensible.”

Although Unser’s Eagle led the opening 30 laps on race day, on the 31^st its distributor rotor broke and ruined his day. Teammate Jerry Grant nearly won the race in AAR’s purple “Mystery Eagle” team car, surging to the front in the late laps only to be derailed by a misplayed pit stop as Mark Donohue earned Roger Penske his first Indy win with the Sunoco McLaren M16B-Offy.

“We should have won the 1972 race,” acknowledged AAR boss Dan Gurney, “but we were pushing the engine envelope a lot, and we didn’t have a large test track or lots of dynamometers to take good care of the reliability side. That probably accounted for Bobby’s early retirement. When Jerry made his last scheduled pit stop we were leading, but a few laps later he came in for an unexpected tire change. We’d lost our radio about three laps into the race, so I had to guess why he was coming in.

“The only thing I could think to do was to add some fuel, so I waved Jerry into Bobby’s slot, but he gesticulated that he needed a change of front tire. It had gone out of balance and was shaking, and he didn’t have a strap to keep his head from falling over, so he was trying to drive with his head on his right shoulder. He thought he might not make it, so it was one of those nightmare situations. In the pandemonium I tried to tell the crew not to put fuel in after all, but they hooked up for about six seconds. We changed the wheel, by which time we’d lost over a lap, and Jerry came out behind Mark Donohue. He unlapped himself and finished second, but George Bignotti had witnessed the fuelling from Bobby’s rig, which was against the rules, and he protested to the officials. As a result, they stopped scoring our race at Lap 182 and Jerry ended up 12^th.”

Unser’s Indy pole that May had been the fifth in his wicked record-setting string of eight straight new-track-record pole position performances stretching back into the previous season. That streak would end at Milwaukee, in August, following a disputed qualifying session that led Gurney to withdraw Bobby’s entry in protest. Three weeks later at the Ontario Motor Speedway, Indy’s slightly wider Southern California clone, racing’s 200 mph barrier would be officially broken — but it wouldn’t be Unser doing it.

Milestone Maker

AAR’s quest for the 200 mph lap began with its new car, the 7200-series Eagle-Offenhauser, but there were, of course, other contributing factors. USAC’s new rules had finally permitted teams to mount true wings, as long as they were neither attached directly to the suspension nor adjustable while the car was moving. Unlike the winglets that had begun appearing in the late ’60s, these wings were huge. Their outer edges extended to the centerline of the tires and, in consort with the advance of technology into the realm of treadless — not quite yet “slick” — tires brought an unprecedented escalation of Indycar speeds.

“What we did with our ’72 Eagle,” declared Gurney, “was try to build a nice home for the Offy engine. That meant very good cooling. The realization that we were looking at big jumps in speed took us into new territory from the structural standpoint, so we also had to build it more robust to maintain a degree of safety. Roman Slobodynskyj, the head of our design group, was very good at packaging a car, which in the end dictates how safe and efficient it is. Roman was consistently very good in those areas. He was good across the board, but from the packaging standpoint, he was excellent.

“In those days, before they learned that it was better to work together,” Gurney continued, “the chassis people used to dictate to the engine people and the engine people would dictate to the chassis people. Guys like Dick Jones, Art Lamy and Art Early worked for Champion Spark Plugs (concentrating on the Offy because all the Fords used Autolites), and they were pretty emphatic about what was important. Cooling was high up their list, but aerodynamics were pretty far down. Eventually, you found out that you needed both, and both had to be done in the most efficient way. That’s where Roman’s packaging was good.”

The ’72 Eagle was Slobodynskyj’s first full design for AAR. “I was trying to make it as good as possible,” he explained. “I didn’t think I was going to reinvent the world. We were carrying 75 gallons of fuel, and in previous cars the tanks were spread out through the length of the car and were fairly tall. I thought that the fuel should be more centralized so that as you burned it off, you wouldn’t change the weight distribution. It also should be as low as possible so that you would get pretty decent airflow.

“The whole thing looked pretty clean aerodynamically, compared to some of the others. I also spent a lot of time on the geometry on the car, trying to fix the roll centers so they were as constant, relative to the Center of Gravity, as possible throughout the wheel travel. I wanted to get the polar moment down and also, by keeping everything nice and low, feed the wings as well as possible. I think we were probably ahead on aerodynamics and, of course, we had good engines. It was also the drivers. It was a total package.”

The experts at Indy agreed. AAR’s 7200-series Eagle was that year’s hands-down winner of the SAE’s Louis Schwitzer Award for excellence in design, and Unser’s crew chief Wayne Leary earned Mechanic of the Year honors. All the recognition may have been welcome, but in reality the new car was little more than another case of dedicated racers optimizing the prevailing regulations in pursuit of a competitive edge.

When Unser had taken the prototype out for its first shakedown run at Ontario on December 10, 1971, he clocked a lap at just over 190 mph! “The ’72 Eagle was absolutely a good car when It was designed,” he enthused, “and we did a bunch of development on that car, all of it gains, but the car was so good in the beginning that we just made little gains. Like wings. We became experts on wings, and during those days AAR was the absolute best! We had a lot of knowledge, and all of our development was good. Then all of a sudden, (engine builder) John Miller comes up with horsepower, and god help the rest of them. It wasn’t even a race then.”

Unser described taking Pole Position at Indy as “so easy to do it wasn’t even funny. By that time I had really perfected getting the car to handle the way I wanted it to. It was really good, and keeping the secrets was the biggest problem that I had.

“I had made a deal with Dan when we started, and we always agreed that anything I did during testing, he’d always get a good, honest answer out of me — or a good honest guess. I’d never slack off the throttle to hide something. I would never lie or cheat in testing. And that was with Goodyear, or with Gurney or with any owner that I ever drove for. But, whenever we’d go to the racetrack for race day — that would include practice, qualifying or the race — it’s Bobby’s deal. Not Jerry Grant, not whoever else Dan might have hired, it’s not for those guys. They get the same stuff I get; they have the right to do the same job I do, and god bless ’em they oughta go do it. I used to have big problems with Dan that way because he always thought it would be nice if I would take his other drivers — whoever they might be — and babysit them and help them along.

“Well, I’m the guy who’s trying to make a living here. I’m not trying to make a living for those guys. It wasn’t that I disliked them, but when it comes down to business, I’m a businessman. I’m hard, I know that, but I do it intentionally. I’m not there to help them out.”

Unser’s exploits were enabled by turbocharged, short-stroke Offenhauser four-cylinder power plants built by AAR engine master John Miller. Miller had commissioned Drake Engineering to produce grooved and lightened pistons to his design, then coupled them with special short connecting rods from Fred Carillo and added Leo Goosen-designed crankcases with two oil scavenge pumps instead of the usual one.

When everyone arrived at Ontario for the Labor Day weekend California 500, the plot, as they say, thickened, and history found itself looming on the horizon. To improve stability for that race, AAR had widened the Eagle’s track both front and rear, a tweak that would become standard equipment on all the ’73 Eagles. When Bobby abandoned first-round qualifying with engine troubles, however, the door swung open for his teammate.

“I didn’t blow the engine,” clarified Unser, “I blew the intake log off the engine. The engine didn’t break. John would put on the strongest, best hose clamps he could find to hold it on the injectors, but it had so much boost it would just blow it off! Of course, because I shut it down so quickly, everybody thought that the engine blew, but it didn’t. I ran the same engine the next day, and the only difference was that John went and got some really big heavy tie-wraps, and tie-wrapped that intake log to the injector manifold. Then it didn’t jump off, so I had my horsepower all the time.”

Teammate Grant, somehow, didn’t suffer the same malady, and took immediate advantage of the opportunity on offer.

“Bobby was going to be the one running for the pole and the 200 mph lap,” Grant admitted, “but he had no engines left. They had to go back to the shop (an hour away in Santa Ana), so they asked me, ‘Do you want to go for the 200?’ And I said, ‘Yes’ just like that. It was like asking an alcoholic if he wants a beer.

“Anyway, I get in the car and go on down to the line, and Miller’s sitting there and he says, ‘You’ve got more horsepower than you’ve ever felt before.’ As I’m moving up the line, he says, ‘Do you think you could stand a little more?’ Of course. Then he comes back and says, ‘You’ve got a lot of horsepower.’ I said ‘Good.’ Then we got up to where we were ready to go and Miller says, ‘We got a little more, do you want to have it all?’ Of course!

“So I went out and, knowing that I had this horsepower, I short-shifted — took off in first and got into second real quick, and as soon as I came up in second it broke loose and I went to third. First lap around was like I had a double-A Fueler! I took the green flag and there wasn’t a lap out of the four that I didn’t get sideways. I scraped the wall, white-walled the tires, and had to change my line. In those days you braked for the turns, not much, but you trail-braked and you had to be careful because you could upset the chassis and crash immediately. Each lap I went faster, and on the third lap I got quite a bit out of shape and when I came back around they held up 200-plus, so I backed down and came around the fourth lap and it was 199 something. The next day Bobby went out and went faster.”

Grant’s third lap registered at 201.414, making it racing’s first official lap of more than 200 mph, and his four-lap average of 199.600 put him on pole for Sunday’s 500-miler. “So,” Jerry concluded, “the two things that people will remember about me is either winning or not winning Indy, and the first 200 mph lap.”

“If you give him what I developed,” Unser complained, “all he has to do is push the throttle down and he goes fast. That’s how he got his 200 mph lap. Without me that just doesn’t happen, and it just wasn’t fair for Dan to give Jerry the opportunity to do that when I had a slight mechanical failure.”

Unser’s only solace came in second-day qualifying when he surpassed Grant’s new standard almost before the ink could dry, setting new one- and four-lap records of 201.965 and 201.374, respectively. Neither driver had any luck in the race, however. Incredibly, polesitter Grant’s engine blew up on the pace lap, while Unser dashed up from 23^rd on the grid to lead laps 45 through 55, but had to quit the chase after 73 laps when … his engine failed. The race was won by Roger McCluskey in Lindsey Hopkins’ American Marine McLaren M16A-Offy.

Sense and Sensibility

The rewriting of the record book was curtailed in 1973, however, after tragedy struck at Indianapolis and forced a major re-think. First, veteran driver Art Pollard was fatally injured when he lost control of Bob Fletcher’s Eagle-Offy on the first day of qualifications, then on the twice-delayed race day rising star Swede Savage crashed his Patrick Racing Eagle heavily and in the ensuing conflagration suffered grievous injuries that would claim his life five weeks later. Making matters even worse, a crewman with the Patrick team, Armando Teran, was struck and killed by a safety truck rushing down the pit lane against traffic toward the Savage crash scene.

In the wake of that “Fire and Rain 500,” it was the rulebook that was rewritten. USAC quickly trimmed back the wings, restricted turbocharger boost and reduced fuel tank capacity by nearly half, which achieved the desired result of restraining speeds. Thus would nearly five years pass before Tom Sneva cranked off Indy’s first official 200 mph lap, hitting 200.535 while qualifying Penske’s Norton Spirit McLaren M24-Cosworth on pole for the ’77 500.

With terminal financial woes having taken Ontario out of the picture, incremental increases over the next two decades pushed the lap record at Indianapolis ever higher, until 1996. Then, driving Fred Treadway’s Reynard 94i-Ford Cosworth, Arie Luyendyk established the single-lap standard of 237.498 mph that still stands today!

This continuing progression of speed at Indy was disrupted, however, by the wholesale rule changes enacted the following year with the full implementation of the Indy Racing League. Although speed had itself not been a bone of contention in the dispute between the track and the car owners, the resulting IRL cars were, by design, some 20 mph slower.

Because the rival Championship Auto Racing Teams series implemented no such restrictions of its own, in September of ’97, during Friday practice for the season-closing Marlboro 500 on the brand-new 2.0-mile, moderately banked California Speedway in Fontana, Mauricio Gugelmin became the first to crack 240. He told Associated Press reporter Mike Harris about it afterward: “I think nobody’s comfortable at these speeds. I’m not. I feel like we’re pushing the laws of physics.”

The next day Gugelmin duly took pole for the race with an even faster official qualifying lap at 240.942 mph in PacWest Racing’s Reynard 97I-Mercedes-Benz. On the same track three years later, Gil de Ferran upped that mark to 241.428 with Team Penske’s Reynard 2KI-Honda!

With those nearly incomprehensible four-miles-per-minute moments came the sobering realization that perhaps such speeds should be reined in lest disaster strike again. Further reductions of turbocharger boost, coupled with aerodynamic adjustments, helped keep the lid on, with the ultimate resolution coming in 2008 when CART and the IRL finally put an end to their divisive split with a merger that reunited them under the IRL’s existing spec-car philosophy.

Because every racer naturally wants each new car to go faster than the last, the lifeblood of thoroughbred auto racing through the years was always its ongoing technical innovation, its venturing into the unknown in search of something new and improved. Recently, however, that developmental “window” has narrowed somewhat as the focus of the sport’s rule makers has correctly turned toward containing speeds and mandating safer cars rather than encouraging the exploration of further frontiers.

So, while Indycar lap speeds beyond 200 mph may be common in today’s one-spec superspeedway racing, it’s unlikely we will ever see 250. Still, it’s easy to understand why so many cherish those days when the only laws that mattered were the Laws of Physics.

The post Quest for 200  appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Now in its 44th running, the name has been shortened to The Mitty, but it has grown to be one of the largest classic racing events on the east coast of the U.S.

The trip from New York to Georgia was a long one, but all that is forgotten when you enter the track and hear the unmuffled sounds of racing engines.

The word these days is inclusiveness. And there was plenty of that spread out over eight racing groups. Like the weather, if you don’t like a certain racing group, just wait a few minutes, and it changes, and I am sure you will find something to cheer on.

The featured marque this year was the Sports 2000. They may seem a bit cookie-cutter, but you start looking closely, and you see a big difference and many different iterations. Lolas, Shannons, Swifts, Tigas, and Carbirs by the score. John Webb created sports 2000 at Brands Hatch. He saw smaller and smaller fields in Group 6, 2-liter sports cars due to escalating prices to run them. Using a low-cost production-derived version of the Ford Pinto engine to power the new category, Sports 2000 was born. Multiple manufacturers got into the act and created numerous takes on the theme. So now we have a close, well-fought competition to watch.

Roger Cassin was in the middle of it all in his 1988 Swift DB2. When Roger signed up to run, there were about 25 cars; then it was 30 in the end, 52 cars were running. As a racer, Roger can see why the S2000 is so popular. They are wonderfully balanced and responsive machines. They are dependable and highly competitive. Power output is around 150 hp, so there is a lot of driver input to make a difference, but the time differential between first and last in a 52 car field is only 10 seconds, so those drivers were working hard and working well in concert.

But if you want more variety, you don’t have to go any further than the next race. A stand-out rare machine is Jim Freeman’s 1967 Matich SR3.

Frank Matich was an accomplished Australian racer in the 60s and 70s. In the late 60s, Matich started work on creating his own car with the help of Bob Britton. The result was the Matich SR3 powered by a 4.5-liter Oldsmobile engine. From there, Matich moved on to Formula 5000. Jim acquired the racer in 1988 and has been running it ever since. At 1670 lbs with 740 hp coming from its motor, it’s a fast, well-balanced beast.

But if that’s not to your taste, you always have Porsches. How about a 924 GTS Clubsport, or maybe a 356 Speedster, or a 911 S or RS, plenty to choose from.

Maybe another air-cooled rear-engined machine, this time from America.Not your taste?

How about something rare and British? Maybe 1 of 44 Chevron B8s built. The Chevron was built in Bolton in Lancashire. The company was founded by Manchester-born Derek Bennett, a talented engineer and successful racing driver in the Clubman’s Formula category.

A 2 liter 230 hp M10 BMW motor powers the B8, one of the prettiest Sports-racers there is. The driver said it sticks like #!T?%& ad it goes like #!T?%&. In less technical terms, it is well balanced, it holds the road, and is extremely quick. Its driver proved that many times during the weekend.

Then there is a true unicorn that has been turning laps at Road Atlanta for many years at the hands of various Woerheide family members.

The 1977 Lola T332C HU55 Schkee. The Schkee is a re-bodied Formula 5000. A low-slung center seat machine that was part of the relaunch of the Can-Am series in 1977. It is a wild standout amongst the other race cars.

Then you have a competitor like David Porter, who doesn’t like sitting around, so he brings a couple of cars to Road Atlanta.

The first was a 2007 Peugeot 908 Hdi FAP, and the second was a 1973 Ford Escort RS1600. He loved running both balls to the wall; he just had to remember one had less horsepower and a lot less brakes. Also, the diesel-powered Peugeot has 880 ft-lbs of torque 750 hp in a 1900 lbs car, and the Escort, if lucky, has 200 ft-lbs of torque 230 hp in a 1900 lbs car. That being said, the Escort is very much a rocket ship, but you do have to stay in the power band to be competitive, and it is a real adventure to slow it down. The Peugeot is all about commitment and intestinal fortitude. The G-forces and torque are immense; you shift gears as quickly as you can grab the paddles. At the same time, it can be very forgiving as you don’t always have to worry about what gear you are in as all that torque never lets you bog down, but with the Escort with its manual shift, you have to be on top of the gearbox at all times.

The Escort makes a lovely sound, whereas all you hear in the Peugeot is the gearbox. Two very different machines, but two great drives handled masterfully. Another northerner planning to run two cars at the Mitty was Mitch Eitel. Unfortunately, his 1975 Dino 308 GT 4 came up with a cracked rotor and was out of action, but he made do with his 1975 Chevron B31. Mitch’s first experience at Road Atlanta was in a Lola B212, a great car, but not in the same league as the Chevron. The Chevron is a brilliantly comfortable car to drive.

Another Derek Bennet design, the B31, was the evolution of the B26. The B31 is fitted with a 2-litre Hart 420R straight-four engine producing 290 hp.

Mitch found the track very challenging as well as intimidating. Mitch remembers from his first time there the speech Dorsey Schroeder made at the driver’s meeting. “You’re at Road Atlanta; this is a he-man track.” Mitch agrees with that; you do a lot of work getting around the course, and there is a lot to learn to pick up valuable seconds in different places. Mitch found the B31 very well suited for the track, but he hasn’t found a track that it is not suited to. The car is very quick but feels safe, the architecture of the car is very comfortable and confidence-inspiring. This was very obvious as Mitch was taking on cars with more displacement and horsepower. It was the perfect match between man, car, and track.

Still not satisfied? Maybe what you need is some ground-pounding, All American Days of Thunder action. Group 8 brings it with a vengeance.

Over 20 big nasty NASCAR machines bellowed and snorted around the road course, with ex-pro Joe Nemechek leading the pack and showing the others how it’s done. All the cars you cheered on in the past, plus a nod to the big screen with a Talladega Nights liveried 2006 Chevrolet Monte Carlo driven by Ryan Tomson.

Like the James Thurber character the race was named after, the competitors are living out their daydreams, racing the cars of the past, doing battle with other drivers and having the time of their lives, and giving the spectators daydreams of their own.

The post The Mitty—Something For Everyone appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

What began as a study of Asian automobile advertising of the late 1950s has unearthed a rare tale of a unique racecar that resided in Hong Kong, Singapore and Selangor between 1955 and 1971. Adestne quisquam de Maranello? You might want to sit down for this one.

The post Far East Ferrari Mondial appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Five years after Whitney Straight’s historic trip to South Africa to take part in the First South African Grand Prix, motor racing had become an established sport in the country and during the European winters British and Continental drivers escaped the cold to take part in the ‘summer series’ down south. This ensured that expensive racing cars could be used to generate an income instead of being stored on blocks during a time that the wintry European season was closed.

For 1939, the South African Grand Prix was to be a ‘proper’ grand prix for voiturettes of 1.5 liters and for the first time run as a scratch race, no more run on the antiquated handicap system with fields made up of outdated machinery, specials and the modern cars of the visiting European drivers. With FIA approval and in line with the European formula, a top class field including the ‘works’ Maserati team, independent Maserati pilotes and a group of competent English amateurs in ERAs was assembled.

The post The Adventures of Louis Gerard appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Alfa Romeo has a long history in racing that dates back to 1910 and extends to Formula One today. Throughout its 112-year history, many Alfa Romeo drivers have made an indelible mark in the sport. In celebration of International Women’s Day, Alfa Romeo has taken a look back at the female race drivers that helped shape the brand. While these women competed in different eras and came from different countries, they all shared a pioneering spirit and were trailblazers in a male-dominated sport.

The post Trailblazers—The Women of Alfa Romeo Racing appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

In 1965, I enjoyed a working holiday in London. On Friday 18 June that year I took the cheapest tour I could find to the Le Mans 24 Hours, via a rickety old plane and a bus.  It proved to be one of the most remarkable races in the event’s storied history.

This was the second year of the “Ford v. Ferrari” confrontation.  In 1964 Ford’s three GT40 prototypes, which were run by the British JWA team, expired early in the race, due to gearbox issues in two of them and a fire in the third, resulting in a resounding Ferrari 1-2-3 win. At year end the American Carroll Shelby, who had co-driven the winning Aston Martin at Le Mans in 1959, was contracted to run Ford’s sports car campaign. (Note: The recent Hollywood epic shows Ford making only one unsuccessful tilt at Le Mans whereas they failed in both 1964 and 1965.  It also depicts Ken Miles in California listening to the radio report of the 1965 event, whereas he drove in the race!)

The post “Ford vs. Ferrari” the Sequel — Le Mans 1965 appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Brausch Niemann had a brief but successful career in motor sport and took part in two world championship Grands Prix, but he is best remembered for his exploits with a humble Lotus 7 during the early 1960s.

Some time ago, our esteemed Editor (Casey Annis) reminded us about the doghouse amenities at motor racing circuits and the informal approach of drivers during those great days.

The post “Lotus Man” – The Brausch Niemann Story appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

America’s premier sports car endurance race started at an abandoned WWII Army Air Corps base in Florida. “The 12-Hours of Sebring” is one of the most important racing events in the U.S. Inaugurated in 1952, Sebring took its place among the ’50s-era international endurance races on which the World Manufacturers’ Championship was then based, these being the Mexican Road Race, Le Mans, the Targa Florio, the Mille Miglia and the Tourist Trophy. Here’s how it all began:

The person behind Sebring was one Alec Ulmann. Born in Russia in 1903, Ulmann was educated in Switzerland and then in the U.S. where, in 1925, he graduated from the Massachusetts’s Institute of Technology in aeronautical engineering. Alec was active in sports car racing during the 1930s as an official. The Sports Car Club of America was founded in February, 1944, and Ulmann joined that July. Alec lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, with his aviation products business based in New York City. In 1948, he was appointed SCCA “Activities Chairman” and he officiated at a number of events in the area. He was the chief steward at the 1948 Watkins Glen road race, the first U.S. sports car road race after WWII.

The post Sebring, The Beginnings appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Click here to read “Chargers Part 1—World Rallying 1957–1965

The CSI struck again in 1965, this time putting out a much more comprehensive 17 pages of regulations called Appendix J to better govern the sport. And that was the year a works Lancia team, later to become a mighty force in the sport, first competed.

The team was put together by a young Italian political science graduate named Cesare Fiorio, son of Lancia’s former PR boss, before the company went broke and was bought by Fiat for a token million lire or £600 at the time. After some success in local rallies, the team became a semi-works outfit in 1965 and a year later began a winning spree that would eventually see Lancia become one of the most successful rally squads of all time. Leo Cella was the first to win a major event for Lancia – the 1966 San Remo – driving the pretty little 1.2-litre Fulvia. A year later, the slightly beefed up 1.3 won the Spanish Rally with tall Swede Ove Andersson at the wheel, then the Tour de Corse, driven by future world champion Sandro Munari.

Ford of Britain rallied their 1498-cc Cortina GT in the early ’60s. Four years into the decade they went the whole hog and sent a team of six cars to the 1964 East African Safari, some to be driven by Kenyans. Local men Peter Hughes and Billy Young won the wild 3,000-mile race through the billowing red dust in one of them and four Cortina GTs finished to give Ford the team prize.

But it was the Mark 1 Lotus Cortina that really made Ford’s name in rallying and laid the foundations for more success along the way. Vic Elford proved the car was a potential winner with its leaf spring rear end instead of coils, when he led the 1965 Coupe des Alpes right through to the final stage where his distributor broke and that let Trautmann/Bouchet through in their private Lancia Flavia Zagato.

After organizer hanky-panky that cost Elford and his works Lotus Cortina victory in the San Remo Rally – the Italians said the homologation form wasn’t filled out properly – the car came good in 1966 with a win for Roger Clark in the Welsh, a second place for Elford in the Tulip and victories for Bengt Söderstrom in the Acropolis, Geneva, RAC and 1967 Swedish.

While all this was going on, Jean Redelé had a bright idea in his workshop up in Dieppe, France. It was to build his own glass fibre body for a Renault 4CV floorpan, powered by a Mignotet-tuned 998-cc Dauphine rear-mounted engine. He called his sexy little coupé the Alpine in honor of his own GT class win in the 1954 Coupe des Alpes. The first of these ultra-lights was the 106 and it won the 1960 Monte Carlo Rally’s small GT class. After that, Redelé moved on to the 1470-cc Renault R16 unit for the A110 and that put out 135 hp. It took time, but eventually Jean Vinatier/Marcel Callewaert won the new car’s first international rally in Czechoslovakia in 1968, quickly followed by its namesake rally, the year’s Coupe des Alpes, driven by Vinatier paired with Jean-Francois Jacob, a victory they repeated in 1969. Both Jean-Claude Andruet and Jean Vinatier won the French National Rally Championship in the car in 1968 and 1969 respectively. Redelé’s idea was beginning to work.

For a while, Renault themselves decided to compete. Privateers had done well with their cars, but this time the Regie had Amedée Gordini produce a hot version of their R8, first as an 1100-cc with cross flow cylinder head, then a 1300-cc with a four speed gearbox. The car was quick and comparatively cheap, a combination that appealed to upcoming stars like Jean-Luc Therier and Markku Alén who rallied it as privateers in their homelands. But it was Vinatier who set the R8 on the road to a brief but potent run of success when he and Roger Masson won the 1964 Tour de Corse in the car. The R8 kind of made the Corsican its own for a while, winning the 1965 and 1966 events driven by Orsini/Canonici and Piot/Jacob. And it also won the San Remo, Portugal and Polish rallies, but at the end of 1968 Renault decided that was it and withdrew from the sport, allowing the Alpines to become their standard bearers. That turned out to be a wise decision.

Lancia really got into its stride with the Fulvia 1.6 HF Coupé, now putting out 120 hp from its 1598-cc engine, a pair of 42-mm Solex carburetors and larger valves through a five-speed gearbox. Two weeks after the car was unveiled, Harry Kallstrom won the 1969 Rally of Spain in it and would win the year’s RAC Rally to give him the points he needed to become the 1969 European Rally Champion. But life was never easy for the little Lancia as the 2.2/2.5-liter Porsche 911 S won the 1970 Monte Carlo, Swedish and Austrian Alpine. The Fulvia had to sweat, but Simo Lampinen pushed it for all he was worth to win the 1970 Portugal and Kallstrom snatched another brilliant RAC win from a trio of Opel Kadett Rallys and Gérard Larrousse’s Porsche 911 S. Not bad for an underpowered little coupé about to be phased out!

The Italian firm was bringing along a young man who was to become synonymous with Lancia’s incredible exploits in the years to come. His name was Sandro Munari. A serious minded youngster of few words, Munari went into voluntary seclusion after he crashed a works Fulvia on the 1967 San Remo Rally and refused to talk to his boss, Cesare Fiorio, about it. So the Lancia team manager went from Turin all the way over to Munari’s home at Cavarzere near Venice and spent two whole days trying to convince his upcoming star to snap out of it and return to the team. Which he did, later to become a champion of champions and the man who did all the development driving for the world’s first purpose built rally car, the Lancia Stratos.

It was thanks to Munari that Lancia, now part of the Fiat empire, were allocated the funds to develop the Stratos. Because the no-nonsense young Italian won the Monte Carlo, the world’s most prestigious rally, in a Fulvia in 1972 and helped the Turin car maker win the year’s International Championship for Makes, effectively the world championship. A year later, Sandro built up a hefty points score in the car to become the 1973 European champion.

Meanwhile, Fiat rallied the attractive, Aurelio Lampredi-designed 124 Sport Spider powered by a twin overhead camshaft, 8-valve 1608-cc engine that rustled up 150 hp and shocked the establishment for a bit, when Swedish tire dealer Hakan Lindberg beat all-comers to set the fastest time in it on the Burzet stage of the 1971 Monte Carlo Rally. He was to do better than that a year later, when he won the Acropolis Rally and then the Austrian Alpine in the 124, with victory in the Polish Rally by Raffaele Pinto in the Fiat sandwiched in between.

That was about the time Alpine A110 really came into its own after being given a much modified Renault R16 rear-mounted 1596-cc engine that pushed out 155 hp. After a couple of failures on the 1970 Monte Carlo, Jean-Luc Therier rattled off two quick victories in the car, its glass fibre body making it just about the sport’s lightest at a mere 680 kg – against the Fiat’s 1020 kg, for instance – in the San Remo and the Acropolis. But it was Jean-Claude Andruet who was crowned champion of Europe for his exploits in it. Alpine-Renault engaged Ove Andersson for 1971 and he made Jean Ridelé’s dream come true with an outstanding win in the year’s Monte Carlo, then won the San Remo, Austrian Alpine and the Acropolis with it before Jean-Pierre Nicolas took the Geneva and Portugal and Bernard Darniche the Coupe des Alpes. All that success earned the little car the International Championship for Makes. The man from Dieppe had climbed rallying’s Everest.

Peugeot continued their African crusade, which really showcased their cars as tough, go anywhere and reliable. The standard bearer this time was the 4-cylinder, 1995-cc 504, although it didn’t have an easy life to begin with as broken front struts and dicey camshafts caused a succession of retirements. But the bodyshell was strengthened, a new suspension was developed and what was once a 130 hp engine was putting out 170 hp by 1974, when Timo Makinen/Henry Liddon gave it its first win on the Bandama Rally in Ivory Coast. Ove Andersson/Arne Hertz followed that with victory in the year’s Safari and Bernard Consten/Jean Flocon the 1975 Bandama before Nicolas/Lefevre won the Moroccan in the car. Not, perhaps, the kind of success Peugeot had in mind, that was to come later, but it was impressive just the same.

The stylish Datsun 240Z was apparently no picnic to drive, more a modern Japanese Austin-Healey 3000 with a mighty 6-cylinder, 2397-cc engine hammering out 220 hp. In fact Shekhar Mehta, the man who won the 1975 Safari in it with Lofty Drews, once described the 240Z as an accident waiting to happen and he ought to know.

Although Datsun targeted the Monte Carlo and Safari, they only pulled off 50% of their objective as the best it could do in the snow and ice of the 1971 Monte was third, driven by Rauno Aaltonen/Jean Todt. Edgar Herrmann/Hans Schuller did win the ’71 Safari with it and Tony Fall/Mike Wood the Welsh before the bigger engine 260Z was brought in, but that proved to be a major disappointment.

The Ford Escort RS1600 actually wasn’t. That was the cubic capacity of the standard engine, but the rally car’s 16-valve unit was really a 1798-cc and could generate 210 hp. All that power went out through a ZF gearbox and Atlas rear axle, which Hannu Mikkola used brilliantly to win the 1972 Safari. And Timo Makinen did the same to devastating effect by winning three consecutive RAC rallies from 1972-74, the 1000 Lakes in 1972 and 1973, the ’73 New Zealand.

It only took 16 years, but the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile eventually launched its World Rally Championship for Makes in 1973 and a rather unlikely contender became the first to win it: the first manufacturers’ world champion was the Alpine-Renault A110, still a light weight at 730-kg, powered by a 4-cylinder in line 1596 cc rear mounted Renault engine that pushed out 155 hp. By this time, Renault had taken a majority shareholding in the company with founder Jean Redelé retaining the presidency. The rest of the rally world knew something was up when the little blue cars took five out of the first six places in the year’s Monte Carlo, the win going to Jean-Claude Andruet. Then Jean-Luc Therier won the Portugal Rally for them, Bernard Darniche the Moroccan, Therier the Acropolis and San Remo and Jean-Pierre Nicolas the Corsican on their way to that first historic world title. Alpine-Renault’s second successful assault on Everest.

Japanese manufacturers were starting to home in on rallying now that the sport had its own world championship. Toyota began with the 1588 cc Celica TA22 in 1972 but with little success, although Pat Moss did win the RAC Rally’s ladies cup with it. That was followed by the 150 hp Carolla TE20, in which Hannu Mikkola won the 1000 Lakes. Then Mitsubishi got in on the act in 1973 with their Colt Lancer GSR 1600, a 1596 cc 165 hp car that Joginder Singh parlayed into a Safari victory in 1974 and did the same again in the 1976 East Africa, once again underlining the importance of local drivers to victory in the punishing Kenya marathon. That was followed by Scottish farmer Andrew Cowan’s win in the 1977 Ivory Coast Rally, a taste of what was to come from a Cowan-Mitsubishi partnership.

Back in 1970, Cesare Fiorio was strolling around the Turin Motor Show on press day, when a really far out design exercise by Nuccio Bertone caught his eye. The Lancia rally boss invited Bertone to bring his impossibly low-slung wedge to the car maker’s Turin factory: it was so low the body stylist simply drove his creation under the front gate barrier, opened the windscreen and stepped out. The car was called the Stratos, a name it retained after Bertone, Fiorio and Gian Paolo Dallara had converted it to the world’s first purpose-built rally car, energised by a V6 Ferrari Dino 246 engine, a package that eventually put out 270 hp. Sandro Munari did most of the development driving of the angry, stubby Stratos. And what a success it became, for the car won Lancia the 1974, 1975 and 1976 World Rally Championships for Manufacturers, Munari became world champion driver by winning the 1977 FIA Cup.

And on its way to all that glory, the exciting little car won 19 world championship rallies, including five Monte Carlos between 1975 and 1980: Munari won a record three Montes in succession, bringing his career total of victories in the Monegasque event to four. This complete dominance of world rallying confirmed the Stratos as a brilliant all-rounder, just as at home on asphalt and loose surfaces as it was in the wet and dry. Many thought the car still had a lot of winning left in it when it was politically elbowed to one side in 1977, by the undistinguished-looking, Lampredi designed Fiat 131 Abarth. But the Stratos was a rally special with a mere 500 built for homologation purposes, while Fiat planned to sell hundreds of thousands of 131s and needed the glamorous exposure world championship rally victories would bring to help them do just that.

The third Ford Escort was certainly not a purpose built rally car, but it won like one. The RS1800 Mk2 had a similar specification to its RS 1600 predecessor – 16-valves, 4-cylinder inline 270 hp engine, McPherson struts, 5-speed ZF gearbox – but its suspension moved more, which made it excel over a much wider range of rallies and surfaces. That’s why it won the 1979 World Rally Championship for Manufacturers, the first ever drivers’ world title for Bjorn Waldegard and the 1981 World Rally Championship for Drivers for Ari Vatanen, as well as 17 world championship rallies, including no fewer than six RAC Rallies of Great Britain.

Opel flirted with rallying through its dealer teams in the ’70s. First car to pull off a world championship win was the Ascona A in the Acropolis driven by the great Walter Röhrl, but little else came of it. The Kadett GT/E was no star car, either. Talented drivers like Röhrl, Anders Kullang and Achim Warmbold struggled to push the GT/E up the leaderboard in some of the world’s top rallies between 1975 and 1978, but the best placing came from Bror Danielson, who persuaded the Opel to pull its finger out and take second in the Swedish. But Röhrl did manage to win the Ypres Rally, a European Championship counter, in the car.

Towards the end of the ’70s-early ’80s there was a rash of relatively unsuccessful cars, like the 225-hp Saab 99 EMS and Turbo, which managed victories in the 1977 and 1979 Swedish Rally driven by Stig Blomqvist and little else; the Triumph TR7, which could only win the rather obscure Boucles de Spa in the hands of Tony Pond; and the Toyota Celica 2000GT RA20, which was unable to win anything.

But the altar on which the Lancia Stratos had been prematurely sacrificed did well. The boxy Fiat 131 Abarth, jazzed up to look more exciting in series of different sponsors’ liveries like the distinctive green and white of Alitalia, won a massive 20 world championship rallies between 1976 and 1981, not to mention the 1977, 1978 and 1980 World Rally Championship for Manufacturers plus the drivers’ world title for the incredibly talented and versatile Walter Röhrl. Its first coming, in 1975, was with a 270 hp V6 engine, but by the time the car made its world championship debut in the 1976 1000 Lakes of Finland, which it won with Markku Alen at the helm, that had been replaced by a 4-cylinder, 1995-cc, 16-valve unit from the Lancia Beta, with 230 hp being deftly distributed through a five speed gearbox. And the car could be quickly switched from a loose special stage set-up to asphalt due to its McPherson struts all round and adjustable anti-roll bars. The Fiat’s driving talent turned in astounding performances, with Markku Alen winning six WRC events in it – the Portugal and 1000 Lakes three times each – another six fell to Röhrl including the 1980 Monte Carlo and Argentinean; and the lovely Michele Mouton the 1978 Tour de France.

By the early ’80s, rally cars were changing again. Four-wheel drive was waiting in the wings and the sport was about to make way for the Group B killers that reputedly put out way over 500 hp. The manufacturer swings and roundabouts saw Lancia still bubbling away at the top, but with Peugeot breathing down its collective neck to eventually defeat the Italian champions – briefly. Toyota, Mitsubishi and Subaru overtook them all for a while to become world championships and the new millennium was graced by almost a decade of consecutive world title wins by Sébastien Loeb, an Alsatian electrician turned rally prodigy, in the works Citroëns.

And the beat goes on…

The post Chargers, Part 2—World Rallying 1965–1980s appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

A single-seater Brabham arrives in Singapore for the 1969 Singapore Grand Prix. On the nosecone reads “Costin Brabham”, not the customary Repco Brabham badge seen on other Brabham single-seaters. Many would have already heard of the name Costin, some would even have known the name from Mar-cos, the more learned might even have suspected some involvement from Cos-Worth. Only the owner and his crew had an inkling of this car’s history and now you are going to be privy to that too.

COS-WORTH

As fate would have it, the story of Cosworth has strong links with a garage in Hornsey owned by a genius by the name of Colin Chapman. The infectious enthusiasm that existed within Chapman’s garage, with its homemade kit racing cars called Lotus, was the crucible that produced many chance encounters that went on to shape motor sports in the 1960s and ’70s.

The post Costin’s Mule appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Three things changed all that. The Second World War, which left behind a much more sophisticated road system; post-war production of better, more advanced cars; and the Scandinavians’ invention of special stages, where the name of the game was speed.

Wham! The whole thing took off to become the mind-blowing spectator sport it is today with a world TV audience of around 820 million in 190 countries.

OK, it wasn’t quite that fast or comprehensive, but by the late ’50s the pedal was on its way down to the metal.

Rallying became official in 1957, when the Commission Sportive Internationale of the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile, motor sport’s governing body, issued a pathetic four pages of regulations by which the sport was to be run. They were pretty restrictive. Only the components with which the cars left the factory could be tuned, although competitors were at least allowed to select their own dampers, batteries, brake linings, tires and lights. And bigger fuel tanks, different drive ratios, carburetors and wheels could be fitted.

Never ones to let an opportunity slip through their fingers, the car manufacturers cottoned on to the sport and set up their own rally operations. They soon found ways of sidestepping the CSI’s modest four pages to make their cars go faster. Then they formed their own works teams, with Saab, Volvo, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Citroën, BMC and Peugeot leading the charge to victory and product promotion on the roads of Europe. Meanwhile, privateers represented the Italians, notably with victory in the 1954 Monte Carlo Rally by colorful Grand Prix racer Louis Chiron in a 2500-cc Lancia Aurelia GT, and Gigi Villoresi in the 1958 Acropolis, in Greece, driving a similar car.

In 1950, Saab put together a pioneering factory team of their new 2-cylinder, 2-stroke 764-cc Saab 92, a car that made few concessions to the sport, with its steering column gear change, three speed ‘box and normal production instrumentation. The 92 put out a meagre 28 hp through its front wheels and had an odd flywheel system that meant drivers could change down without using the clutch, so you can just imagine how quickly left foot braking became all the rage. Three weeks after this quirky little car went on sale, the company’s test driver Rolf Mellde won the Swedish Winter Rally with it: Saab had given notice that it was to become a real force in ’50s and ’60s rallying.

The car was followed, logically enough, by the 93, a revamped 92 but with a 3-cylinder inline power unit that generated 33 hp, in which a major new talent named Erik Carlsson won the 1957 1000 Lakes Rally in Finland, the 1959 Swedish and Deutschland rallies. He was on the verge of becoming a superstar.

Don’t laugh, but even the Volkswagen Beetle enjoyed its share of glory in the early days. It won the East African Safari not once but three times. OK, so it was at a time when rally cars were still unsophisticated, to say the least, but Vic Preston Sr/D.P. Marwaha won the very first Safari – held in 1954 to mark the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II – Holmann/Burton the 1957 and Fjastad/Schmider the 1962, all in 1200-cc Beetles.

Porsche began a massively successful rally campaign in 1952 with their 356, which later grew into the Carrera. The 356 started out inoffensively enough powered by an 1100-cc Volkswagen Beetle engine, which Porsche breathed on so that it churned out up to 40 hp – 15 hp more than the VW – and by 1953 it was using disc brakes. The German firm breathed even harder on the unit as the years slipped by, so the 356 became the 4-cam, 2000-cc Carrera that produced upwards of 130 hp.

In the nine years from 1952, Porsches won the staggeringly harsh Liège-Rome-Liège rally-cum-road-race four times and five Rallies to the Midnight Sun in Sweden, not to mention taking Helmuth Polensky to the first ever European Rally Championship in 1953 and Hans-Joachim Walter to the 1961 title.

In the late ’50s, Volvo, Sweden’s other car maker, decided to try its luck at rallying with the simple yet sturdy 1410-cc PV 444, even though it had an unsuitable three speed gearbox.

That did not stop Ture Janson and Gunnar Andersson winning the country’s 1957 and 1958 Midnight Sun rallies in it before the car was replaced by the four-speed, 1584-cc PV 544, which was a different story altogether. Andersson, who later became head of Volvo’s rally department, won the 1960 1000 Lakes and Gran Premio of Argentina city-to-city race in it before his protégé Tom Trana reeled off a series of victories in the 544 that really put the company on the map. It started with Trana’s win in the mud, ice, snow and fog of the 1963 RAC Rally of Great Britain, followed a year later by victories in the 1964 Acropolis, the RAC again and the 1965 Swedish. The P544 even won the Safari, aka the Kenya Grand Prix, this time in the hands of a politically correct local driver, Joginder Singh.

The Kenyans knew their country better than visiting Europeans and had hoards of local ‘mafia’ to help them if they got into trouble, so many of the country’s drivers were recruited by the works teams to campaign their cars in this decidedly non-European marathon.

Gunnar Anderson became a double European champion by winning the title in a P544 in 1958 and 1963, with the 1964 going to Trana.

Another of rallying’s pioneers was Mercedes-Benz, in whose Rudolf Uhlenhaut- designed 300SL Gullwing Werner Engel won the 1955 European Rally Championship and Olivier Gendebien the Liège-Rome-Liège. In 1956, Walter Schock became the European champion and Willy Mairesse won the Liège-Rome-Liège, after which Mercedes took one of its occasional breaks from the sport before returning in 1960 with the muscular 220SE under the direction of 1952 Carrera Panamericana winner, Karl Kling. The car was not exactly light and nimble, but it was strong, reliable and powered by a lively fuel-injected 6-cylinder engine. Surprisingly, Schock won the 1960 Monte Carlo and Acropolis rallies in the unlikely looking 220SE before Rauno Aaltonen took the following year’s 1000 Lakes.

Then, Eugen Böhringer stepped into the picture and he drove the 220SE to an Acropolis win in 1962 and then the 300SE victory in the 1963 event. The German star turned in amazing performances in the fast and furious Liège-Sofia-Liège, which he won in 1962 and 1963, the first in the 220SE and the second in a 230SL. The team also had a remarkable run of success in the 2,800-mile Gran Premio of Argentina: Walter Schock and the beautiful blond Baroness Ewy Rosqvist of Sweden won the 5,000 km haul over the Andes and back in the 220SE in 1961 and 1962 respectively, then Böhringer pulled off another two victories in 300SEs in the daunting South American races in 1963 and 1964.

You’d hardly think a big, floppy Citroën DS19 like the one that ferried President Charles De Gaulle around á la “Day of the Jackal” would make an ideal rally car, and it almost didn’t. Its first effort was a disaster. Citroën backed six private entrants driving the cars in the 1956 Monte Carlo Rally, but only the Pierre Courtes/André Court-Payon DS finished, and that was in a lowly seventh place, so the company temporarily abandoned the sport to lick its wounds. Another privateer had to save its bacon, but this time in the simpler ID: Paul Coltelloni and his co-drivers friends Pierre Alexandre and Claude Desrosier won the 1959 Monte in a borrowed car and dragged a wary Citroën back into the rallying.

It turned out to be a highly successful comeback for Citroën, because first the ID and then the DS won some of the most prestigious rallies of the ’60s and ’70s, like the 1959, 1963 and 1966 Monte Carlos, the 1962 Liège-Sofia-Liège, 1000 Lakes, as well as providing Coltelloni with the ’59 European Rally Championship.

The phenomenon of the early ’60s, though, was the pairing of Erik Carlsson with the Saab 96, still powered by a tiny two-stroke 3-cylinder in line 850-cc engine, but now with a 95-hp punch. This giant of a man in every sense of the word – way over six feet tall, incredibly courageous, resolute, a great driving talent and nice with it – took his hot, buzzbox of a car on a rampaged through rallying from 1960, leaving the shattered dreams of many far bigger, wealthier car manufacturers in his wake.

He won Britain’s notoriously slippery RAC Rally three times in succession from 1960-1963, the 1961 Acropolis, 1962 and 1963 Monte Carlos, Italy’s San Remo in 1964. He came close to sainthood by almost winning the ’64 East African Safari in the little car, leading the 3,100-mile event for much of the way only to come second, as he also did on the Liège-Sofia-Liège.

Erik was known as “Carlsson på tacket” or “On-the-Roof Carlsson”, because he rolled his car in rallies when it suited him. That’s how he and co-driver Gunnar Palm got the little white two-stroke out of a pool of mud on the ‘64 East African Safari – they simply rolled it out onto firmer ground. Journalists didn’t believe the tale when news of it reached the Safari press room, so at the end-of-rally prize giving Carlsson and Palm invited everyone to slip outside for a few minutes and watch them roll the car over and over again. When Ford tried to do the same thing, they ended up with a severely damaged Cortina GT!

Peugeot got in on the act in the early ’60s, initially with the plain Jane 404 designed by Pininfarina. The modified 4-cylinder, 1618-cc family sedan could not compete with its more nimble brethren in Europe, so the company turned to the rugged East African Safari in pursuit of some kind of glory. It was a sage decision because the car won its class, coaxed along by local crew Zbigniew ‘Nick’ Nowicki and Paddy Cliff, who brought the 404 home second overall a year later, when Peugeot won the team award. The rains came early in 1963, turning the Kenyan dust into a glutinous ocean of red mud and it continued to pour mercilessly throughout the event. Of the 84 starters a mere seven cars finished – the organizers called them the Unsinkable Seven – as the gooey stuff literally brought the other 77 cars to a halt with clogged wheel arches, among them the entire Ford Cortina team. Nowicki/Cliff won in their Peugeot 404 with only 185 penalty points against second placed Peter Hughes/Billy Young in a Ford Anglia with a weighty 264.

Peugeot almost did it again on the 1965 Safari; Ian Jaffray and John Bathurst took their 404 to second place. After that, the French manufacturer completely dominated the Safari from 1966 – 1968, Bert Shankland/Chris Rothwell winning the first two and Nowicki/Cliff the 1968.

The Austin-Healey 3000 was a crude, muscular, fuel-guzzling beast powered by BMC’s 2.9-liter C series engine that put out 210 hp, an eye-watering amount of power when it was introduced in 1959. It was so much of a handful that Tony Ambrose, Rauno Aaltonen’s co-driver, once described it as the last agricultural implement to win a major rally. It had little cornering savvy, but it went like a rocket on a straight road. BMC tried to win the Monte Carlo Rally with it several times, but it was such a handful through the event’s icy, snowy twists and turns that it never made the top 10, let alone victory. Even the great Timo Makinen could only bully it into 13^th place on the 1963 Monte, although he did win the GT class.

If it had one, the brutishly beautiful big Healey’s natural home was on long, fraught events like the Liège-Rome-Liège. It won the 1960 driven by the late, exceptionally talented Pat Moss and Anne Wisdom, as well as the 1964 Liège-Sofia-Liège with Aaltonen and Ambrose. The Morley twins, Don and Erle, almost made the Coupe des Alpes their own in the big Healey in 1961 and 1962. It was only a broken limited slip diff that stopped them winning the rally for the third time in a row, which would have automatically given them their very own gold cup.

Although it had plenty of opportunities, the big Healey never won its home event, the RAC Rally. It did well with the Morleys, who muscled it into third in 1960, Pat Moss and Anne Wisdom deftly took it to second a year later and Makinen with co-driver Paul Easter came second in 1964 and 1965. But the big blaring beast was on its way out and eventually had to make way for the clutch of more technically advanced front-wheel drive cars that were elbowing it to one side in the early ’60s.

Top of that list has to be the BMC Mini, launched in 1959. In no time at all, a batch of these little front-wheel drive, transverse engine 850-cc beasties with a gearbox in the sump were sent to the company’s competitions department at Abingdon. They looked like a bad joke as the tiny tin boxes rubbed door panels in the BMC competitions department with the big, butch Austin-Healey 3000s. At first, lady drivers were fobbed off with Minis – the car’s potential was little understood – until Nancy Mitchell came second in the 1959 Rally of Portugal ladies’ cup in one. But there was a lot of development work to do before the little monster could and did make the rest of the world sit up and take notice.

Things started looking good when Pat Moss won the Ladies’ Cup in the 1962 Monte Carlo Rally driving a 997-cc Mini Cooper with twin SU carburettors. Meanwhile, BMC’s new motor sport boss Stuart Turner put two and two together and got Finns. So he put Rauno Aaltonen in a Mini and the original Flying Finn was running second in the ’62 Monte to eventual winner Erik Carlsson’s Saab 96, until Aaltonen flipped it in the closing stages and the Mini caught fire.

But the Mini’s promise was turning into reality as Pat and Anne Wisdom won the Tulip and Deutschland rallies in it in 1962, and the car’s reliability was confirmed when all three entered for Britain’s RAC made it to the finish, Aaltonen in fifth and first in class, Timo Makinen, another of Turner’s Finns, seventh and Logan Morrison in 13^th.

A year later, Rauno won the Coupe des Alpes in a new 1071-cc Mini Cooper S, the version with which Paddy Hopkirk and Henry Liddon beat off a strong challenge from a full American works team of Ford Falcons and famously captured the world’s imagination by winning the 1964 Monte Carlo Rally outright. After that, the already powerful engine was taken to 1275-cc and then there was no stopping the tiny white roofed red Mini Cooper S. The little cars from Abingdon won the Monte three more times – after Timo’s victory in the 1966 Monte all the Minis were disqualified because the Monegasque organizers said they had illegal headlights – twice driven by Makinen and once by Aaltonen, three 1000 Lakes, the RAC, the Acropolis, two Czech rallies and much more besides.

Next Month: Chargers—1965–1980s

The post Chargers—International Rallying 1957–1965 appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

In 2015, it was announced that the Malaysian city of Kuala Lumpur would hold a street Grand Prix for GT3 cars and a variety of sports cars. However, this was by no means the first time that Malaysia’s capital city had played host to racing in the streets.

HUMBLE SPRINTS

Looking back at the racing scene in the late 1950s, there was a definite buzz amongst members of the larger motoring clubs in South East Asia, such as the Malayan Motor Sports Club (MMSC) and the Singapore Motor Club (SMC). They planned, they schemed, they sought venues, and they looked for the right cars. A trickle of sports and racecars found their way to the region, imported by locals and expatriates. Formula 3 Coopers, Lotus and Lolas added to the plethora of locally built Specials and fast sports cars.

The catalyst for this activity was the Forces Motoring Club’s circuit race at the RAF Changi base in Singapore in 1957. But it wasn’t just the Changi Circuit Race that spurred interest among local motoring enthusiasts then. Selangor’s nascent motor sport scene, as in Singapore, had evolved from the late 1940s. It was in 1948 when the first stirrings of interest in motor sports was evident, in the tin mining town of Gopeng in Perak, 20-km south of Ipoh, where the post-war, club race scene really began in the Malay Peninsula.

The post Capital Racing—Grand Prix Roots in Kuala Lumpur   appeared first on Sports Car Digest.