First off, any overall victory at Le Mans is impressive. But for Ferrari, even more so considering this year’s win marked the Scuderia’s 10th overall victory (the first in 1949, then 1954, 1958 and a subsequent string of dominance from 1960-1965). After its 1960-1964 win streak, the Commendatore, Enzo Ferrari, famously chose to focus his factory racing efforts and resources on Formula One from that point forward, arguably leading to Ferrari’s long 50-year absence from the top rung of the podium at Le Sarthe. But there is an interesting kernel of history buried in these observations that I’m surprised I’ve never heard mentioned before. In the 100 years of Le Mans history, Ferrari is the only manufacturer to have won both Le Mans and the Formula One manufacturers championship in the same year. And even more impressively, they did this “double” twice.

In 1961, Ferrari not only won Le Mans with Phil Hill and Oliver Gendebien driving the 250 TR, but Hill also won the Formula One World Championship in the famed 156 “Sharknose”. Then this herculean feat was repeated, in 1964, when Guichet and Vaccarella won Le Mans in the 275 P and John Surtees took the F1 crown in the Ferrari 158. If you stop to think about the amount of engineering and resources that would go into designing, building and testing, two completely separate and distinct world-beating racing programs like that… it’s a pretty stunning achievement.

Now, before you fire up your angry screeds to tell me what an idiot I am (I already know), yes, Porsche did win Le Mans in ’84 and ’85, the same years that the McLaren-TAG’s won the F1 title, but it’s not really the same thing. Say what you will about Ferrari, but you have to hand it to them, they build every component of their cars—chassis, engine, gearbox etc.—for all of their cars… F1, Le Mans, you name it. Porsche only supplied the engines for McLaren. And if you want to go way back and get nit-picky, an argument could be made for Alfa Romeo winning Le Mans and the Grand Prix championship in both 1931 & 1932, but there wasn’t a formal manufacturers championship back then, so it’s a more difficult comparison. But neither case should in any way detract from how impressive it was for Ferrari to win such vastly different disciplines, in the same year. Which, of course, raises the question…now that Ferrari has won Le Mans this year, what are the odds that they repeat their 1961/1964 double?

Hmmmm, at this stage of the F1 season, I’d say it’s not looking too promising!

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So, the two of us are happily motoring along to the steady purr of two cams, accompanied by dual Webers, when my daughter casually looks down and innocently asks, “What’s that pedal in the middle?” Of course, my gentle, fatherly reply was, “You’re f-ing kidding, right?” Apparently, she wasn’t. “Ah…that’s the brake,” I replied awkwardly.

To which my now drinking age daughter countered, “Right, that’s what I thought. So, if that’s the brake, what’s the other pedal to the left of it.” Ah! Now we get to the crux of the situation. When she rode in the Alfa as a small child, she was oblivious to the many switches, levers and pedals. Few kids care about the details… Go faster Dada, go faster!

But now, as a driving adult, I realize that she’s never really been exposed to a car with a manual transmission. Nowadays, in the U.S. at least, you’re hard-pressed to find a new car with a manual transmission. Slightly appalled—but relieved that she at least knew what the brake was—I then launched into a fatherly diatribe on the workings of the clutch and its actions on the transmission… yadda-yadda-yadda.

To her credit, she appeared politely interested, but seemingly unimpressed with my lecture so we soon returned to just the gentle, dulcet tones of the engine singing along at 4,000 rpm. However, a few minutes later, our shared automotive Zen was again broken, when my apparently now more observant daughter proclaimed, “That can’t be right, we’re going much faster than 45 miles per hour.”

Since I had recently invested some $300 in having my speedometer fixed —some 10 years ago the needle elected to leap to his own death at the bottom of the gauge — I looked down with alarm, only to see that we were, in fact, doing 60 mph with said resurrected needle pointing dead-nuts straight up as God had intended it to. “What are you talking about?”, I countered. “The gauge says we’re doing 60.”

To which my youngin replied, “No it’s not, it says 45 right there.” Confused, and now concerned that I had been gypped out of $300, I furiously scanned the gauge until I finally located what she was referring to. Much to my amazement (and horror if I’m honest) she was looking at the trip odometer! But in her defense, she has grown up in a digital world, not an analog one and the trip odometer numbers stand out more prominently than the 60-year-old white MPH numerals silkscreened on the formerly clear, now yellowing bezel.

As we motored on down the freeway, I wrestled with how I could have so completely failed as a father. Should I have denied her all those dance classes in lieu of a shifter kart? Should I have at least forced her to learn to drive on a stick? I was beating myself up thusly when I happened to spot an early Porsche 911 coming up in the lane next to us. As it pulled alongside, I gave the man behind the wheel a knowing nod of acknowledgement, as we all do, and then noticed what appeared to be his teenage daughter in the passenger seat next to him, presumably on the same father-daughter Sunday drive bonding exercise that we were…except she had this bored, please-come-save-me hostage look on her face that said this was not her Sunday dream come true. And this gave me hope.

At least my daughter wanted to be out there with me in the old car. And between her growing interest in Formula One and possibly the first inklings of an interest in classic cars, I began to believe that maybe it’s never too late to pass on the disease. But if she is truly bitten by the bug, I’ll now face the even more daunting dilemma… how is she going to learn to drive a stick? She ain’t learning on my car!

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Blink as you go by and you might miss it—as the Scots are pretty humble and low key about most things, including their heroes—but seeing this tribute to Clark got my mind thinking as I navigated my way around countless lochs and glens for the next few days. With a total population of just 5.5 million people, Scotland really punches far above its weight when it comes to producing world class racing drivers. In Formula One alone, Jackie Stewart and Jim Clark account for five World Championships between themselves, then you throw in the likes of Archie Scott Brown, Dario Franchitti, his brother Marino and David Coulthard and that’s a lot of driving talent from one sparsely populated country. By comparison, racing powerhouses like Germany has 83 million people to draw from, while Brazil has 214 million and the U.S. 331 million. So, what is the secret sauce that makes the Scots such great drivers?

In my personal experience of driving in Scotland numerous times over the past three decades, I’d say it’s the roads. For all its size and expanse, there is not a straight section of road in the entire country! Cumulatively, the country is made up of thousands of miles of twisty-turny, one and two-lane roads, with all manner of blind corners, off camber turns and uneven surfaces. When you add in the fact that the Highlands of Scotland also receives a total of 250 days of rain per year, you have the perfect breeding ground for talented, seat-of-the-pants drivers. In fact, I’d argue it’s a microcosm of automotive Darwinism, as you either learn how to deftly handle a car in Scotland or you won’t be passing your genes on to the next generation!

Fortunately, my family and I managed to log more than 500 trouble-free miles over hill and dale in our Highlands journey. But driving there does require constant vigilance and concentration… I suppose it adds new meaning to the country’s unofficial national anthem “Scotland the Brave.”

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Now, when you think of this rarest automotive maverick, who comes to mind? Most likely its names like Ferruccio Lamborghini, Preston Tucker or John DeLorean. Men who had a burning fire to see their deepest automotive fantasy brought to life and manifested into physical form. And, while these visionaries did ultimately see their dreams through to fruition, they each had vast financial and engineering resources at their disposal to aid them in the construction of their unique creations. In short, yes, they had the fever… but did they have the madness?

No, what fascinates me and fills me with awe are the madmen, the craftsmen, that wake up one morning and say, “Mildred, I think I’m going to build that sports car I can’t get out of my head.” This week you’ll find a fascinating feature on just such a character, David Simmons, an Alfa fanatic who wanted a rare Tipo 33 Stradale so badly, he built one in his home garage… from scratch! That is true automotive madness, God love him.

And fortunately for us (and the hobby) he is not alone. Over the years, we’ve featured a number of these Mad Dogs… I mean craftsmen; guys like Jerry Shuck and his JS Can-Am Special, or Alex Bacon and his Alfa-based sports racer. High functioning hobbyists, like Simmons, that aren’t content to buy someone else’s dream machine, so they build their own…did I mention from scratch!!

Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to spend time with a number of these touched, but gifted, individuals, including Simmons. On the surface they seem like you or I, a keen enthusiast passionate about their cars. But under that oil impregnated skin lurks a passion, an obsession, that is truly next level. In some ways, I feel lucky that this extreme form of the disease is not contagious… but I do have a few ideas rolling around in the back of my head.

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While my interest in the LBGP has ebbed and flowed over the past 48 years, with the various transitions from F5000 to F1 to CART/Champcar/IRL/Indycar/et. al., I have to say that this year’s event was one of the very best in recent memory for the overall quality of racing, up and down the board.

Interestingly, of all the racing on tap this weekend, the one I found the least compelling was the featured Indy cars! I know they have great, tight racing, but the Stepford Wife-sameness of the cars, with their Kirby upright vacuum-sounding engines just doesn’t get my juices going. However, if you wanted to watch some exciting, one-make racing, the Porsche Carrera Cup undercard was great fun. Throw 35 identically prepared Porsche 992s onto a concrete-lined street course and you’re going to get an action-packed race. Elsewhere on the bill, the inclusion this weekend of a race for historic 3-liter Formula One cars was obviously going to be a high-point, especially in lieu of my “Old Man” nostalgia looking back over my 48-year committed relationship with this race. But the real surprise for me this year was the IMSA race. Man, that ticked all the right boxes.

The IMSA race really reminded me of the “Good Ol’ Days”. It was a big, diverse field, with a ton of direct manufacturer involvement (Porsche, Acura, BMW, Cadillac, Aston Martin, Mercedes, McLaren, Chevrolet, Lexus, Lamborghini). But I think what made it the most appealing for me was the sound…finally, here was a race series with a heterogeneity of sound. In the GTP, the deep V8 rumble of the Cadillacs was distinct from the whoosh of the Porsches or the wail of the BMWs. Each car looked different, sounded different AND went like stink. But I have to confess that the real revelation for me this weekend was the GTD Corvette. The sound that Corvette makes is pure magic. The combination of its DOHC V-8 engine and flat-plane crank gives the Corvette a nasty, gnashy-gnarly howl that just puts my adrenal glands in overload. Sitting in the stands, listening to that thing growl on the overrun, so reminded me of listening to a similar sound being spat out the back of Gilles Villeneuve’s Ferrari 312T4, when he won at Long Beach in 1979. As I basked in this aural nostalgia, I commented to the friend I was with that that sound is the most visceral engine note, I’ve ever heard in my entire life… and at this point, that’s a lot of engine notes!

Near the end of the day, said friend and I sat in another grandstand to watch the Indycar practice. While visually the cars were clearly rocketing by, much faster than the IMSA contingent, their whisper quietness seemed to lessen the impact of their higher speed. After just a couple of minutes, my friend turned to me and said, “Well, at least with these you can carry on a conversation.”

Yeah, I think that’s the problem…

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Many moons ago, I unearthed a true barn find, a very original Lotus 51 that had been rolled off the track and stuffed into a storage unit in the late ‘70s. It was a surreal automotive experience you can read about here if interested (“Mr. Nutter’s Cave of Wonders”). After extricating the car, I restored it myself and then showed and raced it for several years, before “adulting” took hold of my life and I reluctantly sold it so we could buy our first home. Lame, right?

The car stayed local for a number of years and then was sold back east, at which point I lost track of it. Years later, it popped up on eBay, to briefly haunt my dreams (read “The Haunting”), before being sold overseas. I knew the car had ultimately made its way to Australia, but after another ownership change or two, the trail went cold… that is until I started spouting off about poor man’s Daytonas.

In my exchange with my newfound Tasmanian friend, I was heartened to learn that the old girl has shacked up with a very keen owner and enthusiast who seems to love her as much as I did. His collection is impressive and even includes a younger stablemate in the form of a Lotus 61 FF. However, in comparing the two he had to confide that the 61, “… does not feel as good, it may just be psychological, but it does not look as handsome either!” Once again, he and I are of like minds.

I closed with him by lamenting that this Lotus, for me, will likely always be “the one that got away.” To which he then very graciously invited me to come to Tasmania, stay with him and have an on-track reunion with my lost love. So very, very tempting. The only wrinkle is, after just getting back from a solo trip to South Africa, how do I convince Mrs. Annis that I long to galivant across the globe to be reunited with a lost love?

For now, I suppose I’ll just have to be content in the knowledge that I now know where the one that got away… got away to.

Casey Annis’s editorial is one of the many exclusive features you’ll find in our FREE weekly newsletter, as well as all the previous week’s breaking news, latest content, curated articles from our vast archive and select interesting cars for sale.

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So with that said, I certainly understand why the collector car world goes gaga over the Daytona. It’s really one of the last, and arguably greatest, “Enzo-era” Ferrari V-12 road cars. And, as such, it has a price tag that lives up to the hype—$1.3 million for a concours standard GTB. But what if I told you there was an alternative, a “poor man’s” alternative, that has been all but forgotten by the collector cognoscenti and provides the same basic mechanicals, in a… prepare to gasp… more comfortable and better-looking package… for a fraction of the price?

This “working man’s” Daytona is the 365 GTC/4 and I have to say that, like my taste for Brussel sprouts and the herniated discs in my back, it has grown on me with advancing age. Back in the day, these were cheap as chips, no one wanted a 2+2 version of the Daytona, when you could have a real Daytona for $22,000 (my father had the option of buying either a Daytona or his Dino for that price, but that’s a tragic story for another day). Both had essentially the same chassis and 4.4-liter Colombo-designed V-12 engine (though the Daytona’s had downdraft carbs and a dry sump, while the GTC had sidedrafts and a wet sump), resulting in the Daytona having a mere 12-HP advantage. What the GTC also gave up to the Daytona in additional weight (about 500-lbs), it made up for in one of the most luxurious and comfortable interiors in any Ferrari up to that time…. and then there was the styling. Time has been exceedingly kind to the GTC, in my opinion. Due to its sidedraft carburetors, Pininfarina was able to give it a low, sleek sexy profile that looks like a blade slicing through the air. I will admit here, by contrast, that for all my fanboy geekdom over the Daytona, I’ve always found its nose to look just a little ungainly, when viewed from the wrong angle. Heresy!

But here’s the kicker, yes you can do battle with the entire collector car world and try to purchase one of the 1,284 Daytona Coupes and pay upwards of $1.3 million for the privilege, or you could buy a more comfortable, equally as beautiful GTC/4, that makes all the same sounds, performs nearly as well, and can potentially bring two Lilliputian-sized humans along in the back, for just $350,000.

Crazy-talk? Maybe. The 10-year-old me, would have spat on the 57-year-old me for even suggesting such an outlandish notion. But I suppose age and financial fluency has a way of tempering the tastes of even the most snobby Ferrari enthusiasts. Afterall, I could buy a lot of Brussel sprouts with the million dollars saved.

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Then, a few weeks ago, I was at an Alfa Romeo Owners Club event when a friend told me it was coming back, for a special, one-day, invite only event they were calling “Lattes & Lincolns”. He asked if I’d like to bring my Alfa as one of the 300 invited cars? Ah…yeah!

So now that my Alfa is running so well — and I’ve committed to being a good boy and driving it more frequently — I was stoked at the opportunity to drive it down to Irvine this past Saturday and show it amongst the automotive cognoscenti. That is until I woke up Saturday morning to the latest in a continuing series of Biblical rain storms we’ve endured the past few months. [Insert, author screams and shakes his fists at the heavens, here]. I so wanted to drive her down to the show but, while I have rediscovered the joys of my soft top, that car has not seen so much as a drop of water in the past 25 years. If I were to even drive it on a wet road, let alone in the rain, I know I’ll irreversibly set in motion the rusty demarcation of every scratch and untreated part, as well as the slow dissolution of every square centimeter of genuine uncoated Italian sheet metal. Nobody puts Baby in the rain…

Despite my bitter disappointment, the wife and I trundled down to the show anyway in her less-than-car-show-worthy Volvo SUV. And, while there were certainly a significant number of rain-aversive wimps, such as myself, that took a pass, there was still a solid 150-200 cars that braved the conditions. Organized by Ford PR legend John Clinard, the event was once again hosted in the parking lot of the Ford Design Center and featured a host of rare Lincolns, including the wildly futuristic Lincoln L100 concept car, with its massive space-age interior. Elsewhere scattered around the parking lot were Ferraris, Porsches, a clutch of exquisite coachbuilt Alfas, a Bugatti Veyron and even one of Dan Gurney’s Eagle Indy cars.  Standing next to the Indy car, my wife asked what year it was and before I could respond a petite, well-dressed woman turned around and in a German accent said, “1968”. “Oh, hey Evi!”, was my response to Dan Gurney’s wife Evi, who I haven’t caught up with in some time.

Between catching up with Evi and other friends, and poking around all the rare and interesting cars (you don’t see a mid-engined Matra Bonnet every day!), Lattes & Lincolns absolutely lived up to its storied past. Now, if I could just convince Clinard to hold just one more under drier conditions!

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First off, in what alternate, multi-verse would you expect to see an Aston Martin finish on the podium of a Grand Prix? Not even the Marvel Cinematic Universe could have dreamed up something that seemingly outlandish. This notion is all the more absurd if you’re at all familiar with Aston’s history in Formula One. Aston first entered Formula One in 1959, the year that all the front-running teams were moving over to rear-engine racecars. Of course, Aston entered the front-engined DBR4 and was properly shellacked. Never one to give up on a bad idea, the boys from Newport Pagnell, then came back for another beating in 1960 with a rear-engined…. no, I’m just kidding!… of course, they came back with another front-engined car, the DBR5! Anyway, you get the picture, Formula One was not really Aston’s cup of tea.

But then, 60 years later, in struts billionaire car enthusiast, Lawrence Stroll, in 2020. Stroll backed a moving truck up to Aston’s shop door and proceeded to shovel money into the ailing manufacturer like a fireman feeds coal into a locomotive. Not only did Stroll invest in the production and modernization of the road cars, but for good measure, he bought the struggling Force India Formula One team and turned it into Aston Martin Formula One. Since then, the Aston team has lived up to its F1 heritage by being a struggling backmarker, just like they were in ’59 & ’60…. or so it seemed.

But Stroll had a plan…and it involved at least one or more semi-trucks filled with cash. First, he hired away Red Bull’s Chief Aerodynamicist Dan Fallows and made him Technical Director and then he went all in, when the opportunity arose, and hired 2-time World Champion Fernando Alonso away from Alpine. Considering, Stroll had to pay $5 million to entice the now 40-year old Alonso to join Aston, many doubting pundits (including yours truly) considered this a fool-hardy move. Uh… genius move, you mean!

There’s no question that the new Aston Martin has the pace to now be a front-runner. But the secret sauce that put Aston on the podium for the first time in 64 years was unquestionably Alonso. Alonso clawed his way through drivers like Hamilton and Leclerc with pure racecraft the likes of which we haven’t seen in F1 in a long time. It was like watching a master class — inside fakes, to late apex lines that set up for exciting passes under acceleration at the exit. You know who it very much reminded me of? Another supposedly over-the-hill Grand Prix driver named Juan Manuel Fangio.

It’s nigh on impossible to predict how Aston’s F1 fortunes will unfold for the balance of 2023. But, I can tell you one thing… Stroll got more than his money’s worth in Alonso. All hail the Nuevo Maestro!

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Interestingly, the Lotus Cortina was the brainchild of then-newly hired Ford UK public relations director Walter Hayes. Ford was on its early ’60s “Total Performance” kick and the UK arm of the company had basically zilch that fit the bill. Desperate for something to tout, Hayes, who prior to taking the job with Ford was a newspaper editor, decided he’d enlist the aid of a bright young lad who had occasionally written for him… that lad, of course, being one Colin Chapman. Hayes pitched the idea to Chapman that Lotus could take Ford’s new, but decidedly staid, Consul Cortina sedan, and hot it up with the twin-cam Ford engine that Chapman had been developing for the Lotus 23 with the help of Keith Duckworth. Originally, Chapman was only supposed to convert 1,000 examples to satisfy the homologation requirements, but it proved to be so potent and popular that production went on for three years and produced a total of 7,399 examples across two model generations.

In many respects, the Lotus Cortina became one of the first modern “sleepers”, outwardly pedestrian-looking sedans that hid giant-killing performance under their skin. I was fortunate enough to test drive one a few years ago and I can certainly attest to the car’s remarkable potency (I’ve featured my Cortina Profile, below in the archive articles section, if you’d like to read more).

In fact, even 60 years on, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a faster, more responsive, normally-aspirated 1600-cc sedan than the Lotus Cortina. And, really, how many 60-year olds can claim to being just as potent as they were in their youth?

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In the off chance that you’ve either been off on a Tibetan solitude retreat for the past several months or in a coma, there has been a lot of media hype building into next month’s start of the 2024 F1 season. But of all the drivers making appearances and posting wacky videos online, who do you see the most? Reigning champion Verstappen? Multiple past champion Hamilton? No, the media darling of the 2024 race season is unquestionably Daniel Ricciardo… a reserve driver. Huh?

You have to hand it to him, while he is/was a decent if not occasionally gifted driver, Ricciardo’s real talent was in creating a cult of personality far bigger and more valuable than his behind-the-wheel accomplishments. With the help of the Netflix series “Drive to Survive”, I would argue that Ricciardo built an image and a “brand” so big, he became a valuable asset just for his media attention alone. Of all the drivers in Formula One, who would you guess has the most social media followers? Hamilton is the top with a staggering 42.8 million. Next comes Verstappen with 14.4 million. But that makes sense, right? These are two multiple World Champions. But guess who is the third most followed driver in the world? Yep, Ricciardo with 11.7 million and growing.

If you think about it, it kind of makes sense that a driver with a massive media following would have outsized value, compared to a lesser-known driver with equal driving talent. F1 runs on money. Where does that money come from? Advertising. What is advertising looking for? Exposure. Where do you get exposure? Conventional and now social media.

So, in this new business construct, an influencer… I mean driver, like Ricciardo, doesn’t even have to drive to be valuable to a team like Red Bull, if he is generating massive exposure for them. The fact that Daniel is also a serviceable driver that could step in when required is almost a value-added. Plus, as a bonus, with him siphoning off most of the apparent pre-season PR duties, it relieves a lot of that load off of his “on track” teammates Verstappen and Perez.

So now, in 2023, one of the biggest, most visible personalities in Formula One, is a driver, who doesn’t drive. I’m beginning to think that Kim Kardashian might have a future at Williams!

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But one detail I didn’t think to share at the time was that when I went to pick up my car at the shop, I was surprised to see that they had put the top up on it. Now, ordinarily this wouldn’t be any great revelation, but in the almost 20 years that I’ve owned this car the top has only been up once…and that was the day it was delivered to me off the back of a transporter! Of course, keep in mind, I live in Southern California where the weather is arguably nice all the time. Plus, as I’ve already confessed, I drive the car so in frequently that, when I do, it is only in good weather. So, if you’re driving a convertible, in nice weather, why wouldn’t you drive with the top down? Thererfore, all of my driving in the Alfa has been with the top down.

But when I picked it up, it was uncharacteristically cold that day, and I was in a hurry, so I drove it home with the top up… and it was like driving a completely different car! Insulated from the whipping wind and the noise, it was a completely different experience. I would imagine its akin to your spouse of 30-plus years dressing up in that naughty nurse or bad pizza-boy costume… kind of spices up an otherwise “routine” experience.

In fact, I enjoyed the ride home, with the top up, so much that I left it up. Since then, I’ve been a good boy and have taken the car out several more times over the past 2-3 weeks and, each time, I’ve driven it top up. And, much to my surprise, I’m still really enjoying it. If your fortunate enough to own a convertible, I can’t recommend the experience enough. You’ll discover all kinds of new things about your pride and joy.

However, one major drawback is that now that I’ve finally had a chance to take a good, long look at my convertible top, I realize that if I’m going to continue to use it, I really need to replace it. There’s something to be said for “Out of sight, out of mind”… it’s certainly much less expensive!

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Obviously, Ford officially returning to Formula One is a big deal since, despite only being an official supplier from 1967-2004, they still rank third overall in wins with 176 and are only eclipsed by Mercedes (213) and Ferrari (243). Amazingly, 155 of Ford’s wins came from a single engine design the DFV, but that’s really where the air quotes start…since that’s arguably not really a Ford.

Now, before you start firing off those poison-pen emails telling me what an ignorant dufus I am (no argument), my point here is that when you really get down to it the DFV was a Cosworth. The brainchild of engine boffins Keith Duckworth and Mike Costin, the DFV engine was really one of the first “nameplate” engines in Formula One, i.e. an engine built by a specialist house with financial support by a major manufacturer. And, arguably, one of the best investments Ford ever made! So, while the name on the cam covers said “Ford”, it could just as easily have said “Maserati” or “Daihatsu”, had the money been right.

In fact, if you look back over the past 50 years of Formula One, a lot of the “manufacturer” engines were really in name only, having been designed and built by cottage outfits like Cosworth, Hart and Ilmor.

And speaking of Ilmor, even today a number of F1 engines are quasi-nameplate. All the Mercedes engines are designed and built in the UK in the Ilmor factory that Mercedes purchased in 2001, after company founder Paul Morgan was killed in a plane crash. In fact, even the Aston Martin engine is a Mercedes, which is arguably an Ilmor! Likewise, Red Bull has their own powertrain development company now (as a result of Honda’s departure), and essentially this new Ford deal will see the Blue Oval pour buckets of cash into this new powertrain project, but likely have little direct engineering involvement other than sharing its expertise in advanced battery technology for the new energy recovery systems that come into effect in 2026.

But, make no mistake, the above diatribe is in no way intended to be a diminution of the significance of Ford’s announcement. Come 2026, we’re finally going to see a real battle of the ages, between all the major heavies—Ford, GM(most likely), Mercedes, Ferrari, Audi, Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin, Renault and most likely Porsche. What a field, right?! But keep in mind, maybe only a third(?) of those prestigious names will actually be physically engineering their own powertrains. The rest will be carrying on the now time-honored tradition of Nameplate Engineering, pioneered by Cosworth and Ford… way back in 1967.

Casey Annis’s editorial is one of the exclusive features you’ll find in our FREE weekly newsletter, as well as all the previous week’s breaking news, latest content, curated articles from our vast archive and select interesting cars for sale.

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The world works in strange ways and the classic car world, in particular, is both strikingly strange and remarkably small. For the past 12 days, I’ve been in Cape Town, South Africa. I didn’t come here for cars at all (I came to race surfskis of all things!), but somehow cars seem to find me regardless of how remote the location. As luck would have it, I learned while here that renowned car broker and friend of the magazine Marc Devis was also in Cape Town, so we agreed to have breakfast before I flew home. Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Marc walks into mine… so that was the first small world coincidence.

Then, what were the odds that right next door to the hotel that I randomly chose, there would be a classic car showroom? Laude Classic cars (www.laudeclassics.com) was not only next door, but in what has to be one of the great, genius moves of the ages, the owners have built out a full, sit down coffee bar in part of the showroom that serves breakfast and lunch! Is it a coffee bar with cars as decorations or a classic car showroom that serves coffee? Doesn’t matter. What a brilliant way to amortize the cost of the space and guarantee regular showroom traffic.

So, Marc and I sit there enjoying our breakfast and coffee, BS-ing about cars and having a generally grand ol’ time, when the owner, Dean Knoop, recognizes Marc and stops by to say hi. The three of us chat for a while about cars and the market, before I ask Dean if the current state of the exchange rate has hurt his business. What he said, kind of floored me, “No, it’s the opposite! Because the Rand is so devalued against the Dollar, Euro and Pound, we are selling cars like crazy. All exports. The prices are low, and like you in California, all of our cars are dry because they never see snow or bad weather.” Damn! It makes perfect sense once I hear it, but it just never really occurred to me that there could be both good cars and currency leverage here.

So, if you’re looking for good value, Africa may be the last great frontier for inexpensive, dry cars. Of course, a lot of what’s here are British classics, and right-hand drive at that, but Laude had a Ferrari and a Maserati in the showroom, so you never know what treasures you’ll discover here at the bottom of what is apparently an ever-smaller car world.

Casey Annis’s editorial is one of the exclusive features you’ll find in our FREE weekly newsletter, as well as all the previous week’s breaking news, latest content, curated articles from our vast archive and select interesting cars for sale.

Click here to sign up…it’s 100% free, with no commitment.

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I’ve owned a 1962 Alfa Romeo Giulia Spider Veloce for nearly 20 years now and I am, apparently, a neglectful owner. This fact was recently brought into sharp focus when I had to have it towed into the shop because it wouldn’t run on more than three-ish cylinders. I knew deep down what the ailment was, the same one that claims the lives of millions of Americans each year, inactivity. Only instead of a clogged coronary artery, my Alfa had goobered up Weber carburetors. Sadly, there’s no Lipitor for Webers.

When I asked my Alfa guru what I could do to avoid this, he said the same thing he told me the last time this happened three years ago, “You just have to drive it more. The gas is just sitting in there and the ethanol in it is corroding all the passages.” I know he’s right, but it makes me feel guilty and neglectful, like a bad pet owner that leaves the family dog to fend for itself…for one to six months.

I always have the best of intentions to drive her, but there’s always some reason why I don’t take her out. It’s too hot. It’s too cold. All the Christmas decorations are piled up around the Alfa like a medieval embattlement. Sometimes I assuage my guilt, by at least going out and letting it idle in the garage. But then the wife complains that it makes all the laundry smell like exhaust fumes…she says that like it’s a bad thing.

So after a modicum of self-flagellation, and an $800 carb rebuild, I had said missus drive me to the shop to pick it up.  After the above-mentioned dressing down for not driving it enough, I climbed behind the wheel, she fired right up and I headed out for the 30 minute drive home. With trips to both the cardiologist and the mechanic, there’s nothing like heading home with that clean-bill-of-health feeling. You feel bullet proof! I accelerated with confidence onto the freeway and felt a renewed love and connection with my little car as she strongly purred along.

In fact, by the time I got home, I was so pleased with the experience, I thought to myself, “I really should drive this car more.”

PS- If you’d like to see the poor, old, neglected girl in action, Petrolicious did a fun video on her and I which you can see by clicking below.

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In my experience, most auto enthusiasts tend to live dual lives, we have our automotive life (cars, car-friends, events, etc) and then we tend to have a separate parallel life (work, family, other hobbies). But I always find it a little surreal when—once in blue moon—these two separate lives intersect.

As you read through the Racecar Profile and Fast Exposure installments this month, you’ll see the name John Sprinzel pop up numerous times. Not only was Sprinzel an accomplished rally driver from the 1950s through to the early ’70s, but he was also instrumental in the aftermarket tuning and performance of the Austin-Healey Sprite and the very special Sebring Sprites.

In 1957, Sprinzel (and partners Len Adams and George Hulbert) founded Speedwell, where they tuned and prepared Austin A35s and Morris Minors for rallies and competition. By 1959, Sprinzel sold his share in Speedwell to a young mechanic and up-and-coming driver named Graham Hill, and took up a position with the Donald Healey Motor Company as their Manager of Special Equipment. At the DHMC, Sprinzel focused on the race preparation of the Austin-Healey Sprite for both rallying and road racing, including development of the now legendary Sebring Sprite. By 1960, Sprinzel purchased the business from the DHMC and opened his own John Sprinzel Racing, which would further develop and homologate the Sebring Sprite, with an all-alloy body, into what would become known as the Sprinzel Sprite.

During this time and into the early 1970s, Sprinzel continued to race in a variety of his own and others vehicles, including several years as the Triumph rally team’s captain, as well as rallying stints with BMC, Rover, Mercedes-Benz, Peugeot and Saab. By 1973, Sprinzel retired from racing and went into journalism for a few years before pursuing other interests.

I first came in contact with Sprinzel in 2009, just after we had run an interview with him (Click here to read our interview with Sprinzel) about his racing career. That first email was riddled with puns and jokes, which I would later come to realize is quite indicative of Sprinzel’s affable, if not jovial, good nature. I also found it interesting that he signed his name “Aloha John.”

From the closing question in our interview with him, I knew that around 1979, John became enamored with the then new sport of windsurfing and, in fact, became so besotted that he sold all his holdings in the UK and moved to Corfu to open a windsurfing school! Not only did John teach windsurfing, but he also raced and competed on an international level. And so it is here, where my intersection of disparate worlds comes in. John had two clearly separate lives, his automotive life and his windsurfing life, which struck a chord with me, because I too was living a similar dual life. I had my automotive life, but also enjoyed a dramatically different existence racing prone paddleboards in long distance, open ocean races.

So seeing John’s “Aloha John” signature, I immediately knew he must be living in Hawaii somewhere, so I asked him what island. John responded Molokai, which is the least developed and least accessible of all the Hawaiian islands. Surprised by the strange double intersection of our lives, I wrote back to say that I was going to be doing a 32-mile race from Molokai to Oahu and what a small world it was. Then John—being John—generously offered to pick me up at the tiny Molokai airport (nee landing strip) and look after me while I was on his tiny, former leper colony island! I was struck by what an unbelievably generous offer this was considering we only knew each other via a handful of emails…but that’s John for you.

Flash forward almost a year and as I stepped off the tiny twin-engined commuter plane and walked across the hot Molokai tarmac there, standing in the bright Hawaiian sun was an unmistakably British looking man, wearing a Hawaiian print shirt, shorts and sandals—John Sprinzel!

Right from the moment we shook hands, it was like we had been friends for years. He loaded my gear in his truck and we trundled out onto the small, rough road that runs from the airport to the far side of the island, where my race would start from. As we made the long journey, John regaled me with a brief history of the island and its people. He went on to share how he and his wife had moved to the very provincial Molokai for the windsurfing and were at first mostly shunned by the native islanders as Haoles, or outsiders. But after years of investing their time with various social service programs on the small island and getting to know the native islanders, John revealed that he and his wife had eventually won their trust and respect were now treated like one of their own. In fact, so much so that John now sits as a commissioner on the island’s influential Planning Commission. No small feat, but also a clear testament to the type of people the Sprinzels are.

It’s been almost seven years, since I received a personal tour of Molokai, by one of the world’s legendary rally drivers. But as surreal as that still seems to me, I also know that if I were to go back tomorrow, I’d have much the same reception as if only a few days had lapsed, because that’s the kind of guy John is.

Aloha, John Sprinzel.

Editor’s note: John Sprinzel passed away the last week of May 2021, at the age of 90.

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It is with a profound sense of sadness and loss that I must share that long-time contributor and friend Mike Lawrence has passed away at the age of 78.  Mike preferred to say, “…that highly qualified medics were fighting the cancer on his behalf, with his body as the battleground,” but after many brave months of battle he passed away, at home, surrounded by his family on Dec. 21st .

Mike contributed his first “Last Lap” monthly column in our June 2000 issue of Vintage Racecar, and I have to say we hit it off right from the very beginning. Over the years, Mike and I developed a rapport that included a pun-filled form of “verbal jousting” that was immensely satisfying. It was like playing chess with Gary Kasparov, you knew you were the underdog, but when you landed a solid blow, you really felt a sense of accomplishment!

Mike’s writing, whether it was for us or any number of his myriad books, was always erudite and academic, yet slightly cynical with a dry wit—think Denis Jenkinson meets Monty Python.

After a year or two of corresponding only by email, we finally got to meet in person, when I ventured to the UK for one of the first Goodwood Revivals. Since Mike lived right there in Chichester, we spent the better part of the weekend together. Undoubtedly, one of my all-time favorite memories—of anything I’ve done in the past 22-plus years in conjunction with this magazine—was a dinner I shared with Mike that weekend. For some reason, the conversation turned early on to all the behind the scenes stories in Formula One that few if anyone has ever heard about. For the next several hours, Mike regaled me with outlandish and sometimes salacious tale after tale—the Formula One drivers sleeping with owners’ wives, the team’s smuggling drugs and diamonds across Europe in the fuel cells of their racecars and the team principal who was attacked by two thugs with a cricket bat in an alley, coincidentally after having a change of heart on a business deal. At some point in time I told Mike, “Jesus, you’ve got enough here for a best seller, let’s publish the book!” Mike agreed and thought it should be titled, “Grand Prix Babylon.”

I returned to California and immediately started to press Mike on the book. However, after a period of hemming and hawing he finally admitted that he had gotten cold feet. Mike confessed, “A lot of these people are still alive. We probably shouldn’t publish this until after they’re gone…besides I don’t want to be the next in line for the cricket bat!” Sadly, Mike was not able to outlive the statute of limitations on some of the most “choice” stories.

Last year, Mike told me he was going to have to take a break from his column so he could undergo treatment for Lymphoma. While he was often too sick to write even an email, I was able to keep in contact through his son Mark. After Mike passed, I told Mark that I was a little ashamed of the fact that after working with his father for over 20 years, I had to confess to not really knowing that much about his life before we met, other than the fact that he had a Ph.D. in Shakespearean Literature. A fact I used to often taunt him with, since we both shared the same advanced degree that neither of used any longer!

Mark shared the following:

“Much of his determination and self-belief probably stemmed from his early successes.  He won several awards for plays and poetry in his twenties, and commissions from BBC television.  His poetry was romantic and accessible, and the awards given to him were handed over by the likes of Robert Graves and Philip Larkin.

His play ‘Beeston Craig’ was a Frankenstein-like satire that broached media and race relations.  The story is that a white media pundit is killed in a fight and his brain is transplanted into the body of a black ‘full body donor’.  It was well ahead of its time and, at one point, it looked as though it would transfer to Broadway.  Unfortunately, oil-crisis linked currency fluctuation forced the main investor to withdraw.

By the mid 1970s, he temporarily stopped writing and turned to teaching full-time, becoming the head of department in a particularly rough ‘sink’ comprehensive school, where the pupils revered him.  They identified with him as a working class man like themselves, yet who was both deeply learned and pugnacious.  I remember him receiving a salute from a garage attendant who had been a former pupil.

Around this time he joined with a friend Rob Widdows, to produce “Track Torque,” a  motor racing radio program that gained a cult following.  He soon made the leap into full-time motor-racing journalism.  It was a rather glamorous life, staying at five star hotels in Monaco and Switzerland, while being coddled by motoring PR. He also accepted the (acting) editorship of ‘MotorSport’ magazine, which fulfilled a long held schoolboy ambition of his.

By the ’90s, the excesses of motor promotion seemed to have been reigned in, and he was somewhat jaded by it.  He felt that the real Golden age of motor-racing had passed.  He channeled his abilities into earning a doctorate in Literature at the University of Sussex, chosen I suppose because it was relatively local, he could easily have completed it in Oxford or Cambridge.  His dissertation was on the staging of illusion and magic in the plays of Shakespeare and Ben Johnson.

The thing I most wish I’d inherited from him was his photographic (eidetic) memory.  I asked him whether he used any menmotic techniques but no, it was simply an innate ability.  When recently someone mentioned a racing manager to him, Mike reeled off the name of his wife and children, without effort.  Similarly a walk around a town or cathedral would produce a stream of facts and observations about the subject.”

Amazed, but not surprised, by his early successes, I lamented to Mark how I wish I had known these details (and seen those press clippings!), when he was still with us. It would have been grist for a righteous email exchange!

While Mike has moved to the great beyond, I take some solace in the knowledge that Mike has joined his lifetime idol, Sir Stirling Moss, in the great paddock in the sky. One can only imagine the tales the two of them must now be sharing!

It pains me, but Dr. Lawrence has truly exited… stage left.

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At the end of June, a commercial tribunal, in Bologna, Italy, handed down a stunning decision that could have massive implications for the collector car world. And yet, I’ve hardly seen a mention of it in anywhere in the automotive media world. The case in question was a lawsuit, brought by Ferrari, who was suing to stop a small Modenese shop from building replicas of the haloed 250 GTO.

Say what you will about Ferrari, but for decades they have been one of the most aggressive auto manufacturers, in terms of asserting their intellectual property rights. Unauthorized use of the Ferrari logo—cease and desist letter. Unauthorized reproduction of Ferrari scaled miniatures—lawsuit. Those boys in Modena don’t mess around.

So when plans were announced by a cross-town concern to construct 250 GTO replicas, Ferrari lodged a petition to have the design and intellectual property rights associated with the GTO officially protected. And, depending on your perception of the Italian courts, surprisingly (?) the tribunal agreed with Ferrari.

“The customization of the car’s lines and its aesthetic elements have made the 250 GTO unique, a true automobile icon,” the tribunal stated in its decision. The GTO’s “artistic merits” had been recognized by “numerous awards and official testaments.” In essence, the tribunal declared the GTO a work of art, no different than Michelangelo’s “David” or Raphael’s “The Sistine Madonna.”

“It’s the first time in Italy that a car has been recognized as a work of art,” a Ferrari spokesperson told Britain’s The Daily Telegraph. “It’s not just its beauty that makes it special – it also has a long racing history.”

The ruling went on to state, “the customization of the car’s lines and its aesthetic elements have made the 250 GTO unique, a true automobile icon.” As a result, the tribunal declared that the production, commercialization and promotion of the model belonged solely to Ferrari.

So while this decision made minor “lifestyle” news—mostly sensationally focused on the $40-55 million value of the 36 existing Ferrari GTOs—what seems to have been lost in the shuffle is the potentially wide-ranging implications this decision could have across the collector car world and even the broader automotive industry.

While the GTO is certainly a beautiful, historic and now valuable design, it’s subjectively no more unique than say the Jaguar D-Type or the Porsche 550 Spyder. But what if this Italian decision becomes precedent setting? What if other major manufacturers like Jaguar and VW/Porsche decide that they too want to assert their rights to their own “works of art”? This one, seemingly innocuous case in Bologna could end up creating a very slippery slope for the automotive world. Not only would potential replicas, reproductions and “tribute cars” get caught up in this, but keep in mind, the tribunal’s decision also covered the “commercialization and promotion.” With this added protection, even reproductions of the likeness of those vehicles—photographs, artwork, models, t-shirts!—could potentially be protected and thus require a licensing agreement (read fee) for their use. Where does this end? How far could it go?

Finally, playing Devil’s Advocate (or maybe Enzo’s Advocate, in this case), if one car design can be declared a work of art, why not all of them? One-off racing specials like the Ol’ Yallers are certainly historic and unique. But who owns the rights to that design? The family of Max Balchowsky, the original creator? Or Dr. Ernie Nagamatsu, the car’s current owner?

This decision could open up a very complicated and challenging new chapter in the collector car world. Could be difficult times ahead…unless, of course, you’re both an automotive enthusiast and a patent attorney!

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Recently, I had the good fortune to get to test drive the fire-breathing, Quadrifoglio version of the Alfa Romeo Stelvio for a week. True, it is a street car, but with 500-plus horsepower and credentials as the SUV lap record holder at the Nürburgring, it’s not far off a racecar. But one of the many things that struck me about this extraordinary car was the driver’s seat, which not only looks like a racing seat, but felt like one as well. Firmly nestled and supported in the Stelvio’s suede-covered seat, as I carved my way through canyon roads, I had a moment of realization that the seat—and by association, my physical connection with the Stelvio—was a major contributor to my sense of the car’s performance and driving satisfaction. This was the spark, that started my mind sifting back through 20 years of testing racecars to recollect whether my physical connection with those cars, correlated with my master list of what I considered “the best” cars I’ve tested.

What first came to mind were some of the cars that have always stood out to me as the best, most enjoyable cars to test drive. These were the cars that were not only immediately easy to drive, but also felt like they just begged you to go faster. Right up at the top of that list was the ex-Gilles Villeneuve March 76B Formula Atlantic. Sliding into that cockpit was like the proverbial slipping on of a well-worn pair of custom made shoes—the seat perfectly cradled my body in just the right recumbent position, the steering wheel, pedals and gear shift fell in just the right locations for easy use, with no distractions. Out on the track, this perfect fit, meant I felt “one-with-the-car”…not in it, or on it…but a part of it. And perhaps most importantly, as result of that almost second-skin connection between the seat and my derriere, I could sense every movement, every twitch and vibration—right in the seat of my pants—and as a result my brain could instantly decide what my hands and feet needed to do, without that split-second need to interpret and process what my eyes and sense of balance “thought” was happening. It was magic. Other drives that came close to this were in a Tyrrell Formula One car, a Ralt RT1 and a Lotus 51 Formula Ford. In the later two instances, I owned those cars and so was able to custom-mold a seat that gave me that ideal connection and position with the car.

Now, you might read this and say, “Well sure, if I got to drive a Tyrrell Formula One car, it’d rate as one of the very best cars I’d driven too!” And, while at some level you have a good point(!), the truth is I’ve also driven some cars, which intellectually I knew should be some of the best driving cars I’ve ever driven, yet the nature of the driver’s seat made them anything but…at least in my feeble hands.

Case in point, the Maserati Birdcage. No question, one of the most significant, amazing historic racecars of all time. Widely regarded by drivers of the day as being balanced and oh-so-sweet-to drive. However, when I climbed behind the wheel of the 1960 Birdcage that Moss and Gurney drove to a famous win at the Nürburgring, I could not get comfortable in the car.

The seating position for my 6-foot frame was awkward and uncomfortable (how the hell did Dan drive this thing for 6 hours?!), the steering wheel felt to close, the pedals to far to the outside of the frame and the bubble-windshield was such that it was like looking through a funhouse mirror every time I had to peer through it to see the apex of a corner! Assessing the car’s individual elements (power, braking, handling) on their own merits, I knew this was in fact a great car, but due to my inability to comfortably connect with the car, it’s performance that day, and my perception of the experience, was nothing like it could have been. Had I enjoyed the same kind of connection with the Birdcage, that I did with the March, I’m sure the result would have been very different.

I also had a similar experience with the 1974 Shadow Can-Am car. Here was one of the truly great cars, from arguably one of the high points of the sport. The ultimate iteration of the Can-Am lineage, in its final year, the Shadow was an 800-horspower Championship winner. But it is here, where I think I most experienced the importance of the “Butt-Car interface.” I was sharing the car that weekend with noted historic hot-shoe Craig Bennett. Craig and I have a reasonably significant difference in height, but even more impactful was the fact that my freakishly long legs, probably ended somewhere above his waist! In order, to get me in the car so that my butt and hips were actually in the carand not on the car, we had to remove Craig’s custom seat and I had to belt into the bare tub.

This proved to be a pretty pragmatic solution as the overall position was good, my hips were down in the bottom of the tub, I could properly reach the pedals and if I sucked my gut in, I could use the belts without the team having to spend half an hour after each session to readjust then back and forth. However, floating around in the seat-well of the tub proved to be just that…floating around.

As I unleashed the full fury of those 800 ponies behind my head, and made my first left turn, my butt immediately sloshed from one side of the tub to the other! As I changed direction for the following right-hander, it was like a Yankee Clipper coming about on the high seas, my butt and entire upper body sloshed from one side of the seat-well to the other. In reality, I was probably only shifting a few inches from side to side, but the uncoupling of my butt from the car was remarkably distracting and unsettling. If your body is not completely in sync with what the car is doing, you essentially become separate entities…entangled separate entities, but separate entities nonetheless. And without that connection, I don’t care if you’re Mario Andretti or Fernando Alonso, you are not going to be able to get the best out of that car.

With all this said, I’m now firmly of the belief that a driver in an inferior car (but with the perfect connection with that car), will out perform the same driver in a technically better car, that has a horrible driver/car interface. And if this is true, then the oft-overlooked driver’s seat seems to me to arguably be the most important piece of performance equipment on any given racecar.

Turns out a car can be built for comfort AND built for speed.

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This man was a motor racing whirlwind, journalist, author of seven motor sport books, vintage car fan, ran driving courses for the British police and was the founder, president or vice-president of some of the UK’s most prominent motoring and racing organizations. And he kept up that pace until he died at the age of 94 in 1981.

The only time I ever met Sammy Davis was in 1978, when he was a friend’s lunch guest at a London restaurant. We had all finished eating, so I was invited to join them both for coffee. And what an experience that was! Even at 92-years old, Sammy Davis was a motor racing dynamo, bubbling over with enthusiastic memories and still drove himself around in a frog-eyed Austin-Healey Sprite.

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Robert began contributing to VR sometime in 1999. I say sometime in 1999, because it was so long ago, I can’t find any definitive documentation on when he first started with us, other than his first inclusion in the masthead in the May 1999 issue. What I do recall is that the magazine was less than a year old when I received an email from a reader wanting to add a finer level of historical detail to a Maserati 250F article that we had run. While it seemed like minutiae at the time, this reader was going on and on about the importance of the 250F’s long association with Pirelli tires!

However, after further emails back and forth, his strange obsession with the history of Pirelli tires became a bit more clear, when this reader mentioned that he had recently retired from his job in public relations for Pirelli and, if I was interested, he’d love to submit an article or two. Would I be interested?! I jumped at the chance.

As it turned out, Robert Newman had started with the UK division of Pirelli in 1965, been the international head of Pirelli’s public relations since the 1970s and as such had overseen everything from Pirelli’s racy annual calendars to a myriad of publicity launches with Pirelli-sponsored celebrities  like Stirling Moss, Juan Manual Fangio and Sandro Munari, to name but a few. As a relative nobody, cobbling together a magazine out of the back bedroom of my house, Robert’s involvement in the magaine was like striking the editorial equivalent of the Mother Lode.

Over a very short period of time, I came to realize what a knowledgeable, witty and gracious person Robert was (all key elements for any successful automotive PR flack). We clicked on a personal level right away, based solely on emails back and forth and the very rare phone conversation.

It was only much later on in our relationship that I learned that Robert was the somewhat odd combination of an Australian, who was fluent in Italian. While he never would have said as much, I think it spoke volumes about him that, despite not being Italian, he had risen so high within the organization at Pirelli. Having organized countless press launches that included brand ambassadors like Moss and Fangio, not only did Newman have an endless collection of personal stories about these racing greats, but he had also become close personal friends with them. When in Argentina, he stayed with Fangio in Balcarce and in 1990, he worked side-by-side with both the “Maestro” and Moss to produce the extremely popular book, “Fangio: A Pirelli Album.”

Within months Robert was contributing a steady stream of both articles and news out of Italy, so much so that I felt compelled to give him some kind of “title.” We decided on “Italian Bureau Chief” which gave us a both a chuckle, as it sounded very official and implied that we had more than more one person contributing in Italy! But the honorific stuck.

By 2005, Newman began amassing a series of shorter articles centering initially around his first-hand experiences with great drivers he worked with at Pirelli. When the magazine underwent a major upgrade and revision in September 2005, we launched Newman’s new, monthly column entitled “Heroes”, where he would examine the life and career of a different, significant driver each month. I’m pleased to say that Robert was always a prolific writer, so we still have a number of his Heroes pieces to carry us for some time into the future, but sadly these are a precious resource that one day will come to an end.

Over the 20 years that I worked with Robert on a monthly basis, we periodically laid on grandiose plans to meet in person. Trips to the Mille Miglia were planned, as were rendezvous at Retromobile, in Paris. But each fell through for any number of trivial reasons, with the refrain always being, “Ah, we’ll put it together next year.” Like any number of planned interviews with driving greats that were put off too long, sadly my rendezvous with Robert will now never be.

As sad as this realization is to me, I’m thankful that through the miracle of the Internet, I was able to enjoy a rich, digital relationship with one of the truly great gentlemen of the automotive world.

While Robert spent the better part of the last 13 years sharing with us his impressions of the heroes of motorsport, I suggest that it was in fact Robert Newman who was our Hero of the “Heroes.”

The post Hero of the “Heroes” appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

As completely impossible as this scenario may sound, at this year’s SEMA show, FCA (Fiat Chrysler) basically announced the modern day equivalent when they unveiled their upcoming, over-the-counter, performance crate motor, the “Hellephant.” In the first quarter of 2019, you’ll be able to waltz into a Dodge dealer and pick up a brand new, turn-key, supercharged, 426-cu.in. HEMI V8 crate motor that comes from the factory with 1,000 horsepower and 950 lb-ft of torque! According to Dodge’s Mopar performance division, this is the most horsepower ever offered as a crate engine kit by an original equipment manufacturer.

Just to put some perspective on how remarkable this is, the abovementioned 917/30 had a wildly complicated, 5.4-liter, twin-turbocharged 12-cylinder engine that produced 1,100-hp and, in 1973, was the most powerful racing engine the world had ever seen. A little over 10 years later, in 1985, BMW produced the M12 Formula One engine, which was a twin-turbocharged, 1500-cc, inline, 4-cylinder hand grenade that produced 1,110-hp in race trim and allegedly up to 1400-hp on full boost (I say allegedly because even the BMW engineers didn’t know exactly how much horsepower it made as conventional engine dynamometers could only directly measure up to 1,000-hp at the time, so engine outputs above that had to be calculated). But in the case of both the BMW and the Porsche engines, these were extremely temperamental, outrageously complicated and expensive powerplants, only to be run and maintained by factory race teams. But with the Hellephant, any average Joe off the street can plunk down his hard earned cash and walk out the door with a ready to install engine that produces this same level of power…only this unit can easily be dropped  into any pre-1976 vehicle…race or street!

Speaking of hard-earned cash, while the pricing has not been firmly announced yet, Mopar’s previously supreme HEMI crate engine, the Hellcat, sold for $19,350, so it’s reasonable to assume that the Hellephant will come in somewhere between $20,000 and $25,000. And while that is a lot of money for an engine, looking at in the context of our imaginary 1973 scenario above, that actually seems like a relative steal. Or put another way, the Hellephant engine will likely cost a little bit less than what it would cost you to buy an entire car from its manufacturer (MSRP on a new Dodge Charger is $28,000). In 1973, a new Porsche 911 would have cost you about $7,300, so extrapolating out this realtionship, imagine being able to buy Porsche’s most powerful engine of the time (or ever?), for something under 7,000 1973 dollars. How might this have changed history? What if other teams and independents had affordable access to the same “unfair advantage” that Mark Donohue and Roger Penske had access to? Would a clever, “Colin Chapman”-type builder have conjured up a home-brewed giant killer? Would affordable horsepower have saved, or at least extended, the life of the Can-Am series? Keep in mind, around this same period of time, “over-the-counter” availability of a competitive engine in Formula One (e.g. the Cosworth DFV) enabled the “garagistes” like Ken Tyrrell to build World Championship-winning cars, literally out of a shed in their back yard. It’s interesting to daydream about what might have been.

And yet, for all this analogizing the Hellephant to the DFV and the 917/30, it isn’t even being billed as a “race” engine (thought it obviously could be)! The Hellephant is intended as an aftermarket “enthusiast” product to be dropped into a pre-1976 vehicle, whether that be a chopped and channeled Plymouth Road Runner or an Austin-Healey 3000 (Oh, you know someone will do just that). And because it comes out of the box, set up for a reliable 1,000-hp, who knows what it is truly capable of, once aftermarket tuners start tweaking and remapping it. The Hellephant may gloriously usher in a new era of ridiculous horsepower that, quite honestly, probably none of us shadetree knuckleheads should have such easy access to!

Like Hannibal’s elephants turning the tables on the Romans, the new Hellephant could usher in a new era of horsepower warfare. All hail the Hellephant!

The post All Hail the Hellephant appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

By now, you’ve presumably seen at least some of our extensive coverage of this year’s Porsche Rennsport Reunion VI, from Monterey [Click here for our coverage]. At this point, if Rennsport is news to you, you would have to have been in an automotive coma for the past month or two, because it was a massive event and heavily, heavily promoted by Porsche.

In fact, Porsche really went all in on making this their biggest event ever, reportedly investing over $7 million to bring together nearly 2,000 race and road cars, 82,000 spectators and over 50 legendary drivers for five days of activities, dinners and parties under the California sunshine. And one important component of all this was bringing in members of the media, from around the world, to share the stories and photos. Select media members from North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East were all flown in, housed, transported and wined and dined throughout the week…and clearly through some egregious clerical error, I somehow got added to that list!

I had to marvel at the logistics that went into organizing an event of this scale and magnitude. On just one small level, the team at Porsche had to wrangle and coddle more than 100 media members and nearly as many of the company’s legendary drivers for five days. This involved everything from rooms and credentials, to meals and transportation, including bringing in fleets of Suburbans and drivers from around the country just to shuttle everyone around.

One of the great hallmarks of any of these “press junkets” is that there is inevitably a swanky media dinner one night, where the assembled members of the fourth estate, get to enjoy a nice meal and too much wine, with a host of Public Relations reps and a handful of the honored drivers. With this being Porsche’s 70^th anniversary and 6^th Rennsport, I anticipated that this one would be epic. I wasn’t wrong, but it didn’t go down as I envisioned it.

Due to the size of the event, the PR team at Porsche wasn’t able to do quite as much hand-holding of the media as they might have wanted. As such, we were given a schedule of events and then pretty much left to our own, in terms of what we did. The big media dinner was scheduled for Saturday night and our instructions were to meet in front of the hotel, at 6:30 pm, to pick up the shuttle bus that would take us to a restaurant in Carmel. So, being the anal-retentive soul that I am, I dutifully dawned my sports coat and was standing out front at 6:25, ready to go.

There were two shuttle buses out front waiting, so I asked the nearest Porsche rep, which bus for the media dinner? To which he replied, “Either one, they are both going there.” OK, cool.

I stepped onto the second of the two buses, which was empty, and the driver told me that I might as well get on the other bus, as it would be leaving first. OK, cool. I’m a good soldier, and I do what I’m told.

As I stepped up into the other bus, I asked the driver, “Is this going to the media dinner?” To which he replied, “Yes.” Again, OK, cool.

Getting up into the bus, I see there is only one passenger on board, and it is 1977 24 Hours of Le Mans winner Jürgen Barth. I’ve met Barth on a couple of occasions over the years, but I’m sure he’s met a million journalists and judging by the vacant “Who are you?” expression on his face, I can see that my supposition is correct, so I smile and take a window seat a couple of rows back.

A few moments later, 2-time Le Mans winner Gijs van Lennep and his wife climb on board and sit down next to Barth and immediately start chatting away. The van Lenneps are then followed by David Piper and his wife, followed by Richard Attwood and his wife, then Hans Hermann and Jochen Mass. By the time Vic Elford clamors up on the bus it is starting to get filled up. Gerrard Larousse and his wife get in next but now there are only two seats left, so Le Mans winner Larousse takes the one in the row in front of me, while his poor wife gives me a nervous a smile that says, “I hope you’re not an axe murderer,” and takes up the last seat next to me. Now the bus is completely full and even though Brian Redman sticks his head in to taunts and laughter from the assembled crowd, there is no room for him, so he and Jacky Ickx have to find space on the second bus. As the doors to our bus close and it begins to pull away from the hotel, I take a quick look around and am struck by the sudden realization that I am the ONLY non-Le Mans winner on this bus! I then also come to the sobering epiphany that everyone else on the bus has also come to the realization that I am the only non-Le Mans winner on this bus. Hmm, perhaps not so cool.

Once we arrive at the restaurant in Carmel, the awkwardness (for me at least) persists, in that not only am I the only person there who didn’t race for Porsche, but the group as a whole are all also old friends, so I kind of stand to the side with my glass of wine and just observe, assuming that when the second bus arrives with the rest of the media, I’ll have some other people to chat with. But as Jacky Ickx and George Follmer join the patio space that we’re all milling around on, I make room for them and in so doing block the way of Elliot Forbes-Robinson and his wife as they try and pass through. I don’t know if they sensed my isolation or the one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other vibe I was giving off, but they graciously started up what proved to be a genuinely enjoyable conversation.

We talked for some time about Elliot’s early days in racing and some mutual friends, when Bobby Rahal sidled over to say Hi to Elliot. Finally, a legend that I at least know well enough (and isn’t a predominantly German speaker) that I can carry a conversation with! The three of us chatted for a few minutes before the others broke off to chat with their “legend friends” returning me to milling about on my own.

I made my way into the restaurant, where the Porsche PR staff were organizing place settings for where everyone would sit. I happened to spot the woman who was overseeing the operation and since I had not yet met her in person, I went up and introduced myself. I thanked her for inviting me and we made small talk for a minute or two, before I mentioned, my surreal bus trip. “…yeah, I looked around the bus and realized that I was the only person on the bus who was not a famous racecar driver!” She dutifully laughed, then had a moment of realization and asked me, “Are you supposed to be a the media dinner?”

“Err…Yes, I responded. Is this not it?!”

She smiled that smile that a mom does when her precocious 5-year-old does something cute, but inappropriate, then said, “Let me walk you down to the media dinner…it’s just right down the street.”

As we walked through the streets of Carmel, I repeatedly offered how embarrassed I was and she repeatedly reassured me that I shouldn’t be embarrassed, as it was their fault not mine, but I couldn’t shake off the overwhelming feeling of being an interloper. Nor the profound sense of disappointment of not getting to have dinner with a restaurant full of racing legends!

Taking my place at the real media dinner, I couldn’t help feeling like I had been banished to the kids’ table, after having a few tantalizing moments at the grown up table. But another late-comer to the media dinner soon took up the last empty chair next to me.  I didn’t recognize him at first, until he introduced himself, “Hi, I’m Patrick Long.”

So in the end, I ended up having dinner with a really fascinating Le Mans winner after all…just not 50 of them!

The post Rennsport Impostor appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Last Friday I was mindlessly killing some time on Facebook, when I happened to stumble across the livestream of Goodwood’s Kinrara Trophy race for over 3-liter GT cars. Dubbed as the world’s most expensive race grid, this one-hour twilight race featured 8 Ferrari 250 SWBs, 8 Jaguar E-Types, 4 Ferrari GTOs, 4 Aston Martin DB4GTs, 2 Cobras, 2 Big Healeys and a Maserati 3500 GT thrown in for good measure. With a Ferrari 250 GTO having just sold at Monterey for $52 million, the combined value of the Kinrara field was pushing a half a billion dollars!

What immediately sucked me in was a stunning battle royale at the front between the Ferrari 250 GT “Breadvan” of Emanuele Pirro and Niklas Halusa swapping the lead back and forth with the Jaguar E-Type of Jon Minshaw and Phil Keen. As has become expected at Goodwood, these guys were flat-out, hammer-and-tong racing, with no quarter asked, and none given…and they weren’t alone. All up and down the 30-car Kinrara field, there was action and a commensurate amount of cringe-worthy carnage. And when I say cringe-worthy, I mean rear-ended Ferrari 250 GTO, smashed up E-Types, wildly spinning Aston Martin DB4GTs…that kind of cringe –worthy!

But as much as I thoroughly enjoyed the action and excitement of the Kinrara race (Formula One, please take note), it was almost surreal to: 1) even see a 30-car field of such significance and quality; and 2) witness that these icons were being flogged with such reckless abandon. It seems a bizarre dichotomy that very nearly the only historic race event on the planet that can draw out a full field of these hyper-valuable, highly coveted cars is also the one event most likely to all but destroy them!

Elsewhere in the historic racing universe, the past two decades has seen a consistent and steady diminution in participation from the “serious” and most historic racecars. The general party line has always been that these “treasures” are simply too valuable to risk putting out on the track with “lesser” machinery—the argument always being that the owners of the “lesser” cars have far less at risk. Yet, ironically Goodwood has consistently shown—also for the past 20 years now—that this notion is complete nonsense. Were I of the Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos persuasion, I could run my 250 GTO in a dozen regional historic races, for a dozen years and not come even remotely close to the potential damage exposure that one Goodwood Revival would expose my car to. In fact, I’d argue that if I put my GTO in a dozen regional races, it would probably be the safest environment in the world for that car, because EVERYONE is going to be scared silly to put so much as a scratch on it. In reality, it would be the closest thing to racing with a force field around your car.

So what gives? Why have these significant cars, by and large, abandoned all but the most prestigious grids? Oops, just answered my own question…prestige. As Goodwood and Monaco have shown, it isn’t really the cost or the potential “exposure” that holds the owners back, it’s the level of prestige and audience. If you can afford to run a GTO, you want to run it on a world stage, with tens of thousands of spectators and television coverage, not some podunky club race. Yet, one of the confounding pieces to this dilemma is the fact that there seems to be fewer and fewer events on the world stage that now command the necessary level of prestige to draw out those kinds of cars.

And, considering the attrition rate at Goodwood, and the fact that they only built 36 250 GTOs, how long can it be before we’re well and truly asking ourselves, “Where have all the GTOs gone?!”

The post Where have all the GTOs gone? appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Once the 4-stroke Otto cycle form of internal combustion engine became the standard, some of the greatest leaps in performance and efficiency came through improvements in the engines ability to “breathe.” Today, despite claims of the internal combustion engine’s imminent demise, a new technological development is poised to revolutionize and improve the gas-burning engine—EAV, or Electronically Activated Valves.

Looking back at the influence of valve train development on racing history, one of the most significant advancements was made in 1912, by Peugeot. As I recounted in this space, last January [Respect for the Charlatans], in 1912 Peugeot made a major commitment to Grand Prix racing and did so by developing a very different type of racing engine, that instead of relying on massive displacement, focused on smaller, higher revving cylinders with better volumetric efficiency. This relatively diminutive 7.6-liter engine (compared to its 14-20-liter rivals!), featured a new double overhead camshaft arrangement that activated not two, but four valves per cylinder. Sound familiar? It should, as that became the archetype for nearly every racing engine that has followed since.

Once racing engines started spinning much faster, a new engineering challenge reared its ugly head, valve float. With conventional poppet valves being closed by spring activation, as engine speeds increased, if the springs weren’t strong enough, they couldn’t keep the valve in contact with the controlling camshaft, resulting in the valve essentially “floating” in air and not closing in time. Since the early metallurgy could only make reliable springs of a certain strength, other technological solutions were sought. One of these was the development of desmodromic valve actuation.

In a desmodromic valve set up, the face of one cam lobe pushes the valve open, while another physically pushes it closed. Developed by Gustav Mees as early as 1896, a version of it was briefly used by Delage in 1914, but this novel form of valve actuation didn’t really see practical racing application until Mercedes-Benz utilized it in the mid-1950s on the W196 Grand Prix and 300 SLR racecars. Later used by the short-lived Scarab Grand Prix effort and by OSCA in their 2-liter, 4-cylinder sports car, the technology was mostly sidelined in automobile racing by advancements in spring technology and the desmodromic’s complexity and sliding friction drawbacks, though it has lived on in motorcycle racing, most notably by Ducatti.

It wouldn’t be until the 1980s when another major change in valve train technology would appear. During this period Renault, began experimenting with replacing conventional coil valve springs, with compressed gas. By using a sealed chamber of compressed gas to close the valve, Renault found that they could eliminate both valve float and spring harmonics, which both severely limited the maximum rpm a racing engine could attain. By 1989, this system was sophisticated enough that a Renault V-10 engine could reach a redline of over 14,300 rpm! Since then, pneumatic valve springs have been a standard for Formula One racing engines…but that may soon change.

For several years, it has been known that a variety of manufacturers, including Renault, have been experimenting with EAV, or electrically activated valves. In some ways, this could be viewed as an extreme extension of desmodromic activation, in that, instead of relying on a crankshaft driven cam to control valve opening and closing, now each valve has its own electrically driven actuator to open and close any given valve. While this type of advanced system has been experimented with by various manufacturers, a British company named Camcon Automotive has now debuted a completely digital valve system, that could very well usher in a new era in internal combustion engines.

Camcon’s new system, which has been developed in conjunction with Jaguar Land Rover, utilizes an individual cam-type lobe, directly driven by a computer-driven electric motor to control when the valve is opened, how far it is opened and when it is closed. By uncoupling this process from a direct-driven camshaft, theirs is much less internal friction and not only do the valves now have infinite timing variability, but now even the fundamental nature of the combustion cycle itself can be manipulated, in real time. According to Camcon COO Mark Gostick, “What you can do – in principle at least, we haven’t demonstrated it yet – is you can turn the vehicle, for short periods of time, from four-stroke operation into two-stroke operation. That essentially doubles the power output. It gives you, when you need it, a burst of power. In principle, you can do it, for a short time period that’s limited by heat and lubrication factors.

“Two-stroke is one of those things that kind of is, was and always has been the future of internal combustion engines. There’s renewed interest in two-strokes for a number of applications and we might be able to do something interesting there, just for very short periods, so you can get over this problem with small engines in big cars.” Gostick goes on to explain that Camcon’s new IVA, or Intelligent Valve Actuation, can also improve on cylinder deactivation as well, “So if you’re on the motorway and you’re cruising along, you can put it in 12-stroke mode, meaning that every cylinder only fires every third stroke. But it does it over the whole engine, like a roaming cylinder deactivation if you like. A lot of cylinder deactivation just knocks off one or two cylinders, and because it’s mechanical, it always knocks the same ones off, and when you re-engage them, you get hydrocarbon spikes because there’s engine oil building up in the cylinders while they’re not firing. If you do 12-stroking, you keep all the cylinders warm and you stop this build-up of lubricant, so you get the benefit without the penalty when you re-engage four stroke again.”

While Camcon’s new system is predominantly targeted for improving the efficiency of passenger cars—where it is believed it will reduce an engine’s CO2 output by as much as 20%—utilizing this type of a system in racing applications opens up the possibility of another quantum leap in engine performance, similar to that seen with the Peugeot in 1912. At the very least, can you imagine the engine shriek, when a Formula One driver pushes the “pass” button on his or her 15,000 rpm race engine and it briefly doubles down as a two-stroke?!

So will electronically activated valves revolutionize racing? Quite possibly. So if you have any old camshafts in your garage, you might want to hold on to them—I think they are on the verge of becoming collector’s items!

The post The Camshaft is Dead…Long Live the Camshaft appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

The sport of automobile racing is arguably about 130-years old, assuming you subscribe to the notion that the first organized race, using gasoline-powered internal combustion engines, occurred in France in 1887. But looking back across this 130-year history, there are a number of significant events that stand out from the rest, events like the Vanderbilt Cup races, the Targa Florio, the Mille Miglia, the British Grand Prix and the 24 Hours of Daytona. But within the pantheon of “the greatest races of all-time,” really only three events rise to the top, if for no other reason than the fact that they are the three oldest events still in continuous existence—The Monaco Grand Prix, the Indianapolis 500 and the 24 Hours of Le Mans. After examining all three of this year’s events, I’ve come to the conclusion that Le Mans has now assumed the mantle as the true pinnacle of the sport. Let the invectives fly!

Of the three contenders, the Monaco Grand prix is the “youngest” event having had its inaugural running in 1929. Like the others, with the exception of World War II, it has been held every year since. Monaco holds a special place in the Grand Prix calendar as the grande dame, despite many for years decrying that Formula One has outgrown this ultra-tight, all but impossible to pass street circuit run through the tiny principality. Has F1 outgrown Monaco? If I’m honest, probably, but being the last of the old school circuits, bestows on Monaco a certain nostalgic connection to the history of Formula One that will likely insure its survival for at least the foreseeable future…assuming, of course, that Formula One doesn’t die of a self-inflicted wound in the near future.

The oldest event of the three is the Indianapolis 500, with its first running having been in 1911. Dubbed the “greatest spectacle in racing”, Indy’s long and illustrious history is legendary and were I writing this piece 10-15 years ago, I likely would have said that it was, in fact, the pinnacle of the sport. But in those intervening years, political battles and ever homogenizing technical rules have sadly dulled the shine on this once sparkling gem. In the early 1990s, I used to throw an annual Indy 500 viewing party where 30 or more of my historic racing friends would rent a room, lay in provisions and anxiously watch the race together on the big screen. Now, I feel hard-pressed to even watch a 10-minute highlight reel the next day. What happened?

Like Monaco and Indianapolis, the 24 Hours of Le Mans has also had its ups and downs. First run in 1923, that inaugural race was won by the French duo of André Lagache and René Léonard, driving a 3-liter Chenard & Walcker Sport (great piece of worthless trivia!). As the decades rolled on, there would be halcyon periods like the Bentley-Alfa days of the ’20s-’30s, the Jaguar-Cunningham period of the 1950s, and of course the rise of the Porsche juggernaut in the 1970s. Interest seemed to wane some, just before and after the turn of the century, as Le Mans too wrestled with how to balance technology rules with compelling racing, but in recent years both the drama and the interest seems to have undergone a resurgence. Perhaps, for me, the most telling indication of Le Mans’ current popularity was when a friend—who is a very casual racing enthusiast—gushed how he was glued to the Le Mans coverage this year, but never said a peep about Indy or Monaco.

But, there’s also another bellwether by which to measure the current day status of each of these seminal events—historic racing. While the Indy 500 does have a Legends Day [Click here for the Legends Day Photo Gallery] where the old racecars are demonstrated and a separate general historic race meeting at the facility, there really is no dedicated historic event that captures the same format and flavor of the Indy 500.

Monaco on the other hand, does have a biannual historic race meeting, which puts a contingent of authentic period racecars, out on the same course as the full Grand Prix. And while this is a marvelous event, for me as an enthusiast it somehow feels a little distant and less inclusive. Again, perhaps a byproduct of the challenges of running an event of that type in one of the smallest and most expensive communities in the world?

Which brings us back to Le Mans. Not only has Le Mans gotten its professional racing back in order, but they have done the historic component right, as well. This past weekend’s Le Mans Classic saw over 135,000 spectators for a stand alone, historic race meeting, which is pretty impressive considering the Indy 500 itself typically draws about 200,000 spectators. With over 1,000 drivers sharing 700 historically accurate cars on track, both during the day and at night, Le Mans Classic provided the quality, nostalgia and intimate access that are the hallmarks of a great historic race meeting. In short, Le Mans is hitting on all cylinders.

Now, before you start clipping random letters out of the newspaper to construct your carefully constructed hate mail, let me say that my grandiose announcement about Le Mans being the pinnacle of our sport is 1) purely subjective, and 2) purely a moment in time. As alluded to above, the “Big 3” have all been around for more or less 100 years and in that century they have all seen their fortunes and status ebb and flow with the times. I would argue, that as we sit today in July 2018, that Le Mans has managed to claw its way to the top of the heap, but that is not to say that it might not lose its way or that Monaco or Indy might not recapture the throne.

It’s just that for me, today, Le Mans is…well…Classic.

The post The Pinnacle of Motor Sport appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

I’m sure you’re probably all too aware of the groundswell shift throughout the publishing world. In order for us to continue to be viable, in this ever-changing landscape, this will be the last regular monthly issue in print, as we fully commit to producing VR digitally, via our web site. Like you, I have mixed feelings about the monthly print issue stopping at 225, but I’m also excited by the almost unlimited canvas and possibilities that the Web opens up for VR and its readers. (Plus, read down further to learn how the best of VR will still be available in print).

Let me be clear that the magazine is not closing or ending. All the regular content that you’ve come to love and expect is going to continue on…in reality, the only thing changing will be the delivery device. As a paid subscriber, we intend to make this conversion process as easy as possible for you and to ensure that you get more than the residual value of your print subscription, when we set you up with your new “All Access” online subscription. As an example, if you had say $65 worth of value still on your existing print subscription, we will give you that much in your online subscription, plus some extra for good measure, i.e. two years of All Access ($35/yr value) without any payment. If you only have say half a year, or $25 of value left on your print sub, we’ll still give you a full year of the online.

Logistically, if you purchased your existing print subscription through our web site, you don’t have to do anything! We’ve already set up your account, so you can log in (using your regular username and password) and you’re good to go. For everyone else, I have included a separate sheet, inside the polybag of this magazine, with easy-to-follow instructions on how you can activate your online subscription.[pullquote]“While we all love holding the ‘vessel’ in our hands, at the end of the day it’s really the content that’s meaningful and important.”[/pullquote]

While I realize that this may come as unwelcome news for some of you, I assure you that due to pressures from advertisers, readers and the sweeping changes in the world of publishing, this move is necessary to ensure that we can continue to provide you the same quantity and quality of authoritative content. While we all love holding the “vessel” in our hands, at the end of the day it’s really the content that’s meaningful and important, and this step is the only way for us to protect that, so that we can all enjoy it for hopefully another 20 years! But if you’re still a little unsettled by this, here’s just a few of the reasons why you’ll receive even better value from your online subscription:

• More Content— No longer bridled by page counts and restrictions, we can now bring you even more of what you love. If an article is 8,000 words long, we can now run it in its entirety and not have to edit for length. Likewise, we can now include a virtually unlimited amount of photos to support our Profiles, news, Photo Galleries and other articles. Where an article previously may not have fit within our fixed departments and columns, we now will have unlimited space to provide you an even wider variety of articles and photos, as well as an entirely new dimension of videos, audio…there really are no limits!

• Timeliness—Articles and news will now be posted daily, throughout the month, such that news and Photo Gallery coverage of events will be accessible in just days, not months.

• Value— As a subscriber, you no longer have to help carry the ever-increasing overhead of printing and mailing the magazine, as a result the cost to renew (down the road, when your current sub expires) will be less than half of what it was. And for our overseas readers, not only will you no longer be penalized by having to wait an extra week or two to receive your content, you will now pay the same reduced rate everyone else does, eliminating the onerous Air Mail surcharges that the printed edition required.

• VR Archive—As an “All Access” subscriber, you will not only have access to all of the current and future issues of VR moving forward, but you will also have unlimited access to the full archive of back issue material available online. Currently, that’s more than 10 years’ worth of issues—more than 6,500 complete articles—available at the click of your mouse and we’re adding several new back issues to the archive every month, as we work our way back to that first issue from 1998. If you were to purchase all these back issues it would cost you more than $3,000…and you’d need a shed to store them all!

• Searchability—Unlike the print edition, our web site has a search function, which enables you to instantly search the entire 6,000-plus archive of articles to find any content that contains your keyword. In just seconds, you can read every article we’ve ever published on Fangio, or Porsche, or just about anything.

• Accessibility— Because all this content is accessible via an easy to use browser-based system, you can read VR on any device, anywhere, using any web browser, without any balky apps or proprietary systems.

Finally, as I alluded to earlier, while the print edition will no longer be monthly, we’re not planning on abandoning it completely. Our current plan is, once a year, to produce a glossy, stylish annual that will include all 24 of that year’s Racecar and Roadcar Profiles, fully laid out as we’ve done in the past, in a tangible, coffee table-worthy keepsake edition, which we’ll send to you free, as a way of thanking you for your continued support.

Again, while I too have mixed feelings about the magazine changing after 20 long years of service to this community, please keep in mind that these changes are necessary to ensure that VR can continue to share and preserve the history and stories of automotive history’s greatest cars, drivers and legends. I hope you’ll take advantage of all that our Web edition has to offer and take it for a long test drive. Like any great sports car, it may feel a little strange and foreign at first, but after you spend some time and get comfortable with it, I think you’ll really come to enjoy the way she drives.

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for your past and future support!

All the best,

Casey Annis

Publisher/ Editor

The post Turning the Page to Start a New Chapter appeared first on Sports Car Digest.

Frédéric Vasseur, Team Prinicpal, commented, “I am very much looking forward to the 2018 season, and to seeing Marcus (Ericsson) and Charles (Leclerc) on track. We have put lots of effort and hard work into the C37 over the last few months, and it is fantastic to be launching the new car today. Our target ahead of 2018 is clear: We have to catch up with the field and to continue improving our performance during the course of the season. We have put lots of energy and commitment into the development of the C37. The return of Alfa Romeo to Formula One sets another milestone in the team’s history, and I am proud that such a historical brand has chosen us for their return to the sport. We are eager to start the 2018 season as the Alfa Romeo Sauber F1 Team.”

Interestingly, the 2018 season will mark the return of the Milanese powerhouse to the Formula One grid after a 33-year absence.

While Alfa Romeo has competed in motorsport throughout its over 100-year history, it has only periodically made forays into Grand Prix racing and Formula One. In the 1920s and ’30s, Alfa’s monoposto 8C racecars were a dominant force in European Grand Prix racing, being driven by the likes of Tazio Nuvolari and Rudolf Caracciola.

Then, after World War II, the Formula One World Championship was created and in its inaugural season, Nino Farina and Alfa’s Tipo 158 “Alfetta” would emerge as clear champions, followed by another championship in 1952, this time in the hands of Argentinean legend Juan Manuel Fangio. While the underlying reasons are often debated, Alfa Romeo chose to retire from Formula One after the 1952 season, with the Quadrifoglio not gracing the Grand Prix starting grid again until 1970, when a McLaren M7D was equipped with one of Autodelta’s Tipo 33 V8 engines.

The next few years would see the occasional appearance of Alfa-engined Grand Prix cars, including the now famous March 711 fielded for Ronnie Peterson in 1971. But in 1976, Alfa became an official engine supplier to the Brabham team, resulting in a brief return to the winner’s rostrum.

With renewed on-track success, Alfa Romeo made the decision to return to Formula One as a constructor in 1979, with the introduction of the Tipo 177. But Alfa’s factory effort experienced up and down fortunes over the ensuing years, with the team showing occasional flashes of competitiveness, but no victories. By the end of the 1985 season, Alfa pulled the plug on its Formula One program, not to return until this February.

Some might argue, “Is this really a return or just a badging exercise?” I would argue, that based on the patterns and history described above, this is likely just the first move in a multi-step return. While the “Alfa” engine being used in the Sauber is, in fact, a Ferrari-developed unit, keep in mind that Ferrari, Maserati and Alfa Romeo are all brands under the FCA umbrella, which fluidly interchange all kinds of resources and development. Also, remember that when Alfa last returned to Formula One, in the 1970s, they first did so as an engine supplier, got their collective feet wet, then went all in with their own effort. Finally, as has been the case for so many major manufacturers entering Formula One in recent years, the modus operandi is that you first partner with an independent team (e.g., Benetton/Renault, Stewart/Jaguar, BAR/ Honda, Brawn/Mercedes-Benz, Red Bull/Aston Martin) then eventually assimilate and rebrand the entire operation. Given all the above, I’d be willing to wager that Sauber eventually gets absorbed and Alfa will once again return to Formula One as a fully fledged constructor…especially if Ferrari ever makes good on its periodic threats to leave F1! First Alfa returns to the North American market, then they return to Formula One…it’s a good time to be an Alfisti!

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Just looking at the cover of VR this month, you’ll realize something is different. For only the second time, in our 20 years of monthly publication, there is a person featured on the cover, rather than a car. The last time was in 2008, when Phil Hill passed away. Now, sadly, we’ve once again reached this somber territory with the passing of American legend Dan Gurney.

As a tribute, we devote this entire issue of Vintage Racecar to Dan and his legacy. You’ll read lots about his history and achievements throughout this issue, so I’m not going to waste space regurgitating any of that here. In fact, the only unique thing that I can offer is a window into a number of personal interactions I was fortunate to have with Dan over the past 36 years.

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As you’ll read in this month’s news, Bette Hill, wife of World Champion Graham and mother of World Champion Damon, has passed away at the age of 91.

After meeting future husband Graham, at a rowing club function in 1950, Bette would four years later be swept up into the dangerous world of motorsport. A mere four more years, in 1958, Graham made his Formula One debut at Monaco and from that point onwards the Hill “family business” would be professional motorsport. I say “family business”, because while Graham was being paid to drive the car, Bette was very much his partner, if not “teammate,” in so many ways. Bette’s constant presence and support at the track enabled Graham to focus on his driving and perform his best.

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