Pete Lyons Fifty years ago, when people communicated on paper delivered by hand, her brother’s letters from far-off England would...
Pete Lyons Partway through an evening of kind words, warm recollections and congratulations, the moderator came on the mic and...
Pete Lyons Come with me to Italy, if you’ve got a minute, I want to show you something neat. We’re standing along a sun-drenched country road, waiting for old race cars in the Mille Miglia Storica commemorative rally to appear. It’s a scene of joyous beauty, with flowers spangling the...
It was one of those good races spoiled by bad scoring. After taking the checkered flag at 10 pm, Phil...
Telling about cannibalizing a pickup truck engine for his racecar, he said, “Any of you would have really enjoyed” that...
Let’s call her “Debbie,” because that’s what Derrick Walker called her and I never did get her right name. Must’ve been flummoxed by her sly, limpid eyes. Walker is a Champ Car team co-owner whom I’ve known since he was a Brabham F1 mechanic. We were catching up in the...
Dan Gurney once tried to show me how to wring the neck of a recalcitrant racecar to squeeze out that...
Pete Lyons The little Speedster stared out the dealership’s window like a puppy, its big eyes pleading mournfully: Won’t you take me home? A young couple kept stopping by to gaze in at the radiant red roadster. “Every week—sometimes more often—we fell in love with it.” Become a Member &...
Friday evening before the 1975 Austrian Grand Prix, over dinner in a quiet countryside hotel, Mark Donohue told us about...
It reads like a plot line no real screenwriter would dare pitch: A little-known transmission engineer who has never designed...
Shanghai’s gaudy new, $300-million supercircuit, home of the first-ever Grand Prix in China, has a truly distinctive first turn complex. It coils up tightly one way like a watch spring, then unwinds. It seems obvious to me it’s meant to look like the oriental yin and yang symbol. SpeedTV commentators...
A couple of years and a bit ago I suggested in this spot that, during these times of economic stress,...
Performance perv that I am, I’m turned on by naked racecars. Even partially undressed ones. Lift an engine cover, unveil...
Pete Lyons Occasionally here you may notice me express disdain for the twisted state modern Formula One has gotten itself...
Interview most any racecar designer and you’ll likely hear a beautifully turned tale of insight, and enlightenment, and clever science...
Pete Lyons I edged my toes to the brink of an abyss a thousand feet deep, issuing my own small dare to this mighty mountain, and from this precarious apex of the world I gazed a hundred miles out to the vast eastern horizon, where dawnlight was rising to join...
We aren’t timeless, but our artifacts can be, and the achievements they represent should live forever. That’s at least some...
Pete Lyons Fair warning: I know very little about my topic, which is Rush, the new movie set in the...
Pete Lyons Try throwing your arms around all the richness of racing … too immense to embrace, isn’t it? Racecars, raceways, races, innovations, news, controversy, history, drama, beauty, excitement, emotion; a single day at the track produces far more than a single enthusiast can harvest, and we haven’t yet mentioned...
Bet you’re thinking of Fangio’s transcendent victory at the ’Ring. The launch of the Fuelie Corvette. The beautiful Scarabs. Jaguar’s...
One sunny spring day in Spain, twenty-three Grand Prix drivers shut themselves into a van in a race paddock, refusing...
Sometime in the rainy wee hours of the recent Rolex 24 at Daytona, a race I find myself covering again after a lapse of, gosh, decades, one of my younger colleagues turned and asked, “So what do you think?” My response wasn’t prepared, but it was instant. “Well, it’s not...
Fifty-one years after winning his fifth and final world championship, Juan Manuel Fangio is still my favorite F1 driver. Never...
As the years pile up, I find myself learning more about people I used to know than I ever appreciated...
Conception, a friend of mine used to say, “is the biggest word in the English language.” His aphorism came to mind when I learned of the recent passing of John Cooper. It was never my privilege to meet Cooper, but the cars he and his father, Charles, created were central...
Pete Lyons Our reigning World Champion has forced us to think, once again, about sportsmanship in motorsport. Whether or not...
Thirty years ago the world was no less crassly simplistic than it is today, and many people glancing at Peter...
Sicily’s wild old Targa Florio rates as one of the most appealingly primitive speed events I’ve ever been to. Most race organizers strive to spread a frosting of civility over this nutty-fruitcake business, but they don’t seem to worry about that in Baja, nor did I see much of it...
