When you see Sebastian Vettel and Jensen battling, you just see the car. You don’t see any emotion on the track. Sometimes an angry arm will come up, but for the most part it’s a car and a helmet. It could almost be remote controlled (some would say it is too remote controlled—zing!).
This image of José Froilán González ahead of Ascari in their Ferraris though, smacked me upside the head with what we’ve lost by hiding the drivers. José and Alberto here could be a couple of kids in their go karts or BMX bikes. They look determined; but they also look like they’re having a hell of a good time. Even though their faces are obscured by shadow and photographic noise, their body language: leaning, elbows out, face poking around the windscreen. They really look like their minds, their hearts, their souls are out there on the race track. They look like they’re having an absolute blast.
The fact that Silverstone of 1951, in this photo anyway, looks like you could have assembled this course in a parking lot with some cones. It just accentuates the fact that this marvelous sport was once just a bunch of guys wanting to find out how fast she’ll go and got together to put on a race.
Usually I don’t categorize something under Video AND Audio, but I’m going to make an exception for this ridiculously lovely sounding clip from the Gstaad Classic 2011 rally. Check out Sports Car Digest’s event report and marvelous gallery of Julien Mahiels’ shots from the event.
After last week’s post about vintage sidecar racers, the Ledermanns, @MplsMoto passed along this tasty nugget of BMW R75/5 sidecar runs from Mid-Ohio. How could I not share it?
I always assumed that an open-wheeled racer would be leagues easier to maintain than a closed-wheel car. After all, there’s little or no bodywork to deal with: You can more immediately locate and diagnose a problem, you don’t have to spend additional maintenance hours removing body panels, and you don’t have to distort your arms in impossibly ornate ways to reach around things.
It’s all just there.
This 1975 Datsun 280Z currently available on eBay, though, makes me wonder if it’s all just in the setup. This looks just about as accessible as it can be. I don’t know if it conforms to any particular vintage regulations, but this looks almost as easy to work on as a Formula Ford of the same vintage.
Buy it Now at $45K, bidding is open until Sept. 22.
When you’re born in Brescia it only makes sense that you’ll become a racing driver. I’d say that this pipe may have been Felice Bonetto’s lucky charm, but it’s worth noting that he was disqualified from the 1952 German GP at the Nurburgring—where the above photo was snapped. Maybe he already knew he was disqualified and thought, “The Hell with it, I may as well enjoy a lovely drive around the Eifel Mountains. Now where is my pipe?”.
It would be only a year later that Felice’s drive would be anything but leisurely while leading the 1953 Carrera Panamericana for Lancia. It sounds a bit apocryphal, but Benetto reportedly marked dangerous corners along the route with blue signs. It was at one of these locations—despite this care in marking these corners—that Felice would take a 60mph corner at 125. Bonetto swerved his Lancia D24 into a building and was killed at the scene.
