Seeing vintage images from Goodwood really drives home how good a job the Goodwood organization has done in keeping the spirit of the old track very much alive. I can almost shift these photos to color in my mind thanks to the coverage and imagery from the contemporary Goodwood races.

Some of these photos (maybe all of them?) are by Alan Smith, who has prints available at Rosenstiel’s.

via Librarying.

Make yourself comfortable friends. Karl Ludvigsen is about to tell you everything there is to know about the B.R.M. V16.

Everything.

I think all lectures, and Power Point presentations for that matter, should start with 16 screaming cylinders, don’t you?

Great soundtrack in this recap of the ’67 German GP. 1967 was the first year of the Hohrenhain chicane leading into the start/finish straight, which attempted to reduce the speeds. Even so, it’s still the Nurburgring, which with these light f1 cars means liftoff at Pflanzgarten.

Bad luck for Dan Gurney in this race, he broke the lap record 4 times in the early stages of the race (so much for attempts at reducing speeds!) only to suffer from a broken U-joint 2 laps from the finish.

Enough has been written about the differences in modern Formula 1 and the GP drivers of the pre-downforce era, but I’m especially struck by the starts. The narrower cars and wider classic tracks means that the start is a mob scene. Groupings of 6 and 7 wide weren’t uncommon in the dash to turn one. Today’s narrower tracks allows for a much more controlled and less chaotic, and certainly less exciting, start.

With a first row start and fastest lap in the race, the 1962 French Grand Prix really should have belonged to Graham Hill. But a minor bump with a privateer and later engine problems forced Graham to finish 10 laps off the pace. This race was made famous, of course, by Gurney’s win in a Porsche — the first Formula 1 win for both. Let’s take a spin around the forests of Normandy with Graham Hill at the wheel of his unlucky BRM, shall we?

Now this is exactly the position you probably don’t want to be in. Then again, by nearly any measure, sitting on the track watching your BRM tumble through the air, throwing wheels, exhaust, and everything else, is probably a damn fortunate position to end up in. Considering.

This is Hans Herrmann, watching his BRM barrel roll through the air at the South end of the 1959 German Grand Prix. This race was run on the steeply banked AVUS track in West Berlin. The track might have been more economical to run in place of the Nurburgring, but is it ever boring. Looking much more like a modern Speedway than a proper Formula 1 track, it’s simply two very long straights with two banked hairpins at either end. It was at the south end that it all went wrong for our friend Hans here; dropping from 4th to 3rd to slow for the turn. Looks like he got a bit too close to the hay bales, and it was all over. This might be one of only a few examples of being safer without the driver’s safety belts. Whew.