Damnit. Rest in peace, chicken farmer. More at Speed and the New York Times.

Love this anecdote from that Times article. “Bill Neale, an automotive artist who illustrated Shelby’s designs, once recalled for Vanity Fair that when Shelby assembled his first Cobra, he painted it yellow and had it photographed for the cover of Sports Car Graphic. The next day he showed another magazine what seemed to be an identical car, colored red.

“I said, ‘You have two of them?’ ” Neale recalled. “And he said, ‘Nah, we just painted it so they think we have two.’ ”

And Bill Cosby’s routine on Carroll and his machines is always worth a listen. (Thanks RossLH)

And, for reasons I can’t quite explain, I hope this article is true.

Corvette Forum member Sonny557 was there to see it go down: “So I am watching in my mirror as his 66 is rolling along the highway with no driver !!! It slowly reaches the grassy part of the shoulder and slows down somewhat before going into a concrete drain and goes on for several more feet before coming to a stop. Miraculously only the whitewall had a major scuff mark on it, the car had no scratches or rash!!”

Sounds like the owner was pretty nonchalant about it, just hopped in an drove to the next exit. I might have fallen to me knees in euphoria.

Click on over for the complete story, and double-check triple-check your tie-downs.

Hat tip to TurretOpera’s post on Reddit for digging this one up.

Love this shot of a sign painter at work from the USA Diligence Flickr stream of Jim Kimberly’s Ferrari 166 MM being prepared for a race at Palm Springs. Check out more of Kimberly’s Ferrari here.

Thanks John for pointing this one out!

This is what it looks like when your GT40 is being off-loaded on a Brizilian dock in 1969. I’m sure there were some nervous folks on the docks that day watching this incredible machine twisting in the air high over the deck of the ship. Tense moments for sure. This footage is of GT40 chassis GT/40P 1083, currently on offer from Fantasy Junction. She looks as beautiful and determined today as when she was winning races for Sidney Cardoso and his Colegio Arte e Instrucao (C.A.I.) Racing team.

More information and a TON of photos on Fantasy Junction’s detail page. Thanks for the heads up, Paul!

The photo itself, though, especially when viewed among the others in the set, is a marvelous achievement. Angerer manages the difficult task of getting just the right amount of light reflected without making the cars look glossier than they really are.

Click on over to Zonkey Boot for more photos and a conversation with the photographer.

Some photos and video from my racing experience with my 1968 ASP Formula Vee MK. III. This orange livery that you see was the result of my earlier 2004 restoration that I wrote about here. The ASP is currently undergoing restoration a second time, taking her back to the glory she deserves.

It was time to do a proper restoration of my old formula vee. It was tired, worn and I was starting to feel like my car was the roach among all the beautifully prepared vees I race with in the VSCDA. The car is a 1968 ASP MK III, originally built by Wayne Purdy, a former Beach FV employee. The ASP was 1 of 6 or so vees Wayne built before moving on to other racing ventures. This car was raced by a gentleman named Robert Samm very successfully in the southwestern United States and Mexico, claiming at least 3 national titles in Mexico in the MKIII.

I acquired the ASP in the winter of 2004 sight unseen. I knew I wanted to go vintage vee racing but admittedly didn’t do as much research as I should have prior to making the purchase. I was taken by the story and esthetics of the little known ASP rather than the proven race worthiness. A more rational man may have sought out a Lynx or a Zink, brands that dominated FV in the late 60s. I discovered the ASP on a racing classifieds website and the price was right… or so I thought. As it turns out it was just further proof that you get what you pay for.

Despite that, I remember feeling just like a kid on Christmas when it arrived by truck that day late in January. With the help of the driver, I rolled it off the truck through the fresh snow into the garage. I was elated. I couldn’t believe I now owned a vintage open-wheeled racecar. I had wanted to race cars like these since I was a kid. At this point I had only been to track days and autocross events in a street car but I had the racing bug and I had it bad.

I contacted the race director at my local track to see if he could put me in touch with any of the vintage vee drivers in the area. As luck would have it, his former neighbor Garret Van Camp was recently back in vintage vee racing, a former SCCA national champion and he lived 20 minutes from me. Garrett won the 1970 FV championship, raced Porsche speedsters and went on to race super vees as the factory driver for Lynx. Eventually he took a long hiatus from racing to raise his family. In 1994 he decided to once again get behind the wheel. He tracked down his original Lynx, restored it back to the configuration he won with in 1970 and he keeps on winning nearly every race he enters… At 74! Truly inspiring.

I called Garrett and that same day after work he met me at my house to have a look at my car. I’ll never forget what he said upon laying his eyes on the ASP. He said “I wish we would’ve met 3 weeks ago… I never would have let you buy this piece of shit”. We joked about the whole car being held together with cabinet fasteners and zip ties. He was right and I knew it but I was still optimistic. He immediately started educating me on the car and made an impossible list of what needed to be done before the driver’s school began in April. And without his help it would have been impossible.

Garrett would stop by once a week to check on my progress. He encouraged me, taught me and provided endless motivation. Besides that he re-engineered and re-fabricated parts to make the car stronger, safer and the car more competitive. All things that at the time were well beyond my knowledge and ability. I had some background in motorcycle restoration but when it came to racecars I was about as green as they come. Garrett would constantly remind me “if it doesn’t make you go faster, don’t waste your time kid”. Come spring, the car was done but it was a tremendous amount of work… especially for a car that was advertised as “race ready”. Garret was my instructor, is still my mentor and a constant source of inspiration. I consider he and his wife Maggie as 2nd parents and lifelong friends. I completed the school that spring and went on to my first race. There are few things in life I’ve experienced that are as satisfying as finishing a race in a car that you’ve built… Except maybe winning—but that came much later.

How is it possible to look at this stunning 1949 De Luca Fiat-Lancia Sport Special and not fall in love? It’s an Italian representation of a hot-rodding zeitgeist that was taking hold worldwide in at the end of the 1940s.

This bare utility is one of the things I so love about early barchettas. The interior could not be more sparse. The exposed backsides of the door skins attest to the lightness that was built into this special for (by?) Senore De Luca, “the wolf of Calabrese” (note the amazing wolf head mascot). I’ve had no luck in finding De Luca’s racing history, but sellers Cristiano Luzzago say the car has period appearances at the Circuito di Posillipo (probably the ’49 running of the GP Napoli though I find no matching car in their entry list) and Grio delle Calabrie.

I adore everything about it—the Stance, the utilitarian design, the minimal embellishment. I have no real reason for this, but the leaf-spring front end is something I’m kind of obsessed with lately. I think it’s something to do with the backyard shed and garage engineered use of the leaf-spring front suspension in everything from the T-Bucket to the Cooper 500s. I just see those leaves poking out where we’re used to seeing A-arms, and my head spins. That’s what this Fiat frame meets Lancia Ardea drivetrain really is when we get down to it: The early Italian version of the later hated Garagistas.

Let’s face it, if this didn’t have the words “Fiat-Lancia” attached to it, you might think it was a garage-built Southern California custom with a Ford V8 under the hood. In many ways, it is. And I love this little street rod for it.

More photos and details on Cristaino Luzzago’s inventory page.

Harvington Motor Co. must have been equally excited and nervous to handle the mechanical restoration of the 1956 Mike Hawthorn D-Type. It always impresses the hell out of me when restoration and race shops routinely tear into a priceless machine (or in this case, valued at about ￡7 Million). That sort of confidence is what separates top-shelf vintage racing technicians from garage tinkerers like me.

More info and progress photos on Harvington’s project page.