As a non-traditional sports fan, I’ve always thought Sports Illustrated had a difficult relationship with sports that aren’t Football, Baseball, Basketball. But these covers from the 50s and 60s show that auto racing was once a cherished pillar in the temple of sportsmen. In recent years, there has been occasional NASCAR covers, and a Danica Patrick cover, but I think it’s fair to say that the “auto racing isn’t a sport” crowd are winning out on the editorial staff of SI.
Part of that isn’t the magazine’s fault, it’s the path that auto racing has taken. In early American sportscar racing, the driver was the key component. This was particularly true in the early days, when most drivers were competing in cars that were essentially off-the-shelf product. Pick it up at the dealership on Friday, race it on Saturday.
Today, the real muscle behind a successful racing enterprise isn’t so singular. It’s true that drivers get the bulk of the attention, but if the changing teams of Formula 1 have taught us anything, it’s that the best driver isn’t always the winning driver. What has happened is that, in broad strokes, racing has shifted from being an individual sport to a team sport. Sports Illustrated, as much as anyone else, knows that you aren’t going to sell a lot of magazines to the mass market with photos of aerodynamicists on the cover. And so it has struggled to figure out how to showcase racing on her cover pages.
This wasn’t always the case of course, so let’s check out some great covers from the magazine’s past coverage of our sport. Enough has been said about the decaying state of magazine design, so I won’t comment other than to to say, isn’t it nice to see powerful illustration and photography not have to compete with 25 article callouts. We’ve turned magazine covers from covers to photographic table of contents pages.
A few weeks ago we looked at the Sven Voelker book Go Faster: The Graphic Design of Racing Cars, now Gestalten Video has interviewed Voelker at the Porsche museum about the project. It’s a nice piece of video, combining historic footage, excerpted images from the book, and Voelker’s thoughts on the design, colors, typography, and randomness of some of the most iconic racing cars. Definitely worth a watch.
Sven makes a interesting point on what he considers the high point of racing car design. My natural gut instinct is to long for the national racing colors without corporate sponsorship. Sven argues that the initial years of the late 60s and early 70s, when sponsorship was just entering racing, but there were few sponsors per car, provided the greatest opportunity for graphic design greatness. When you consider the Gold Leaf Lotus, the Gulf Porsches and Fords, and the Jagermeister 911s, it’s hard to argue with him on the point.
While I would have liked the book itself to have more text, it’s still a fun project and definitely worth checking out, available here.
We’ve long been fans of the hand-illustrated track maps of years gone by, and that of course extends to this Pit Map of the Tribunes from the 1921 24 Heurs du Mans. (Update: as a commenter pointed out below, there was no 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1921—nor would there be for another 2 years—this material is all from the ACF Grand Prix, which largely used the same facilities as the eventual 24 hour race – Thanks for the clarification, Dan)
It’s graphically beautiful. In a modern world of graphic design software and precision digital printing presses, I’m always impressed by the incredible graphic design expertise of those who did without them. this hand-set type is beautiful, and the lines precise enough to go up against anything the Creative Suite has to offer.
Found at The Nostalgia Forum, which also turned up these printed artifacts from the ‘21 LeMans, a track map and program cover. Always great information over there.
This is a big day for The Chicane. We finally get to let you in on something that we’ve been dying to share on the blog for some time.
After months of work, we’re finally ready to debut the first pieces of a line of vintage racing inspired clothing. Chicane Trackwear will ultimately include a variety of garments and accessories inspired by our love of vintage racing: everything from our favorite racing models, marques, teams, races, and eras of auto racing history.
The first items are two t-shirts from two very different parts of our vintage racing heritage. The Riverside International Raceway t-shirt is inspired by the early races held at the track in 1957. There are a lot of tracks that we’d like to feature on t-shirt graphics. But for our first, we though it was important to celebrate one of America’s great Lost Tracks. It would be obvious to have a Green Hell shirt, or a Circuito Palermo (and I suspect we’ll have one of each eventually), but celebrating America’s sportscar racing heritage has always been an important part of The Chicane, and there’s not many tracks more missed than Riverside.
The Yamura Motors t-shirt is our way of showing appreciation for the fictional Formula 1 team at the heart of John Frankenheimer’s legendary film, Grand Prix. In a few frames of the movie, you can see the Yamura pit crews gathering around Pete Aron’s machine wearing coveralls with a graphic very like this one. Most people might not understand it; but when someone does, it’s magic.
Available exclusively from the newly launched—and soon to expand—Chicane Shop.
Another brilliant argument for the benefits of body-on-frame building. Are you bored with your Austin-7 or compact Ford? Why not just drop a new fiberglass body on that frame and have a sweet little racing special to take to the track or just cruise around town. See how easy it used to be to become the coolest kid on the block?
These were all from a single 1958 issue of MotorSport. The possibilities were endless, and cheap. Guess what you do if you’re bored with your compact Ford today… You deal with it. Or you glue a horrifically ugly wing on it. Yay! a big stupid wing!
I adore the illustration style of this poster from 2006 commemorating 30 years of Tamiya models. Legend holds that Tamiya started with a Porsche 911 bought from the factory. They tore it apart and recreated it at 1:10 scale – and a hobby shop legacy was born.
Their good taste continued for the next 30 years and beyond. Their current catalog offers such fine vintage racing machines as an Alpine A110 (in 1972 Monte Carlo Rally winning livery), an Alfa Romeo Giulia Sprint GTA, and a rally-ready Mini Cooper.
The poster features more of the fantastic racing models that Tamiya has produced over the years. I can spot the John Player Lotus 79, the Tyrrell P34 6-wheeler, the Rothmans Paris-Dakar Porsche 959, Minis, Fiat-Abarth 500s, Alfas… It just goes on and on.
To commemorate the anniversary in 2006, Tamiya updated and re-released their first model, the Porsche Turbo RSR Type 934; one of which would look absolutely fantastic on my shelf, don’t you think?
Usually in our ‘Track Maps of the Past’ series I try to feature beautifully rendered maps from historic racing programs. There’s always a lot to choose from, as the hand illustrated track maps of the age before satellite views tend to just have more soul than the long-on-accuracy-short-on-spirit CAD rendered maps of today. It isn’t the illustration of this track at Paramount Ranch, though, that drew me in. It isn’t amazingly well rendered or beautiful. It’s is fairly ordinary in its execution and presentation. What it does have though, is the benefit of a marvelous feature of the Paramount Ranch race track: it has a tunnel.
There’s something magical about a track that loops back in on itself, tucking under competitors and passing, figure-8 style, beneath the action above. It recalls the classic Monza, with a tunnel under one end of the banked oval. I can understand why this once enduring track feature went away. It is not, after all, easy to blend run-off areas and kitty litter with bridge abutments. But damn if it isn’t just cool. There is — and I’m talking to the track designers out there when I say this — a reason why almost every slot car track you can find on toy store shelves has a crossover. It’s just cooler that way.
Here’s another shot of Stirling Moss from a late 60s issue of Playboy, this time in an advertisement for AT&T. Naturally, Moss is a giant in the racing world, but I never realized that he was a well known enough figure in the States that he would be in a non-automotive ad in a mass-market magazine. Good Stuff.
Don’t worry, the photos are safe. This was from the days of Playboy’s immensely high quality interviews and articles. Thanks to the Playboy Cover to Cover project, we can dive back into those days of excellent journalism… among other things.
The September 1962 issue is of particular interest, as it features a 19 page interview with Stirling Moss with the evocative title Stirling Moss: a Nodding Acquaintance with Death. When was the last time you read a 19 page article about anything in a magazine? Surely it must be a sign of the reduced prominence of magazine journalism.
The interview was conducted just after Stirling broke the Goodwood lap record and subsequently crashed the Lotus he was piloting at the time. He had to be cut from the chassis and spent the next two months in hospital. In 1962, it was probably the only place a journalist would have been able to keep him still long enough for an interview of any length. There’s a number of interesting pieces of information in the article, including Stirling’s thoughts on the sheer danger of Formula 1 in one of its most deadly eras:
…”Grand Prix driving, is the most dangerous sport in the world. In some recent years the mortality rate has been 25 percent per year: one of every four drivers starting the season could expect to be dead at the end of it.”
Amazing to think how much the sport has changed in the years since. Massa’s crash and recuperation had F1 fans on the edges of their seats in 2009, it’s hard to imagine a similar injury getting more than a paragraph in the race report 35 years earlier.
Of course the obvious question was: why play such a dangerous game?
“Because it’s also the most compelling, delightful, sensually rewarding game in the world. In a race-driver’s view, endeavors like tennis and golf and baseball are excersises, pastimes: demanding, yes, if you like, but still games that children can play.” … “Bullfighters, mountain climbers, skindivers know something of the racing-driver’s ecstasy, but only in part, because theirs are team sports. Toreros are never alone and mountaineers rarely; the skindiver not usually, and in any case his opponent, the sea, though implacable and deadly, still is passive. When a race-car is passive it is sitting in the garage, and its driver’s seat is as safe as a baby’s cradle”
I’m sure there would be some to disagree that bullfighting and mountaineering are team sports, but the romance of the danger of the era is certainly spelled out clearly enough by the comparison.
A fascinating bit from the author, Ken Purdy, just might be the origin of a long-revered mantra in racing circles. When describing the allure of danger, he recounts a story by famous highwire performer, Karl Wellenda; recounting a quote of his from when he struggled to overcome the tragedy of the Wellenda family’s famous accident in Detroit. “To be on the wire is life; the rest of waiting”.
Adapted years later in Le Mans, McQueen’s riff on this very line would become a catch phrase of amateur and professional racing drivers forever.
I clicked on over to Amazon and pre-ordered this one seconds after I heard about it.
As a graphic designer (that’s my day job, I’m a web designer) and a racecar geek, there’s no way Sven Voelker’s Go Faster: The Graphic Design of Racing Cars couldn’t be on my shelf. I didn’t even have time to translate the German blurb before I was adding this one to my cart. Look for a review on The Chicane when I receive it.
Ok, here’s that translation now, courtesy of Google which is less than elegant in its conversion but gets the job (mostly) done:
“Strip strike, numbers, colors and logo – the visual appearance of a race car needs so you can distinguish the car at first glance from the other when it raced at top speed. Most do not know, however, that the race cars from Porsche, Ferrari, Maserati and Lotus, its appearance is not the work of brand strategists and graphic designers, but often due to chance. Go Faster collected over 100 examples of car design, these carefree anarchy of the document creation process. In the book, each brightly decorated cars will be presented next to an unpainted, white model. This juxtaposition Go Faster takes his readers not only with a fast ride through images in racing history, but shows exactly how the graphics modulates the appearance of a racing car. “This book by Prof. Sven Voelker published by Gestalten Verlag, linking not only gasoline junkies and graphic designer, but definitely belongs in every bookshelf of these two groups.”
As a non-traditional sports fan, I’ve always thought Sports Illustrated had a difficult relationship with sports that aren’t Football, Baseball, Basketball. But these covers from the 50s and 60s show that auto racing was once a cherished pillar in the temple of sportsmen. In recent years, there has been occasional NASCAR covers, and a Danica Patrick cover, but I think it’s fair to say that the “auto racing isn’t a sport” crowd are winning out on the editorial staff of SI.
This wasn’t always the case of course, so let’s check out some great covers from the magazine’s past coverage of our sport. Enough has been said about the decaying state of magazine design, so I won’t comment other than to to say, isn’t it nice to see powerful illustration and photography not have to compete with 25 article callouts. We’ve turned magazine covers from covers to photographic table of contents pages.
this one seconds after I heard about it.
