I can’t remember where I first stumbled across this photo—Bulgogi Brothers, maybe?—but it wasn’t until recently that I had a much fuller appreciation of it. Seeing this little Lotus looking vulnerable in Paris traffic is one thing, but look closer at the surrounding vehicles and you’ll see that this is no vintage shot.
Thank you for your chutzpah, Lotus driver.
Update: This photos is originally from Flickr user Zirwilliam, who has a bunch of great car shots.
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?
Let’s take a deeper look at this short-lived but much loved SoCal race track, shall we? There were only a handful of races held at the Santa Monica mountainside race track, most of which were marred by dangerous track design that led to 3 fatalities in the 18 short months the track was operating a full capacity. Of course, the feature we so admired, the crossover, was a contributing factor to the inherent dangers of the facility.
The fact that the track was bound by cliffs and rocky terrain didn’t help either.
Here’s a (sparse) race report from the first event at Paramount, the California Sports Car Club sponsored race in August 1956 as reported in the West Coast Sports Car Journal:
Thousands of Southern California spectators witnessed Harrison Evans, in his Ferrari Monza, battle it out with Eric Hauser, Morgansen Special, Sunday August 19, at the first sports car road race to be held at the Paramount Ranch in Agoura, California. Evans zoomed across the finish line just two seconds ahead of the home-build Special to chalk-up another victory for Ferrari banners. Richie Ginther, driving a Von Neumann Porsche, upset favorite Jack McAfee in Saturday’s go by a close half-second proving that the young driver belongs with the top ranking drivers on the West Coast. Ginther sailed to an easy victory in the Sunday under 1500cc race also when the closely anticipated race between him and McAfee failed to materialize after McAfee’s Porsche was forced out early in the race.
Some top drivers in the country participated making for some of the most exciting races of the season. Veteran driver Rudy Cleye won the production over 1500cc race by taking the checkered flat 27 seconds ahead of his nearest rival and averaged 66.9 mpg during the 20 mile race. Bruce Kessler, driving a Cooper Norton captured the first place both Saturday and Sunday in the exciting Formula III races.
Paramount track is a great step toward the development of sports car road racing in this country.
Sounds like an auspicious beginning, I’m surprised there’s not much discussion of the track itself. It’s almost as if the author was just reporting from the race results sheet. No matter though, the track was quickly a favorite of SoCal drivers and specators.
Check out the Morgansen Special that was mentioned in the article, long before it became the first Old Yeller: a sheer brute of a thing. Amazing that this was duking it out with an elegant Ferrari Monza in a heated battle for the lead. This is one of the things that I think most conjures the glory of early American road racing; that an (ok, I’ll say it) ugly home built beast could hold its own against some of the best sports cars from Europe is still an impressive feat. It’s also an example of an era when hot rods and sports cars were much more aligned in spirit and events. Sadly, in the years since, the typical sports car driver has moved very far away indeed from the hot rodding, home building, shade-tree engineering spirit of her early days.
Today, the Paramount Ranch race track is slowly crumbling into the surrounding landscape. It’s part of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area and is currently in the care of the National Parks Service. The park is most famous as a tourist destination for movie fans; the old Paramount Western sets are preserved on the same property. This Google Map shows, however, that some of the original track remains. The sweeping carousel comprised of turns 1 and 2 is clearly visible in the satellite image.
At least we can still (sort of) experience this track today, thanks to video games. Race simulator fans have created custom tracks to bring long-dead facilities back to life, and Paramount Ranch is among the tracks updated for a new generation. Check out a gallery here.
You can also build your own Paramount Ranch in a decidedly less high-tech manner. The unique crossover feature is a must for slot car track builders to equalize the track lengths of the different lanes. As a result, Paramount Ranch has been a popular basis for home-built slot car tracks. Here is a series of articles from ’66-’67 in Car Modeler Magazine that describe how to build your own scale version of Paramount Ranch in your basement.
Tam’s Old Race Car Site has a ton of photos and stories from the racers in their Paramount Ranch section
More pics of the Morgansen Special on the H.A.M.B.
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.
Filmmaker Dikayl Rimmasch shot some great footage of the 2006 Rolex Invitational at Lime Rock testing two historic film cameras, a Bell & Howell 70 KRM (the KRM was the military model, this example was from the Vietnam era) and a 1930’s Cine Kodak. The beauty of these cameras is that you can achieve a very vintage look (grain, light flicker, etc) without having to fake it in post-production. The result is a gorgeous piece of film who’s technique does a service to the subject matter. Great stuff.
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 work 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; recalling 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.
Head over to the archive for the complete article, well worth a read.
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.”
I can’t wait to read it.
Is there anything more romantic than the Circuito Madonie?
Bellissimo.
