More from the Topps World on Wheels bubblegum card collection. This time, Connaught.
From the card’s reverse:
Horsepower: 107 A tiny factory in England, producing only about two cars per week, makes the Connaught. The body is very light and is built for speed. It has cycle fenders, outside exhaust pipes, bucket seats and a good finish. The price of the Connaught is $5,500! the basis for this car is a Lea-Francis engine. Under the cowl is a two and one half gallon gas tank.
The latest from our series featuring cards from the 1953—1955 Topps issued bubblegum cards, “World on Wheels”. This time it’s Allard: “British Sports Car: Speed-Lined Beauty”.
From the card’s reverse: Horsepower 160
This British sports car weighs less than 2,500 pounds, and can reach a speed of sixty miles an hour in about seven seconds. This is from a standstill. The top speed is about 130 miles per hour. The Allard’s brakes are right out in the open, and are highly efficient. Allard now makes two kinds of cars… one for normal, everyday use, and the other as a competition car.
These artifacts of boyhood obsession with racing are so very valuable. I can’t help but imagine an 8 or 10 year old laying on his bedroom floor obsessing over every detail in this basic line drawing and imagining himself changing gear through a hairpin.
Check out the rest of the the World on Wheels series.
The latest from our series featuring cards from the 1953—1955 Topps issued bubblegum cards, “World on Wheels”.
From the card’s reverse:
Alfa Romeo
This famous-make Italian racing car has seen action in almost all the major automobile races in Europe. In one race in Switzerland, an Alfa-Romeo, driven by Nino Faurino, hit a wrecked car… causing his car to run into the crowd, injuring both his legs. The Alfa-Romeo company is considered the greatest builder of Grand Prix racing cars in the world. They make sports cars as well.
I adore the rough-hewn, suggestive painting technique on these posters from the ’53 and ’54 Gran Premio de España motorcycle races. Even better to see the tradition carrying on until at least this 1969 Premio Internaccional poster.
Is it simply because they’re Spanish that they’re bringing to mind Picasso’s gestural Bull paintings? Or is there something there—a certain Spanish style.
You don’t have to be able to read French to enjoy Marvano’s Grand Prix series of graphic novels. These images speak for themselves and should probably work their way onto your bookshelf. I’m afraid I suffer from that dreaded affliction of believing that color was invented somewhere around 1959 so seeing the vibrance in these renderings of the French Gran Prix and Tripoli Grand Prix and Brooklands is a wonderful treat.
Marvano’s vibrant and wonderfully realized ligne claire illustrations naturally bring to mind fellow Belgian Hergé and—like Hergé’s Tintin–the characters surrounding the Silver Arrows in the 1930’s take us to marvelously exotic locations and stirring drama. And that’s all without being able to read a word of it. Reviews say, and Marzano appears to have confirmed, that while the people and locations are true, the story is somewhat fictionalized. As the author puts it: “The ingredients are historical but the dishes are fictitious.”
I suspect that this doesn’t diminish the work in the slightest but race historians may cry fowl as they see cars that crashed out early in Avus continuing to circle the track. I will not be among them and quite enjoyed the first volume of the three part series, which is currently available on Amazon (Grand prix, Tome 1 : Renaissance) with a forward by Jackie Ickx.
Comic book artist and character designer Jon Haward was commissioned to create this life-size standup of Sir Stirling Moss for the Goodwood Revival this year. We all knew that Stirling drove like a machine, but this may start to explain some things. I flipped through some of the Goodwood Revival programmes and ephemera from this year’s event today and I am continually impressed by the commitment to authenticity and to evoking the period so brilliantly by the entire Goodwood team. Jon’s piece here is no exception.
When he was contacted by the branding and design team at Northstar Publishing, who are responsible for much of the Revival’s graphic look, they already had many of the details sorted. As Jon says, it “had to look as if it was from The Eagle comic from the 1950’s, the idea was to show Sir Stirling as a kind of cyborg with a computer for a brain, gears and springs and engine for his legs and chest etc.”
A bit eccentric? A bit specific? Perfectly of the era? Perfectly perfect?
Yep.
More of Jon Haward’s process on this piece on his blog.
It’s become a bit of a tradition here to feature some of Stefan Marjoram’s sketches in the days following the Goodwood Revival. I just popped over to his sketch blog to see if he made the rounds this year.
Did he ever.
The volume of amazing racers at Goodwood might prove overwhelming for anyone; particularly for someone trying to take it all in. The temptation to take a few quick snapshots and run to the next GTO or GT40 or insert-amazingly-iconic-racecar-name-here, must be strong indeed. That’s why I so appreciate Stefan’s patience to sit down for 10 or 15 or 30 minutes and focus on a single machine from a single view and pull out a sketchbook.
Model makers have a bit of a reputation for being fastidious about the details.
Ostensibly, this illustration by R. Pawlowicz for Modelarz magazine is meant to simply guide a model-maker in their own reproduction of a ’56—’59 Vanwall GP car like the one Tony Brooks piloted in the 1958 Monaco. But just look at the inset detail illustrations of the De Dion axle, the mirrors, or the scoops and vents. Any one of these could be hung on their own as a piece of art worthy of any garage. The more typical modellers guide of a simple front, top, and rear view is pitifully bare by comparison.
It’s hard to imagine that any model built from this guide could be a greater work of art than this series of illustrations.
