In photos like this, opening up the gearbox looks so orderly and meditative, but I’m still too nervous to crack open my Triumph’s transmission… and procrastinating as a result.
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Gearbox
Category: Historic Racing Photos
There’s no shortage of love for the mid sixties cigar shaped Formula 1 cars. The levels to which we praise Lotus and BRM and Cooper often unnecessarily push Honda’s debut efforts out of our minds, but these are just lovely.
Over on The Nostalgia Forum, Lyntonh has dug into his seemingly inexhaustible archive of vintage Formula Vee photography to both showcase the great racing down under and to seek the assistance of the super-geniuses on the forum to help identify racers and cars. The whole Australian vintage vee thread is tremendous; with people swapping photos and stories of their time racing vees. Head on over and dive in. Better yet, get into the conversation and share your own tales of one of my favorite series.
Magnificent shot that Bertocchi uploaded to a thread at Ferrari Chat. Prepare to lose the rest of your afternoon.
Update: Back on the FChat thread, Andrea points out that I’m inaccurate on this post’s title. The #14 car being unloaded is the Ferrari 500 of Louis Rosier’s “Ecurie Rosier”, not the factory team. Thanks, Andrea.
Rosier qualified 9th but retired on the 17th lap with engine troubles.
There’s an atmosphere captured in these shots of the Porsche pit crew servicing Siffert and Herrmann’s Porsche 910 at the 1967 Sebring that is hard to put into words. I don’t know if it’s something to do with the film grain or the sun setting behind the car, or something less discernable. But there’s just something about the shots that make the event seem important: an importance that transcends the perceived importance of a motor race. There’s something in these photos that gives them historic weight. Just amazing.
More at Gearheads and Monkeywrenches.
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Corvettes in Nassau. 1956.
They didn’t set the world on fire with their showing but even though none of them finished higher than 19th for the main event, the Corvettes that made the trip across the Caribbean to attend the 1956 Bahamas Speed Week sure looked damned good on the streets of Nassau.
You’d think that Ford would have rested a bit after achieving their drubbing of Ferrari and bringing LeMans victory home. But whether it was just momentum or to silence critics that suggested that the GT40 was more Lola than Ford, FoMoCo decided to bring the design of the next iteration of the GT car more in-house. Keeping the mighty 7 liter of the previous generation, they sculpted a new shape around it in partnership with Kar Kraft. Getting those strings placed right to measure the wind movement over the shape helped refine the aerodynamics of the project that would eventually become the GT40 Mk IV.
More at The Magnetic Brain. Thanks for sending this in, Skeeters.
Nor should they all. Then again, I’d sure like to see a rekindling of the New York/DC rivalry of Auto Polo’s heyday; when nightly Auto Polo matches could be attended in the Northeast United States. From the Auto Polo Wikipedia page: “A tally of the damages encountered by Hankinson’s British and American auto polo teams in 1924 revealed 1564 broken wheels, 538 burst tires, 66 broken axles, 10 cracked engines and six cars completely destroyed during the course of the year.”
Sounds like fun, right?
Best use of running boards ever.
More photos at Klyker.
In the hours leading up to the start of the 1965 running of the Sebring 12 hours race, it seemed like a perfect day for racing. A bit hot maybe at 94° but that wasn’t unusual for a Florida afternoon—even in March. There were rumors of hard weather on the way, but radio jamming between the US and Cuba meant that there was no solid local weather report available trackside.
After 6 hours of racing the sky began to threaten rain. An hour later, at 5:25 pm the sky opened up. By the time the race was over, prototype drivers were saying that their cars were filling up to their elbows with rainwater. It sounds like hyperbole until you see the photos. Rain delay? What’s a rain delay?
There’s endurance racing, and then there’s endurance racing.
More on the race and the spectacular conditions it was run in at Sportscars.tv. Some photos from BARC Boys, Via Retro and The Inside Line.
What a sight it must have been, particularly for Stateside attendees of the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Grand Prix cars were never a common site on American shores and the images of these racers bounding through the grounds must have been thrilling to see. Imagine the sounds that would have been echoing off of those arches as they blast through them, inches from the support columns. Makes my annual trip to the Minnesota State Fair seem positively sedate.
