Click here to read “Chargers Part 1—World Rallying 1957–1965 The CSI struck again in 1965, this time putting out a...
There were no rally cars, as such, during the sport’s first 50 years or so, just the bog standard daily...
If ever there is a breeding ground for heroes it is the Monte Carlo Rally, organized by the Automobile Club de Monaco and now celebrating its 110th anniversary. Today, the most prestigious event in the world championship is three days of high speed poker. It is played out by supermen,...
Not long before his untimely death a few years ago, our Robert Newman wrote this tribute to his friend and...
The name Alfetta is still one that makes any red-blooded Italian motor sport fan throw out his chest with pride....
When he competed in his first Formula One race, Eddie Cheever was even more baby-faced than when I got to know him, which is saying something. It was the 1978 South African Grand Prix and Eddie, who looked about 16 at the time, had actually just turned 20. He qualified...
Yes, girls, too. In fact, if it hadn’t been for one—Mildred Mary Bruce—the famous Blower Bentley could have stayed an...
It was a word-of-mouth, invitation-only affair organized by his lovely wife Susie and a friend without Stirling Moss knowing a...
In the early 20th century, the motor car was considered a killer. The culprit was the 1903 Paris to Madrid road race that never made it to Madrid. It was stopped by the French prime minister, Emile Combes, as it got to Bordeaux. The reason? The race had killed 10 people and...
I have admired Tazio Nuvolari all my life and so has just about every other motor racing enthusiast of my...
Tucked away in a little potato-farming town, 250 miles south east of Buenos Aires, is one of the most important...
This man was a motor racing whirlwind, journalist, author of seven motor sport books, vintage car fan, ran driving courses for the British police and was the founder, president or vice-president of some of the UK’s most prominent motoring and racing organizations. And he kept up that pace until he...
He was a spectacular Formula 1 driver and the first Polish addition to the F1 circus, who had it all...
Today, Franco Cortese is, perhaps, one of motor sport’s forgotten stars and he shouldn’t be. He was the driver who...
He is literally the fastest man on the planet, and has been since October 15, 1997. That was when Andy Green set the current World Land Speed Record of an average 766.035 mph taking him to Mach 1.02, which also made him the world’s first supersonic car driver. And he...
Fathers and their sons who have each won the Formula 1 World Championship are few and far between. There are...
[Click here to read the second installment] Sure enough, the more liberal formula of the 1949 Mille Miglia attracted a...
The last time a car featured in my Heroes column was months back, when I wrote about the 1935 Alfa Romeo Bi-turbo, a fast if erratic machine with an Alfa P3 engine, front and rear. It was dreamt up by Enzo Ferrari and his designer Luigi Bazzi in a desperate...
Bugatti had won the Targa Florio three consecutive years from 1925 – 1927 by the time their new recruit, Albert...
[Click here to read the first installment] Poland, Denmark and Norway had fallen to Nazi Germany and the blitzkrieg up...
Argentinean husband and wife team Juan Tonconogy and Barbara Ruffini doused each other with champagne on the traditional winners’ ramp in Viale Venezia, Brescia, Italy, on May 19 after winning the 36th Mille Miglia Storica in their 1933 Alfa Romeo 6C 1500 GS (number 85). For Tonconogy, the 2018 victory...
Only three of the world’s oldest motor races still take place. The most senior of them is the 500 Miles...
Mike Hailwood had won no fewer than nine World Motorcycle Championships before he ever competed in his first Formula One...
Giuseppe Campari discovered 17-year-old Giulio Ramponi in 1919, when the youngster was working as a trainee for a Milan fuel pump manufacturer. The great driver was looking for a keen young man who he could mould into an effective riding mechanic. And that was the start of Giulio’s brilliant career...
So we have lost Dan Gurney, a few months shy of his 87th birthday. Dan was one of the sport’s...
It had been a long, hard ride from winning masses of kart races when he was a kid to winning...
Ask anyone who was the first American to win a Grand Prix and chances are they will say Phil Hill or Dan Gurney, heroes of the ’60s. But it was, in fact, much earlier than that. The first was David Bruce-Brown, a strikingly handsome young New Yorker and son of...
An Alfa Romeo car mechanic who rose to become one of the greatest endurance drivers of his generation, the man...
The only time I ever met Eddie Cheever was one weekend when we were at the Hockenheim circuit, in Germany,...
One of the remarkable things about Juan Manuel Fangio is that he only competed in 51 Grands Prix, yet won five Formula One World Championships. Another is that he won 24 of those 51 GPs—almost half of them from pole position—a success rate of 47 percent. People still say Fangio...
