Browsing: Vintage Racecar Columns

Heroes
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I have admired Tazio Nuvolari all my life and so has just about every other motor racing enthusiast of my generation. My friend Murray Walker, the British television Formula One commentator, often likes to say he saw the Flying Mantuan race, but I was born too late to enjoy such a spectacle. So I did the next best thing: I read everything I could about the diminutive Italian. But in spite of all that reading, one thing remained a mystery to me: the gold tortoise that became Nuvolari’s trademark. Of course, I knew the Italian poet and dramatist Gabriele D’Annunzio…

Last Lap Hill at Monaco Roger Dixon
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We are frequently told that Formula One is at the cutting edge of technology, but that has been true only occasionally, most recently with new heights being reached in the thermal efficiency of engines. This is something we cannot see and how it is achieved is something that not all of us can understand. Most...

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Last Lap
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Most people when launching a new product normally try to come up with a new name to reflect innovation.  Then it comes to cars, however, there is a trend to resurrect a name from the past so we have had Allard, Connaught, Osca, Lea-Francis, Jensen, Invicta, Spyker, Ermini and that is just scratching the surface.  It does not matter that the original went bust, sometimes several times and that is also the likely fate of the revival, people will revive defunct names.   Sometimes, not always, the new project has bought the rights to the old name because old companies…

Heroes
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Tucked away in a little potato-farming town, 250 miles south east of Buenos Aires, is one of the most important motor racing museums in the world, a tribute to the little town of Balcarce from the man whose life story it tells. It is the Centro Tecnologico-Cultural y Museo del Automovilismo Juan Manuel Fangio, which...

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First Turn DANO
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What’s the single most important component, for maximal performance, on a racecar? The engine? Suspension? In the grand scheme of things it’s probably the checkbook(!), but that’s really outside of the car. As odd as it may seem, I’ve come to the conclusion that the racing seat probably contributes more to the success or failure of any given racecar than any other piece of equipment. Recently, I had the good fortune to get to test drive the fire-breathing, Quadrifoglio version of the Alfa Romeo Stelvio for a week. True, it is a street car, but with 500-plus horsepower and credentials…

Heroes
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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 died at the age of...

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Last Lap
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Once upon a time in a bar…well, near a bar…I was talking to a couple who had just bought a new Bentley, a name so famous in motor racing circles that even I, not normally given to huge enthusiasm for motorway cruisers, started asking questions about the technical specs. “Actually,” the friend told me “until...

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Heroes
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He was a spectacular Formula 1 driver and the first Polish addition to the F1 circus, who had it all going for him after six years in the top echelon of motor racing. He even won the 2008 Grand Prix of Canada in a BMW Sauber F1.05 and finished the year fourth in the F1...

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First Turn
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The Internet has changed our lives in so many ways. In just the past 20 years, the Internet has both opened up the expanse of our immediate world and at that same time made it all closer to hand than we ever could have imagined. It is as a result of this strange global “closeness” that I now sit here, mourning a man I’ve known for over 20 years and yet never met. It is with a heavy heart that I report that Vintage Road & Racecar’s longtime contributor and “Italian Bureau Chief,” Robert Newman, has passed away. Robert began…

Heroes
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Today, Franco Cortese is, perhaps, one of motor sport’s forgotten stars and he shouldn’t be. He was the driver who put Ferrari on the map in a career that spanned 156 races, 20 victories and top placings as long as your arm. During more than four decades, from 1926 to 1958, he raced for the...

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Last Lap courtesy Audi
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A recent visit to the famous Donington circuit in England, for the launch of a wonderful book about the history of the place, got me to thinking of many other great circuits of yesteryear and what has become of them. Donington, which was Britain’s first road racing circuit, survives albeit not exactly in its original...

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