During the late ’50s and early ’60s American racers were doing battle in a wide variety of homebuilt racecars and Specials. Taking production car engines and chassis and creating their own unique take on a competition car. They may have been quick, but many had a look only a mother (their creator) could love. This...
The powers-that-be in 1920s auto racing, namely the American Automobile Association’s Contest Board, barred anyone who wasn’t a white male from the sport. But Dewey Gatson, a black man who went by the name “Rajo Jack”, drove into the center of “outlaw” auto racing in California, refusing to let the pervasive racism of his day stop him from competing against entire fields of white drivers. In the new book “The Brown Bullet”, journalist Bill Poehler uncovers the life of a long-forgotten trailblazer and the great lengths he took to even get on the track, showing ultimately how Rajo Jack proved…
In the 1950s, Britain struggled to find its place in Formula One racing. Fed up with BRM’s attempt, Tony Vandervell took the bit between his teeth and fielded cars of his own devising. The result was heartening success against the dominant Italians. At the age of 32, Guy Anthony “Tony” Vandervell had an epiphany. A...
In late December 1959, Bill Jennings packed his tools, spares and suitcase into the passenger seat of his self-assembled GSM Dart sports car and drove from his home in Cape Town to East London – a trip of over 600 miles in the days before highways. Jennings then took part in the Sixth International South...
When Rod Millen hit the starter on his custom-designed and built four-wheel drive, four-rotor 1985 Mazda RX7 the explosion made photographer Dennis Fregger and I jump. It shattered the morning quiet, and flushed the birds out of the bushes a hundred yards away. The sound of an unfettered rotary engine at full song is like...
At Monaco, the first significant race of the 1933 season, a new Grand Prix team made its debut: Scuderia CC, with Rudi Caracciola and Louis Chiron as its principals. Two of the finest, most successful drivers in the world, they each had broken away from their established works teams. The Monagesque Chiron was forced out of Bugatti because of personal conflict. The German Caracciola was abandoned first by Mercedes, then Alfa Romeo, because of the economic doldrums that had swept the United States, then Europe. Supporting a Grand Prix team was simply too expensive. “You know,” Chiron said to his…
Attending shows is always fun, and you never know what you might find among the entries. The Highlands Motoring Festival is a small show in the western North Carolina mountain town of Highlands. There were a number of very interesting automobiles in the show, including a ’39 Ford racecar that appeared, at first, much less...
March 2020 will mark the 50th anniversary of what many feel is the greatest endurance road race in history – the 1970 Sebring 12-hour. Yes, there have been many great 12- and 24-hour races over the years, some with more historical significance. But none can match the 1970 Sebring for its combination of legendary drivers, great cars, and an incredible finish. It’s difficult, today, to truly appreciate the international status Sebring had in its first 20 years. All the greats raced at Sebring at one time or another: Fangio, Moss, Hill (both of them), Surtees, and Stewart. Even Jim Clark…
I recently beheld a holy icon of auto racing called the Bothwell Peugeot. Why it is called that I will explain later, but first I need to tell you a remarkable story that will make real the significance of this issue’s feature car. The event happened more than 100 years ago but it was a...
Can you imagine the sheer agony if you were a Formula One fan and had to watch two dozen Grand Prix races of the sort we have been seeing over the last few years? Well, back in the early 1960s, there was an F1 race virtually every other weekend. In 1963, there were exactly 24...
Fed up with seeing their major races won by the Germans in the 1930s, the Italians allowed only 1½-liter entries in their 1939 races to eliminate their opposition. They reckoned without the astonishing skills of the Daimler-Benz Racing Department. The most glamorous Grand Prix race of the 1930s was not at Monaco, not at Dubai,...