TVR Griffith At Spa-Francorchamps

Here's a fun video of a TVR Griffith at Spa, with some fine in-car footage showing some classic '60's GT cars.  Run time is 20 minutes.  Select 720 or 1080 resolution; the default is 320.

Phil Keen starts from the pit lane and passes a lot of cars.  He might have passed more but for some sketchy driving seen through his windshield.  Just the same, a Ford GT 40 comes whistling by him in six laps and disappears into the distance.  But the main point of a Spa video, as always, is the lovely, fast, sweeping course.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t_HWQEn9JY

Same car, different race: the McInerney/McInerney/Keen TVR Griffith as raced at Spa (without night-driving lights).
As best I can tell from the video, this car runs a fully-tuned (Webers) Ford small-block.  Managing that much torque
in a wheelbase that short has always seemed to me to be major achievement in car-control.

Mario Andretti RRDC Interview

This post gives me a chance to put up a picture posted before: Mario Andretti at Road America in the Newman-Haas
Lola T-8700 in 1987.  I saw Andretti race several times: in Formula 5000 at Mid-Ohio, and CART events at
Road America 1987-1994.

I found the Andretti interview less informative (and amusing) than the Jim Hall and Brian Redman interviews.  Here's the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGlRDw-rDQ0


Perhaps because it was my first, the 1987 CART race at Road America was one of the most memorable for me.  Views were unobstructed by catch-fencing.  You could watch from anywhere on the "middle straight," and from the Billy Mitchell Bridge all the way back to the exit of The Kink.  We had dinner at Siepken's Inn, with Andretti's team, Al Holbert's Porsche team, and other luminaries, at nearby tables.

The paddock was still grass.  Many of the teams still hauled their race cars in enclosed gooseneck trailers towed by "dualie" pickups.  They found a spot in the paddock, unrolled the awning from the trailer, and went to work on the car.  I remember walking past Michael Andretti's blue and yellow Kraco Stereo entry, sitting on sawhorses next to a paddock lane, completely torn down between practice sessions, close enough to touch.  I cherish these memories.

It was emblematic of Mario's Road America weekend in 1987 that his Lola sat, silent and unattended, under a cover, while the other crews beavered away at torn-down cars all over the paddock.  He qualified on pole, led all laps, and won the race.  Game, set, match.

At the nadir of their respective racing careers, as Andretti explains in the interview, he teamed up with Colin Chapman.
And Chapman turned out to have a couple more aces up his sleeve: the Lotus 78 with inverted wings in its side pods,
and the Lotus 79 (above) with venturi tunnels in its side pods.  The 78 gave Andretti a couple of wins, and the 79
made him World Champion in 1978.  It is also the classiest-looking integration of sponsor graphics into race
car design, in my opinion.  The Players cigarette box was black with gold pinstripes.  If we must have
sponsor graphics (and I guess we must), let them look this good.

Purdy Car, Purdy Picture

I'm a sucker for nice shots of pretty endurance racing cars chasing a low sun.  They remind me of the days when still
photographers used to station themselves at the exit of Mulsanne Corner at LeMans around dinner time.  The event
had already surpassed sprint race distance, but had 90% of its time yet to go.  But this isn't LeMans: it's the
Peter Sutcliffe/Frank Matich Ford GT 40 at the Surfers Paradise Twelve Hours in 1966.  photo: John Stanley

Fun With Fine Print, And The Warranty

Five Year Warranty!

It turns out that, in my new digs, I need a barrier to halt my Civic Si just short of the garbage bins.  If I estimate the distance, I may bump the bins or the garage door may close on the rear of the car.  I tried a short, flat, piece of scrap lumber but it was too flat and it moved.

Viola!  A catalog shows up from AutoSport Automotive Outfitters (outfitters?) offering a rubber parking curb for precisely my need.  It's heavy, high, and doesn't needed to be bolted to the garage floor. I've bought things like driving gloves and tire pressure gauges from A.A.O. for six years, off and on, and have not been disappointed.

Upon close examination, this high-tech device turns out to be made in Canada from recycled tires.  It comes with a consumer warning: "Your Home Park It is only a guide, not a barrier.  If you do not brake on contact, you can ride over it."  But what really made me smile was the Five Year Warranty.  Against what?  How could this product fail in any way in five years, or ever?

Brian Redman RRDC Interview

Brian Redman drove most of the race cars that made a deep impression on me in my youth, notably the Porsche 917 and the Lola T-330/332.  His talent showed best in long races on the most difficult courses: Nurburgring, Spa, the Targa Florio.  But I watched Formula 5000 races at Mid-Ohio in which he out-drove Mario Andretti, David Hobbs, Al Unser Sr., and several former Can-Am luminaries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3Vgva4gFwY

Race car drivers, generally, seem to me to be unimaginative and self-absorbed.  They have an empathy deficit.  And the more successful they are, the truer that is.  Brian Redman is an exception to the rule.  I love his skill as a story-teller: he humanizes the racing scene.  When you think about one of his stories, you sometimes see that there's a point that applies outside of racing.

Brian Redman in the prime of his racing career, with Jo Siffert at the Nurburgring, around the time he declined to test
an early version of the Porsche 917 and maybe "die for the Fatherland" (see interview).

Redman in his Hall/Haas Lola T-332-Chevy Formula 5000 car at Road America.  As a spectator, I recall these cars as
even more difficult to control than 7 liter Can Am cars--on the tight Mid-Ohio course anyway.  The difference being
that, in a Can-Am car the technique was to get the car slowed, roll through the corner, straighten it out, and nail the
gas.  With superior downforce, Formula 5000 cars could be driven hard through the corner.  But, with their short
wheelbase and big power, car-control was a knife-edge proposition.

BMW 3.0 CSL: not the most famous of the makes and models driven by Brian Redman, but his interview gives me an
excuse to post a picture of one of my favorite race car graphic schemes of the 1970's.  These are the factory BMW's
entering Turn 7 at Riverside Raceway in California.

Citroen 2CV Video

Citroen 2CV

Here's a serious video about the 2CV, unlike the Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee one previously posted.  I love the 2CV as much as Chris Harris does (and for the same reasons), and enjoyed this sympathetic take:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76ktMcCDZvk&index=2&list=PL239B84BD346EEEFA


In an automotive culture far less international than it now is, the Citroen 2CV was "the French people's car:" their Volkswagen Beetle or Model T Ford.  Although a generation newer, it was far closer in spirit to the Model T.  The Beetle was intended to get mostly urban families down Germany's new Autobahns between cities.  The 2CV was intended to get French farm families into and out of their fields, and into town for market day.  Like the Beetle, it was delayed by World War Two and didn't become a cultural icon until the 1950's.

Although it was in production until 1990, I saw very few 2CV's in my two trips to France in 2002 and 2010.  The Autoroutes had made them obsolete.  People in France who can't afford modern cars ride motorcycles or scooters.  In the mid 1990's, a couple of guys who flagged a corner with me at Blackhawk Farms brought a restored one to the track.  In two-tone grey and maroon paint, no less.  With the sunroof open all day and doubtless on back roads only.  It must have been a 3-hour trip from Chicagoland.

Jim Hall RRDC Inteview

Above and below: the Chaparral 2J, possibly the most innovative of Jim Hall's designs (one hesitates to say probably).
It had a snowmible engine powering two fans, and skirts around the bottom of the chassis, which sucked the car down
to the road.  It was banned by racing authorities.  With the possible exception of Colin Chapman, Hall was the most
creative race car designer of the 1960's and 1970's.  The major difference being that Hall focused on sports cars and
Chapman on Formula 1.

This is the first of some links to interviews with people who were very significant in professional road racing in the 1960's and '70's.  The interviews run 40 to 50 minutes, so readers may want to save them for a weekend over morning coffee.

Jim Hall's interview leads off, mostly because of his engineering achievements, but also because I'd forgotten that Hall was the entrant for Brian Redman's dominant Formula 5000 seasons--and Redman's interview is next up.  (The Jim Hall/Carl Haas Lola Formula 5000 cars were some of the few he was associated with that were not technically innovative.)

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fkk-VbSSvU

Interviews like this, in settings like this, are double-edged.  I see them as like a politician's memoirs.  The Honored Guest is not going to be asked any truly tough or embarrassing questions.  He touches on the highlights of a long career, viewed through the lens of his own perspective.  It's not a complete and objective record, and it's not intended to be.  Just the same, we get fascinating factoids and insights we might not otherwise have had.  If you're into road racing history, these interviews are worth your time.