Video Antidote

Watched the so-called Indy Car Grand Prix of Houston.  A mistake: another street course crashfest. Why do I keep doing this?

My refreshing video shower (so to speak) was a summary of the 2013 Targa Newfoundland, which seems to have lost its TV contract.  Of course it was fun to get glimpses of the overall-winning Mustang S-197: one for the home team!  But just the general ambience, scenery, cars, and entrants was a pick-me-up.  Here's the link (20 minutes):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYaaWpxFG3o

Have Cruise Nights Peaked?

1965 Pontiac GTO: when is an old car no longer an icon, but just an old car?

Looking for some blog content, I checked my town's website to see if we'd repeat last summer's experiment with cruise nights.  No.  This year it's "Music And Movies In The Park."  The music is local bar bands and the movies are kid-friendly.  The town is looking to promote community-building.  The cruise nights were not well-attended.

It's not surprising that local cruise nights are history.  You can attend cruise nights in many Chicagoland towns and see car counts of 150-200.  If you go to Anytown on Wednesday night, and Othertown on Thursday night, you see mostly the same cars.  Almost all of them are American; almost all of them were made between 1955 and 1970.  These are the cars of my youth, the cars of American Graffiti.  Go find a modern tuner car at a cruise night.  Or a young tuner car enthusiast.

Four things are in play here:

1) Demography: the number of young families interested in a free kids' movie is larger, and growing faster, than the number of empty-nesters towing their grandchildren around to look at old cars.

2) Decline of the Car Culture:  The number of today's young singles who want to be on smart phones and tablets (vastly) outnumbers those who see cars as symbols of freedom and personal autonomy.  Watchtower first pointed this out to me.  A Pontiac GTO isn't iconic even to a 40-something: it's just an old car.  I saw a car buff show that asked some teenagers what it would take to get them interested in cars.  Their answer: "Ain't gonna happen."

3) "You Are Now What You Were When": This is the title of a management training film I saw 40 years ago.  The point of the film was that time freezes, or at least begins to settle into the mud, for each generation, before it reaches the age of 30.  My generation will be rockin' out to the Rolling Stones in our assisted living facilities, not big band swing music of the 1940's or rap music from the 1980's.  Songs by the Beach Boys about muscle cars, once part of a burgeoning youth culture, are quaint trivia now.  Two and a half generations have passed.

4) Cars of the 1970's and 1980's were mostly forgettable, or worse: There was an actual generation gap.  Cars were interesting in the 1960's and got interesting again in the 1990's.  Not much put on the road between those decades is likely to make someone now 50 to 60 years old weep with nostalgia.

Maserati's Hot Rod

Maserati does a muscle car: the 450 S.

Stirling Moss has said that the 3 liter straight six Maserati 300 S was his favorite racing sports car of the 1950's because it was such a balanced, tossable, car.  It punched above its weight, but couldn't contest overall wins with the Ferrari 290 MM or the Jaguar D-Type.  The 450 S was Maserati's hot rod for 1957.  It was intended to win the Mille Miglia, LeMans, and the unlimited sports car championship.  A target competitor was the (specialist) LeMans-winning D-Type.  But the real target was Maserati's cross-town rival, Ferrari.

How would Maserati beat Jaguar's 3.8 liter six and Ferrari's 3.5 liter V-12?  With 4.5 liter V-8 powah.  I searched the internet for a claimed horsepower figure for the 4.5 and didn't find one.  But certainly it was over 400 and, if Maserati followed Ferrari's 1950's practice of optimistic claims, it might have been 450.  Either way, the 4.5 had a 10 to 20% advantage over its competition.

The Maserati d.o.h.c. 4.5 liter V-8: one of the largest postwar European race engines.

The 450 S was essentially a super-sized 300 S.  But something was lost in translation.  While it had a top speed of 190 m.p.h. (important for the Mille Miglia and LeMans), it handled poorly with that big
V-8 over the front wheels.  But it got Enzo Ferrari's attention: he punched the 290 MM's 3.5 liters out to 3.8 liters (the 315 S) and then 4.0 liters (the 335 S).  On paper, the 450 S remained a Ferrari-killer, especially with Juan Fangio and Stirling Moss behind the wheel.  But in an era when race cars were unreliable, Maserati had an unusually star-crossed season, leavened with both Keystone Cops and gallows humor.  Here's the record:

Buenos Aires 1000 km's: Fangio/Moss retired when the clutch and then the gearbox failed.  The Ferrari 290 MM of Masten Gregory/Eugenio Castellotti/Luigi Musso won in a trot from a Maserati
300 S driven by Jean Behra/Carlos Menditieguy.

Sebring 12 Hours: Fangio/Behra did 190 m.p.h. on the long straights, winning easily from Ferrari 315 S's.  Everybody ran out of brakes, but the Ferraris ran out sooner.  And a lot of people were surprised when the 450 S lasted so long on Sebring's bumpy runways.

Mille Miglia: The Moss/Jenkinson 450 S challenge fizzled when the brake pedal pad snapped off the pedal lever at the weld, only 7 miles after the start.  But Ferrari would have given them all they could handle.  The Peter Collins/Louis Klementaski 335 S led early and was beating the legendary Moss/Jenkinson time of 1955 when the differential failed late in the race.  Piero Taruffi won in a 315 S. The best Maserati could do was Giorgio Scarlatti's distant 4th in a 300 S.  Alfonso DePortago's fatal crash in a 335 S ended the Mille Miglia.

Nurburgring 1000 km's: The 3 liter Aston Martin DBR1, driven by Tony Brooks/Noel Cunningham-Reid, won easily.  This was the DBR1's first major international victory, foreshadowing its dominance at the 'Ring and showing that superior handling could beat big power there.  The Aston was followed home by two Ferraris.  Moss's 450 S broke a wheel while in the lead, having chased Brooks down from 4th place.

LeMans: Jaguar swept the first four places in the D-Type's last appearance at a major international race.  Fangio refused to drive Moss's brainchild (below) and was paired with Behra in a 450 S Spider. Behra muffed the start and had to work his way forward from mid-pack to second.  Moss's coupe could only manage 4th in the early going with a duff engine.  Both 450 S's retired around 10% distance with broken differentials.

Sweden 1000 km's:  Jean Behra won in a 450 S, followed home by Phil Hill in a 335 S.

Venezuela 1000 km's: The Collins/Hill 335 S won, followed home by the Mike Hawthorn/Musso ditto.  Moss had an accident in his 450 S.  He took over Jean Behra's 450 S after it suffered a minor fire, but burned his butt because the seat was still smoldering.  This car had another accident with Harry Schell at the wheel.  Two more DNF's for the 450 S.

Ferrari won the sports car championship again in 1957 with 48 points.  Maserati was a distant second with 28, followed by Jaguar with 17, Aston Martin with 8, and Porsche with 7.  Sports cars would be limited to 3 liters in 1958, so 450 S and the big bore Ferraris were obsolete at the end of the season.

Above and below: the Stirling Moss-inspired, Mike Costin-designed, Zagato-built, one-off 450 S LeMans coupe.
Costin already had a reputation for slippery shapes like the Lotus Eleven and the Vanwall Grand Prix car.  Moss
was looking to capitalize on the 450 S's power on the long Mulsanne Straight.  But the coupe proved to be a
turkey.  Costin said that Zagato failed to follow his drawings, and cut holes in the bodywork, increasing drag.
This may have been true, as far as it went, but the sauna-like cockpit needed better ventilation than Costin
had provided.  Also, as these "before and after" pictures show, the as-designed windshield wiper failed to
clear the screen.  So Maserati's LeMans mechanics added a supplemental wiper pivoted at the top of
the screen and a "bug deflector" to the cowl to disturb the airflow and let the wipers do their job.

The 450 S coupe as restored in recent years.  It was converted to a road car after the 1957 season, substantially as it
appears here.  That is, the compound-curved windshield, quarter windows, bright metal side vents, and enclosed/
muffled exhausts.  It was offered for sale out of Toledo, OH in the early 1960's, apparently without takers, because
classified ads for it ran in Road & Track off-and-on for several years.  Since then the color has changed (from red)
and the interior may have been upgraded.  I hope it has air conditioning.

Despite its wins at Sebring and Sweden, the 450 S was not popular with its front-rank drivers.
Two 450 S's went on to some success in big-bore sports car racing in the States, driven most notably by Carroll Shelby.  But in 1958-59 the hot set-up over here was Lance Reventlow's new Scarab, with a 5.4 liter small block Chevy doing what the 4.5 liter Maserati V-8 had been intended to do.

Carroll Shelby had successes in a 450 S imported and entered by Temple Buell in road races in the U.S.  This picture
is of a win at the Virginia International Raceway inaugural event in August, 1957.  Aston Martin, Ferrari, and Jaguar
were financially secure compared to Maserati.  So their factory racers typically had a technical edge or two, and were
not sold until the end of the season.  Maserati was sometimes in the position of selling one race car to finance the
building of the next one.  Thus a front-rank Maserati showed up in Virginia in the middle of the '57 season.

Scarab at a modern vintage race.  The entire point of the Scarab, from Lance Reventlow's viewpoint, was that the
Southern California hot rod engineering and fabrication traditions could build a better unlimited racing sports
car than the Europeans.  And he was right, at least when it came to sprint races.  But another way to think of
the Scarab is a Maserati 450 S done right.

Touring: Batavia, IL

My sister is the Keeper of our family's haute culture, and the Keeper of our Family History.  So when she visited, it was a foregone conclusion that we would "do" the Art Institute, and gravesites.  To be fair, it doesn't take much persuading to get me to visit the Art Institute repeatedly.  Especially the new Modern Wing.  And of course we took my Mustang, top down, to the gravesites.  It's an excellent way to visit long-dead ancestors.  ;-)

It turns out that our family has a long, but mostly incidental, connection with Chicago.  We seem to circle it like a Sioux war party.  We have approached it from St. Louis, New York State, Michigan, and Ohio.  Sometimes we stay for as long as a generation, but then we leave again.

My father and his sisters were raised here.  That's because my grandfather, who was raised in Michigan, got a job and married and settled in Chicago around 1920.  My grandfather and grandmother are buried in Chicagoland, but they retired to Chapel Hill, NC, and came back only to visit.  My father and his sisters left when they went to college.  One aunt and her husband lived here for a few years after World War Two, but he moved the family to the Atlanta area in the early 1950's to start his own business.  My extended family is now scattered across the U.S.  I'm the only one in Chicago, and am here only because my employer sent me 25 years ago.

But Amelia Ann and her daughter, Helen, four and five generations removed from me, are buried in a Batavia, IL, cemetery.  Why?  Because Helen had some kind of mental illness and was sent to the Bellevue Sanitarium by her husband from their home in St. Louis.  Amelia, widowed early in New York State, later moved to Batavia to be near Helen.  Her move may have had as much to do with being lonely as with caregiving.  We don't know.  They lived out their lives in Batavia.

We found the graves of Helen and Amelia in a Batavia cemetery without difficulty.  The layout of the cemetery and
locations of graves are clearly marked at a Visitors' Center kiosk.

Bellevue Sanitarium in Batavia, IL.  It was one of the foremost facilities for the mentally ill in the U.S. in the last half
of the 19th Century.  This was where Robert Lincoln had his mother, Mary Lincoln, involuntarily confined after a
trial that fell far short of modern procedural safeguards.  She was eventually released and spent her final years
with a Todd sister in Springfield.  My sister has been unable to learn more about our distant aunt's time here
because all of Bellevue's records were purchased by a private collector to get Mary Lincoln's file.  My sister
advises that Bellevue was more a "rest home for women with any kind of affliction" than a mental hospital.
Its current, local, reputation has been the latter.  Which may have a lot to do with Mary Lincoln being,
so to speak, its Star Patient.  Today Bellevue is part of an upscale apartment/condo complex.

Amelia Ann in middle age.  My own daughter has the same name, not because of family
tradition, but simply because my ex-wife and I both liked the name.  Anne as a middle
name has family tradition behind it--on the other side of my family.  Six generations
separate the Amelias, with no namesakes in between.  What are the odds?

There is no shortage of good Mexican restaurants in Chicagoland.  Including, of course, Chef Rick Bayless's nationally-known Frontera Grill downtown.  You can get an indifferent Mexican meal here, but it's pretty hard to get a bad one.  My sister and I took a chance on a small storefront in a strip mall in downtown Batavia, and hit the jackpot:

El Sazon in downtown Batavia.  It's short on ambience (formica tables, for example) but the food is outstanding.
Like Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator, "I'll be back."

The Red Bull Ring

The Red Bull Ring, nee A-1 Ring, nee Osterreich Ring, nee Zeltweg

What a neat little course!  Only 8 turns in 2.6 miles, but with lots of elevation change and off-camber bends.  (Some teams count 9 turns because of a throttle-lift between turns 3 and 4.)  David Hobbs says it is a medium-speed circuit, with a lap speed of around 140 m.p.h.  But it looks high-speed to me.  There was some chatter about the Red Bull Ring being a "point and squirt" circuit, hard on rear tires (which it is), but the complex from turns 3 to 8 is anything but.

I don't remember being impressed with this course when it was the A-1 Ring.  And I wasn't aware that it went all the way back to the Osterreichring (a fine course) until the NBCSN broadcast team mentioned it in practice on Friday.

Compare this track map to the 12-14 turn, 3.5 mile, flat but pretzel-twisted, courses that have become part of the Formula 1 schedule in the past decade or so.  The lovely mountains and history make for a great venue.  Tradition is a no-cost option.  But I'd have been impressed with the Red Bull Ring even if it was a new.  Which it is, in a way, due to configuration changes from the A-1 Ring.  This is what Formula 1 is all about.  Here's an on-board video lap in a slower Formula BMW car:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NRf0-tUKxY

"You Could Have A Ferrari, Or A Corvette Stingray"

The car I knew looked like this, but with the standard wheel covers that Leno's car has.  And a 327 with a single
four-barrel carburetor.

Jay Leno says that in the video linked to below.  I knew of a guy who took it literally.  A few years before, he'd sourced and bought a used Ferrari 250 GT through the dealer I worked for.  He was a personal friend and sometime race crew member for my former employer.  My own ride in that car was one of the thrills of my automotive life.  The audio we hear on the internet doesn't do justice to the sound of a Ferrari V-12.

When the Stingray came out, John sold his 250 GT and bought a new, red, Stingray coupe.  I was an 18-year-old kid working a summer job, and John was a 30-something engineer, so I didn't feel comfortable asking him why he made the switch and what he thought of each car.

But, as Leno says, it's hard to overestimate the impact the Stingray had when it came out.  It looked terrific--and like nothing else on the road.  And it had power to match the most exotic European GT's  And it had independent rear suspension.  It was the beginning of the reputation Corvette has to this day: world-class performance for less than half the price of its exotic competition.

http://www.nbc.com/jay-lenos-garage/video/1963-chevrolet-corvette-sting-ray/2789393

There's an error in the video: the C 2's independent rear suspension was fully-articulated, with universal joints at both ends of the half shafts.  It was not a swing axle.  Even so, as the video shows (on-ramp seconds), the Stingray  could be a handful, when you gave it the boot, on those narrow cross-ply tires.

Post-Modern Irony On The Dragon

This picture is funny in so many ways...