Favourite era

[TimD]

Simple question - what is the era of Historic Racing that most appeals to you? From a nostalgia perspective, a design perspective and from a spectating perspective too.

Are they the same for all of your interests?

I wonder this, because I'm trawling through race results from the early 1950s at the moment, and although I adore 1950s sports prototypes above all others when it comes to watching a Historic Racing meet, frankly archiving their original successes is a bit of a slog.

At the same time, I love the cars of the 1920s, and take great delight in chronicling them, but their day is done, I can't call them the best racing spectacle in the world any more.

What's the era that does it for you? F1 turbocars? classic Porsche/Ferrari/Ford Le Mans battles? The thirties Grand Prix titans?

And what is it about them that appeals?

[paulzinho]

I am quite keen on the 80s myself.

Group C sportscars, amazinbg to look at, amzing races too.

And Formula One had one of its greatest periods with Turbos and Drivers such as Senna, Prost and Piquet.

Unfortunately nowadays F1 is dominated by electonics and we have lost many great circuits.

Oh I long to see the Mulsanne straight chicaneless, Formula One mickey mouse circuitless and more close, hard and fair racing.

[Craig]

I'm really a fan of classic saloon/touring car racing (what is the definition of classic, historic, vintage, etc ?) of the late 60s to date. Not really a huge fan of anything much older I'm afraid but I am somewhat taken with late-thirties Grand prix racing I have to confess. Sadly though I'm really no expert on racing history so I tend to stick to the modern day stuff and just read about/browse this forum to pick up bits about the 'good old days'

[John Schoen]

The late sixties and early seventies. Formula 1 was more accessible and there was the CanAm series in the US. There was a lot of room for innovation and people tried out the weirdest ideas. The people that drove those cars are my heroes.

[strad]

Tim;
You ask the hardest questions
As you may have gathered I'm a big fan of those early years, you know the thirties, with Rosemeyer, Nuvolari, Varzi, Caracciola...the Auto-Union and Mercedes battles, and think the Bugatti was a beauty. They were great days. Glory days.
Yet much of my heart belongs to those heros who brought us into the modern age in the fifties and the time when it was still a sport. The skill of guys like Fangio and Ascari, Hawthorn, Brooks etc...too many to name.. mastering cars that while beautiful were still a bear to drive.
But my personal heros , the ones I first watched that sucked me so deeply into F1 come from the sixties..Clark first and foremost but also Von Tripps and Bandini, Brabham, Surtees and Stewart to name just a few..
However I have a deep abideing love for the innovation and and cars of the seventies, such a vast array of different designs and approaches, and the drivers Rindt, Fittipaldi, Lauda, Hunt, Scheckter Villenuve and Alan Jones. Once again to name but just a few. The danger had not yet been abated and they faced death everytime they got into the cars.
They lived fast they drove fast, it was a very exciting time.
But how can I downplay the eighties and nineties the excitement of the Prost/Senna battles? Nigel or Damon? The slashing attack of Rosburg.
As you can see it would be very hard for me to say this or that was my favorite era..
I have follwed and loved every year, every (well almost every)race until this most recent time when competition and innovation have almost been squelched by the FIA and some of their ridiculous rules and games and the altering of almost every challenging (read that as dangerous-as per the FIA)track. I fear for what the boys in charge have done in the last few years and for the influence that sponsorship dollars and corporate control have on F1, but I soldier on in hopes that the light will break and we will soon find a time when the rules makers at the FIA will no longer decide the design and shape of the cars through they rule mandates.
A time when cars and drivers will truly be allowed to explore the limits of their abilities. A time when we will once again be allowed to see glorious battles.

[TimD]

I'll drink to that!

I'm a great believer in the "wow" factor. I took a couple of total motor racing novices to a Silverstone Coys festival a couple of years back. These were people who knew absolutely nothing about racing or marques or drivers. (Far more impressed by seeing Mark Knopfler in the paddock than Stirling Moss, for example.)

But when a pack of Lola T70s came charging through Copse, with a Porsche 917, Matra MS650 and an Alfa T33 in close attendance, one of my friends just turned to me and exclaimed "Now that was sexy!"

And that's what it all boils down to for me. The incredible spectacle that seems somehow to have been diluted for the sake of - well, what exactly....?

[strad]

Sexy...well that does discribe it doesn't it? HAHAHAHAHA
Ah for the old days, Ah for want of Can-Am..heavy sigh

[strad]

But Timmy me boy, you've hinted now come clean with your choices.

[TimD]

Well, seeing as you asked....

For me, motor racing heaven is a brightly coloured pack of beautifully crafted 50s sports cars. Aston DB3S, Ferrari Mondial, Maserati 300S, Jaguar D, each with their unique and distinctive character, competing against one another.

Vintage sports cars appeal, but don't have quite the same visceral delight. I adore vintage Bentleys for their aesthetics and their character, not for how quickly they can thrash round a track any more. Big sixties V8 Sports Prototypes - the Lola T70s - get me every time though.

As for single-seaters, the nostalgia for the turbo era is struggling for supremacy over my admiration for the titans of the 1930s. Not sure which is winning this morning - it will have changed by this afternoon, anyway.

And then of course there are the aero-engined monsters from Brooklands, and how I regret being born 70 years too late to see them in their heyday!

Next!!

[David McKinney]

I'm sure what each of us considers to be our "golden era" is determined by when we caught "the bug". In my own case I was smitten in 1959, and immediately devoured any reading matter I could lay my hands on. This means that while it was rear-engined Coopers I was watching at the circuits, there were still front-engined Maseratis and Ferraris - the type of cars I had been reading about, and which seemed to me to be "real' racing cars. I am sure that is the reason that the last years of the front-engined period remain my personal favourite.
I am qually sure we'd find that most - if not all - the favourite eras chosen by other posters in their thread relate directly to when they discovered motor racing - especially if that coincided with their puberty (don't ask me, I'm not a psychiatrist )

[AndyF]

Am more of a fan of Saloon racing myself, so anything post-1950s is good for me!!

[DAVID PATERSON]

I am also a touring car fan above all else and I am interested in the late '60s through to the present day.

[everett brown]

Can-Am for me as well as Indy car racing in the 70's with those massive turbo engines and a all new era of Aero R&D. AAR doing battle both in Can-Am as well as USAC.

[Adam43]

I like sportscar racing from the 50s (D-Types), late 60s/early 70 (GT40s, 917s etc..) and the 80s (Group C). I also like F1 from the mid 70s to the late 80s.

Fast, powerful and good looking cars do it for me.

[David Tremayne]

Err, here's one I prepared earlier, TimD, but I guess it sums up my first favourite era. By the way, since you live in Harrow you are always welcome to call. The number's in the book.

I’d been in the world 14 years and one month when, on January 4 1967, I caught the news footage of Donald Campbell crashing to his death on Coniston Water.
I look back on that as the defining moment of my life.
When I had started at grammar school in 1964 I was aware that Campbell had driven a big blue whale-shaped car to the land speed record, but it would be a while longer before I became smart enough to appreciate the heroic status of its driver. The tragedy that took his life changed all that. A month or two later I happened across a book by Richard Hough called The BP Book of the Racing Campbells while I was shopping in our local Soper’s department store in Harrow one Saturday morning. Without daring to tell my parents I blew my 12/6d pocket money on it, and feasted on the Campbells’ exploits for weeks afterwards. I still remember chunks of the book verbatim. ‘Driver matched car, for Ray Keech was a giant of a man with red hair and hands like a crane’s grab…’
1967 became the year when I found my life’s focuses.
Four months later my father and I overhauled the gearbox in his Rover 90, which he would already let me drive in private car parks. I’d cleaned the massively engineered clutch withdrawal mechanism, but it wasn’t until we had the gearbox back in the car and my father tried it for the first time and couldn’t select a gear that we realised I had put the withdrawal shaft back in at the wrong angle. The whole thing had to come out again so we could reset it. Typically, my father bore the setback with a calmness, tolerance and lack of recrimination that I confess usually eludes me.
That night I took refuge in the latest copy of Autocar. It was handed on to my mother, who worked in a wallpaper shop in Harrow, by the owner, a kind Hungarian called Zenukov Selby. There I found an evocative photo of this fierce-looking BRM H16 being driven by a guy called Jackie Stewart in the Daily Express International Trophy race at Silverstone. I had loved cars as far back as I could remember. I once told my parents about the time we’d seen the Golden Arrow. They swore we never had gone down to the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu, but I had memories of just being able to peer over those panniers, and seeing the acres of gold coachwork and the gun sight on the scuttle. Astonished, they later remembered that we must have seen it at a Schoolboys’ Exhibition in London in 1956. They figured I’d been four years old. But until that moment with the photo of JYS, Le Mans Maseratis had been uppermost in my interest. Now, thanks to that wonderful head-on portrait of the brutish H16 eating its understeering way through Copse, I became hooked on Formula One cars. 1967 was indeed a cathartic year.
That August the Fourth Harrow Scout Troop went to the Lake District. We erected our tents in torrential rain, and while the troop leaders set about creating a hot stew dinner and we all dreamed of being dry and scoffing it down, we were dragged out on a five-mile hike. It was still raining, because this was Lakeland. That’s what it does there. Where else do you figure all that green comes from?
My mate Alan ‘Castrol Mac’ McLelland was Chris Amon in a Ferrari P4 and I, of course, was John Surtees in the Lola Aston Martin that had, to my intense disappointment and embarrassment, lasted just over a lap at Le Mans. Ever since I’d seen the gorgeous dark green coupe in the flesh at the Racing Car Show in January I had been obsessed by it. Now in the rain in Cumbria the pair of us ‘raced’ against other boys who were blissfully unaware that they were myriad Ford MkIVs, Chaparral 2Fs, Porsche 907s and Gulf Mirages, though no less important for that ignorance. Needless to say, the Lola Aston ran at the front this time and was narrowly ‘victorious’ when our drenched party finally got back to camp.
(I wonder about myself, sometimes. I once ran an entire Tasman Series in my head over Sunday lunch, nominating members of my again blissfully unaware family as contenders such as Niel Allen and Frank Matich in their Formula 5000 McLaren M10Bs as we all chomped through each course as if it was one of the races. Only I knew that I was Graham McRae with his black Crown Lynn Potteries version. And that, of course, I won. I always was a fast eater.)
But enough fantasy digression.
That was my first visit to the Lakes, which immediately became my favourite part of the world. A sort of spiritual home. No matter where I have been since, and I’ve been lucky to see an awful lot of the globe over the years, that has never changed. Together with the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, it’s one of those places that evoke the sort of memories that make your heart warm and your eyes moisten.
That trip was probably the point at which my mania for collecting racing memorabilia subconsciously began. I guess what really fired it was my frustration at the complete lack of Campbell ephemera in the shops of Coniston. What I couldn’t know then was that it would be at least another two decades before the village shyly acknowledged the connection by selling a few nice models of the Bluebirds, for the folk there have never been the type to cash in on sacred memories.
Other racing seasons came and went, but none quite so captured my developing imagination as the year in which the flat, wide orange-snouted BRMs waged their hopeless, overweight fight against the elegant new Lotus-Fords of Jim Clark and Graham Hill, or Dan Gurney occasionally finished – won, even! - in the gloriously beaked Eagle-Weslake. Even the car names were better back then.
That year’s World Championship fell to Denny Hulme, a no-nonsense New Zealander as tough as they came. Graham Hill lived not far from us, and I occasionally tormented myself wondering what on earth I’d say to this great man if I ever met him. I felt the same about Denny who, God help us all, had a fearsomely grouchy reputation.
Back then I could never have known that my career would lead to a friendship with Jackie Stewart and Bette Hill and her children, and sound working relationships with gods such as Amon and Gurney, who (and it was terribly important to me that it should be so) proved just as much a hero when I finally met him as he always had been in my youthful mind.
Denny in particular became a mate and was a man I admired immensely for his unique brand of grit and courage. It would later see the McLaren team through its darkest hour in the aftermath of Bruce’s death on June 2 1970. Denny had only days before burned his hands horribly in an invisible methanol fire at Indianapolis, but somehow he raced again and again, this human giant, each time cracking his newly healed skin, just to keep the team that Bruce created from being swamped by the enormity of its loss. Without Denny, there might not have been anything for Ron Dennis to build into the fabulous empire that McLaren is today.
When you had passed the secret assessments that Denny made, you were allowed to become privy to the warm and wonderful fellow that lived behind the craggy exterior that the old bear chose to present to the world. It helped to keep away those that he didn’t want to have to deal with.
Like Donald Campbell, Dan Gurney and Jimmy Clark, he left me with an enduring image of what a hero should be, and I use that definition still when judging today’s stars. And like Donald, Dan and Jimmy, Denny had not the remotest idea that men such as himself, their deeds and their courage, capture the rare human spirit that makes the world more special and motivates young boys to try and realise their dreams.
Denny died of natural causes in October 1992, racing a BMW at Bathurst in Australia. Five months earlier we’d had a fulfilling weekend in Monaco where he was feted on the 25th anniversary of his victory in 1967. He remembered how pre-war racer Louis Chiron had had to ask him what his name was before presenting him to Prince Rainer. ‘The old bugger had watched me leading for two hours and he still didn’t know who I was,’ Denny grated. ‘I reckon he was well past his sell-by date!’
I can hear him chuckling even now.
And my eyes always sting every time I think of that wonderful man who was king of the Formula One world, back in that most formative year of my life.

David Tremayne

[Lee Janotta]

Oh, jeez... So many wonderful eras!

Mid '50s to mid '60s F1 and F2... '80s IMSA GTP and FIA Group C... '50s and '60s LeMans sportscars (Jag D-types, a plethora of Ferarris and Maseratis, Lotus Elite and Elan, Porsche 356 and 550, Cobra, GT40.... DROOL!)... SCCA Trans Am thru '70... But Can Am cars are my absolute favorites. I'm more partial to the earlier ones... The McLaren-Chevrolets, Jim Hall's Chapparels, the the McKee with the 455 big-block Olds... But, of course, the Porsche 917/30 is the ultimate challenge for a driver. If you can conquer that car, there's not much you _can't_ do in a car.

[strad]

David;
Your writting hasn't suffered with time..thank for the wonderful and personal insight.

[mickj]

strad I agree with you. David you put into words what some people can only think of saying. Have you got any other stories to share with us??

[strad]

HAHAHAHAHAHA Yes David do you have any other stories?

[strad]

I'm sorry, not nice of me...
For those that don't recognize the name, Mr Tremayne, if in fact this is one in the same, something I have no reason to doubt concidering his eloquent post,is a published author in the motorsports world, and to quote from the dust jacket on my copy of "the Concise Encyclopedia of Formula One"...David is a self confessed speed addict. He has interviewed all the major F1 drivers, team owners, and motorsports personalities of the past 15 years(98), as well as many from the past.
David covers the F-1 Championship each year, and has written numerous books on motorsport past and present, as well as contributing regularly to magazines...blah blah...
I hope this doesn't embarass you Mr. Tremayne, but it's an honor to to have you here.

[strad]

I should add that I for one would be most interested in any stories you may feel like sharing..

[Ray Bell]

I'm glad there's someone else around who can spell Niel Allen's name... thank you David.

You're even better known than myself in our field.

One question though... if you knew of Niel Allen, why on earth would you choose to be Graham McRae?

[TimD]

David, I may very well take you up on your kind offer. I am honoured.

("Racers Apart" is one of the best reads on my bookshelf, and I'm not just saying that!)

[Peter Mallett]

Well,

I lurve those pre 65 sports cars, then there's the Group 2 era from 1976 to 82, then we've got the Group ones then .................Oh my God I just love em all!!!!!!

Welcome aboard Mr Tremayne (tugging non-existent forelock).

[DAVID PATERSON]

EVEN better known Ray, settle down.