Great Read
German Group 5 saloon car race, Nurburgring, 1976 I've had a funny career. I started like gangbusters, and always came very close but never got all I wanted. So to…
Great Read
Pragmatists, not purists: That was Cooper compared to design-led Lotus, or the intensive engineering of BRM. While Colin Chapman was stripping out every gramme and making components double up, Cooper's…
Great Read
It was like bumping into an old flame. Forty years ago, in our distant youth, we'd shared just one dance. In the intervening decades we'd both moved on; inevitably, we…
Great Read
Seeing it lined up, in the Goodwood paddock at the Revival Meeting, with such as the Dino 246, the 250F and the Mercedes-Benz W196, it struck me again how small is the Lancia D50, how astonishing…
Great Read
Just minutes after picking up the mountain pass we come to the first hairpin. I look at my photographs of behemoth Mercedes and Auto Unions scrabbling around tight Alpine bends…
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When Mateus goes to bed he settles down on the kitchen floor beside the cooker. There are seven people living in two rooms. It is hot and there is no…
Great Read
Lifetime achievement awards are usually consolation prizes for people who made a career out of finishing second. John Cooper so rewarded by the historic racing world is clearly an exception.…
Great Read
We all know that there is only one individual sports car in history to not only claim a World Championship but also Le Mans not once but twice. The story…
Great Read
Teatime in McLaren’s paddock palace, The Brand Centre. ‘Team Button’ – father John and manager Richard Goddard – are having a natter. They might be talking business, but just as…
Great Read
The formation finish, staged for the benefit of the cameras, has become commonplace at Le Mans thanks to a certain manufacturer from Germany. Before Audi’s domination of the event, though,…
Great Read
It is purely an age thing, I suppose, this, peculiar tendency we have to forget whole swathes of people who did their stuff before a certain age. An atrophied sense…
Great Read
Sometimes things just don’t turn out as they should. If you had been in the grandstands at Le Mans one lap into the 24-hour race of 1962, you’d have had…
Great Read
Bonneville and the Black Rock Desert; before Daytona Beach or Pendine Sands in Wales, the Land Speed Record belonged to an exclusive turn-of-the-century holiday resort — Ormond Beach, Florida. Ormond…
Great Read
Take out of the equation those pedal-to-metal laps around the old eight-mile Spa-Francorchamps or the pre-Hella Licht-S Osterreichring, and a Porsche 917 couldn't live with a Formula 1 car in…
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Just as it finally seemed within his reach, a broken titanium component crushed Peter Revson's F1 dream Peter Jeffrey Revlon Revson had it all. Good looks, breeding, an attractive personality…
Great Read
"Geentair! Alors, un nouveau record du tour pour Reeshi Geentair!" May 14 1961, Monaco, by common consent the greatest drive of Stirling Moss's life. In Rob Walker's old Lotus 18,…
