Hard to believe this is the same world I live in today...

Wednesday was my 76th birthday. I would have been 12 or 13 at the time of this Spa race. I can't argue with the logic of the modern world...but there is much about this ancient world I find far more attractive.





ps - I love watching the mechanics driving the cars to the track

 

In 1956 I saw my first sports car race at the old Palm Springs airport course. 32 years later I got to race a 1958 Alfa Spider Veloce at the same airport. There is a great old f1 movie made in 1953, "The Racers" starring Kirk Douglas and a lot of other Hollywood legends. There's a bit of Hollywood BS in it but it was the movie that planted the love of auto racing in me. The car Douglas crashes in the opening race sequence I got to see in the flesh racing up at Monterey decades later.

In one of the film clips I posted you see an English team having tea in the pits. And Fangio is just beginning his career at the age of 38. The races cars interspersed with regular traffic, all driving to the track is priceless. A mechanic who worked on my Alfas back in the 80s was a former factory Auto Delta mechanic and he told me how they would race the factory GTAs back to the factory after a race weekend. Sterling Moss, in one of the clips, talks about racing for just enough money to buy himself one meal a day for a week...and you can see the fondness for that time in his face and hear it in his voice.

Today is today and I'm never going to get younger and racing isn't going to go backwards in time and technology. And part of this modern world is YouTube which is what makes seeing all these old films so available.

Thanks for the well wishes. And I think it would be swell if Sunday gives us Kimi, Seb, and Ocon on the podium in that order.