Vintage Motorsports on the Other Side of the Pandemic

One nice thing about the old car hobby is that it’s pretty much pandemic-proof. Other than large gatherings, most of the things that make vintage cars enjoyable can be done without affecting others. After all, spinning a wrench in a garage is essentially a lonesome pursuit, as is just staring at your beloved classic (activities which probably account for 90% of all classic car time). As long as FedEx has trucks, you can get parts delivered.

But what about more active pursuits? Well, racing old cars, it turns out, is not a high-risk activity. Hell, it’s done outdoors at enormous facilities, each competitor is packed into his own little self-contained box on wheels… and the crowds at most vintage car races–even without a pandemic–is generally small.

The happy upshot of this is that most classic car magazines survived the pandemic just fine, as did most forms of old-car racing.

So 2022 was business as usual for Vintage Motorsport, and they turned out yet another delightful mag for their May / June issue of the year. Perhaps the most notable characteristic of this particular mag is that it focuses on American cars and racing, which is a welcome complement to my Anglo-centric usual reads.

One article in particular felt wondrous and amazing: the one about the Nutley Velodrome. Now, quite apart from the fact that Nutley Velodrome is an utterly perfect name for an insane board-racing track, a place where Mad Max would race, I enjoyed the article because I was just too young to have been around when board-track racing was a thing, or even a recent memory. It truly is an exotic era of auto racing for me.

The rest of the mag was good, too… but that article was simply wonderful.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a high concept science fiction novel entitled–perhaps controversially–Fat Man. He hopes readers enjoy the book as much as he loved writing it… but mainly, he hopes it makes them think. You can check it out here.

Learning from the Past

There is very little that can be said about the 1955 Le Mans disaster that is good. It was a tragedy that led to all sorts of overreactions and almost, almost killed serious motor racing. In fact, the Swiss still haven’t made circuit racing legal again.

But there was one good thing that happened: the organizers of the race said, the week after the accident, that the 1956 race would go on as planned. Yes, there would be modifications to the circuit to make things safer, but all that silly talk about canceling the race could be safely ignored. Writing, as I do in 2023, this attitude is so wonderful and refreshing as to be a breath of fresh air in a world suffocated by people who confuse being alive with living. Living implies a degree of risk, accepting that it is neither possible nor desirable to make everything safe. Sure, store your kids in bubble wrap if you must, but let adults decide for themselves.

Can you imagine how much grayer the world would be had the 2020s nanny state existed in the ’50s? I can’t imagine a world without Le Mans. And yes, it has claimed lives since, but it was worth it.

Of course, the September 1955 issue of Road & Track was overshadowed by the enormity of 84 dead, but the rest of the magazine was interesting, with a Fangio win in Belgium a highlight.

Still, this one would be historic even if the rest of the pages were blank.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a high concept science fiction novel entitled–perhaps controversially–Fat Man. He hopes readers enjoy the book as much as he loved writing it… but mainly, he hopes it makes them think. You can check it out here.

It’s So Simple

Okay, we’ve reached one of my favorite eras of sports car racing at Le Mans: Group C. I know there have been other golden eras, including one that apparently began this year, and I also got to live though the wonderful second half of the 1990s.

But Group C is particularly cool because it was so simple: run whatever you wanted, as long as it was a two-seater (very liberally defined) that had certain dimensions and weight. The caveat? You had only a certain amount of fuel to do it with.

The result of this utterly simple and liberal formula was a golden age. The variety of cars, both competitive and hopeless, from major manufacturers and random garages, was simply amazing. The cars might have looked a bit similar, but they hid technical innovations and differences. Turbos. Engines with 4, 6, 8 and 12 cylinders. Rotaries. Plastic engines (no, I’m not kidding) all ran. And the tiny WM team turned up the boost, taped up the panel lines and hit 400 km/h on the Mulsanne. Beautiful.

All of this is reported on in depth in this book, part of a wonderful series by Spurring, and it reminds us that every single racecar formula in the present day is missing the mark. F1, with its stupid technical restrictions which mean that a team with a good car today can’t be caught by anyone in the foreseeable future, and even Le Mans, which has a good set of interesting cars, appears to be sliding down the slippery slope of Balance of Performance. There are apparently zero circuit racing categories where technical innovation is actually encouraged.

So we can wallow in the nostalgia of an era when rulemakers actually believed that racing was supposed to improve the breed.

And this is a particularly cool era in which to enjoy that.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a collection of science fiction and fantasy crime stories entitled Thin Air. He hopes readers enjoy the stories as much as he loved writing them. You can check it out here.

The Mighty RS500

I drew something… Ford’s Group A weapon, the Sierra RS500 was a wonderful attempt at giving a sedan whose aerodynamics-first styling was controversial in its day and age a sporting image. The fact that they were successful in doing so is a testament to just how awesome the fire-breathing racers were. This is a restored example: the car Guy Edwards drove in 1989.

Gustavo Bondoni’s latest book is a collection of science fiction and fantasy crime stories entitled Thin Air. He hopes readers enjoy the stories as much as he loved writing them. You can check it out here.

For the Love of Old Race Cars

Vintage Motorsport is one of the magazines I grab whenever I’m in the US. Generally, you can find issues at the better Barnes and Nobles.

Why? What is it about old race cars that fascinates me (and enough people that the mag is still printed and distributed)? After all, race cars have a very short shelf life. In extreme cases, they’re only good for a few races and then are made obsolete by new developments (or, at least they used to be when actually developing stuff was legal). Racers, for the most part, HATE any car that doesn’t have the very latest, and is therefore slower than the other cars on track.

And old race cars, like that girl (or boy) you were in love with in your sophomore year, aren’t conventionally beautiful–often even destroying the pure lines of whatever car they were originally based on.

I think there are a couple of things at work here. The first is the pure nostalgia factor. These were the cars you grew up rooting for (or against, as in the case of the utterly hated and reviled MP4/4), driven by people who seemed larger than life to a young enthusiast. And this last part is even objectively true–after all, racing was a hell of a lot more dangerous back then, and the men who practiced the sport truly were a breed apart compared to the much more pampered “heroes” of today.

The other part is the history of these old machines. We know where each of the cars here stands. We know which were giants (hello Porsche 962) and which were footnotes.

My problem is that I tend to find the footnotes even more interesting than the giants, which kind of blunts the argument.

Worse still, I find the Group 44 Jaguars some of the most beautiful cars to ever grace road or track.

So I guess it’s just a disease.

Still, if I have to have a disease, this is a nicer one than most.

Gustavo Bondoni has recently completed the Emily Plair Trilogy with the final novel, Amalgam. Find out what happens to each of the characters in the satisfying conclusion, which you can purchase here.

The Most Beautiful Might-have-been

In 1938, Alfa brought the most beautiful cars to Le Mans.  They were also the fastest and stormed off into the distance, beating down the field to lead the race by miles.  That they broke was a heartbreak that endures more than eighty years later.

This is my drawing of that car in that race. I hope it gives you an idea of the beauty that came to the race that day.

You can check out my other drawings here.

Bringing Antisocialism to the US

We’ve discussed the sheer fun and completely antisocial nature (which makes it even more fun) of top-speed shootouts before. But since this is the ’80s, it wasn’t enough for a US magazine to do a World’s Fastest Cars article in the far-off (and therefore safe) reaches of the European continent. They had to bring the circus to the US, where, if you recall, the second dumbest law ever (after prohibition) was still in effect, limiting speeds to 55 mph.

Of course, for a reader not in the US, reading this issue nearly forty years after the test, the only thing I see is that the cars in here are slower than the ones they ran in Europe. Still, I will always admire anything that upsets the social engineers among us, and those timid souls who establish stupid speed limits, so I applaud the effort anyway.

While the last issue I read was probably among the best I’ve ever seen, this one was perhaps average. A lot of relatively uninteresting road cars followed the top speed article, offset by the wonderful competition articles towards the end of the mag, which included two memorable races: the 1985 Monaco GP (I still remember the fiery Alfa crash), and the famous Indy 500 in which Danny Sullivan spun and won.

On that front alone, this one is an important issue, but certainly not a landmark.

Gustavo Bondoni has recently completed the Emily Plair Trilogy with the final novel, Amalgam. Find out what happens to each of the characters in the satisfying conclusion, which you can purchase here.

Swoopy Street Car – the Dream of the Individualist

Being an individualist has never been easy, although it was much easier back in the 1980s. Nowadays, people think you’re an individualist because you have a tattoo or two, or maybe because you have a particularly creative cellphone case. In fact, those things just make you exactly the same as everyone else.

In the 1980s, on the other hand, you could buy a loud, antisocial and extremely dangerous (the list of drivers killed in Lola sports racers of this era is long and distinguished) car for the road, all perfectly legal. I didn’t recall this particular vehicle from my own eighties experience, so it’s nice that the good folks at R&T decided to put it on the cover. Can you imagine driving that in southern California today? The Ferrari and Bentley drivers would feel the unaccustomed emotion of envy, while the vegans and millionaire socialists would have palpitations and faint while clutching their pearls. All of these are desirable outcomes.

The rest of the issue is a bit less in-your-face, as it’s an offseason special, but at least the Salon is of a Hispano-Suiza, a car that, in its day, enraged more socialists than anything you can buy today. Again, an enjoyable outcome, not so much because I dislike socialists per se, but because I dislike socialists when they’re attacking symbols of taste and individuality. A god Hispano sighting every once in a while serves to remind them that not all things done by rich people are bad.

The rest of the mag was classic eighties fare… R&T was losing its edge a bit, and we had a comparison test of station wagons. But the cover car forgives a lot of sins!

Gustavo Bondoni has recently completed the Emily Plair Trilogy with the final novel, Amalgam. Find out what happens to each of the characters in the satisfying conclusion, which you can purchase here.

Bonnier’s Lola

Jo Bonnier was one of the greats and, as the driving force behind the Swiss-cheese Lola T-280, this GP winner was also responsible for one of the most surreally interesting liveries ever to grace a race car.  Most people will be hard-pressed to realice that the grayish lumps on this wonderfully yellow racer are cheeses.  But they are, and they rock.

This is a colored pencil drawing of the car as it appeared in Zeltweg in 1972.

One note on colored pencil which fascinates me is just how different the drawings look in person versus in a photograph. In real life, the lagers of color are clearly visible while in the photo, the dominant color looks like a flat area. It’s an interesting effect that seems to be unique to pencil, although other mediums might have the same issue.

Additionally, I’ve recently opened a gallery on DeviantArt, mainly as a way to be able to showcase all these drawings in one place. You can check it out here.

Gustavo Bondoni has recently completed the Emily Plair Trilogy with the final novel, Amalgam. Find out what happens to each of the characters in the satisfying conclusion, which you can purchase here.

Ferrari at Daytona

I don’t have a ton of time to draw, but when I do, I love doing quirky and unusual cars most of all. A Ferrari might not seem to fit the bill on the face of it, but the 308 that ran at Daytona in 1981 represents one of very, very few appearances for the model at any top-flight event.

Due to Fine Art America imposing a limit of 25 pictures to any artist profile before it starts to charge (it also charges a commission on all sales, so this seems a little greedy on their part), I’ve moved my main gallery to DeviantArt. Here’s the link to all my drawings.