Then. In a tiny village of 100 houses in the province of Luxembourg, Belgium, lives a man grinning from ear...
Racer Hurdles Crowd and Lives.” This was the Sunday, August 31, 1952 headline story in the Buffalo Courier Express. The...
For as long as he can remember, James Peacock of Long Beach, California, has been afflicted with a palate for automotive curiosities…a proclivity for the unusual as it were. Worse yet, he’s had a grand master plan…a plan to retire at 40 and spend the second half of his life...
Then. Etceterini.com is the place to be if you’re obsessed with small displacement Italian wizardry of the 1950s. If it’s...
Then. By his own admission, Geoff Hacker specializes in finding cars that no one is looking for. It’s actually an...
Much like the animal it was named for, the precise origin of the Unicorn H-Modified sports racer remains a mystery. Legend has it that the car was built in or around San Francisco in 1952 by a police officer. However, years and years of research by subsequent owners have failed...
What was Jud Phillips thinking? This has been the question that’s tormented Bill Fester for nearly a decade. Fester, from...
Before WWII, the term “sports car” was an alien phrase in the USA. There was no such thing. Returning G.I.s...
“Their hopes, their dreams, their love; tied to a ribbon of road…and a boy’s unflinching faith…in a girl!” “A story of fast cars…reckless women…and sudden danger …and a guy who loved all three!” Become a Member & Get Ad-Free Access To This Article (& About 6,000+ More) Access to the...
The German Grand Prix; Nürburgring, August 2, 1953. World Champion Alberto Ascari sits in his Ferrari 500/F2 in front of...
Then. I’ve been hiding something from you. I’m not proud of it, and it’s been going on for way too...
In the March 2009 VRJ I wrote about Don Blenderman’s Kurtis obsession and his wonderful Sutton-bodied 500KK. What I failed to mention was his lengthy quest to capture an example of Frank’s most prolific sports racer, the legendary 500S. The Kurtis 500S is a masterpiece in function and design. Introduced...
1953 Leson Simca Special Progress is not always a good thing. In the early 1950s, if you wanted to go...
This month’s awesome Hidden Treasure was discovered in 1995, sitting behind a house in Glendale, Arizona. How awesome? You tell...
There is no hidden racecar in this story, but there are four treasures, one mechanical and three human. I love this one. The mechanical treasure of this month’s installment is the 1953 Siata 208S (#BS520). Painted in a lovely shade of white, BS520 was the E-Production Class Winner at the...
In the early 1950s, Americans looked forward to attending auto shows for the unveiling of the manufacture’s latest offerings. Adding...
“For nearly a half-century, wherever Americans powered their way to automobile glory, whether on the two-and-a-half-mile Speedway at Indianapolis, the...
Karl Kling, Mercedes W196.Photo: courtesy of Chris Bayley Automobilia (www.chrisbayleyautomobilia.co.uk) Lost in the sands of time for nearly 60 years a photographic collection has recently been unearthed by Automotive Collector Chris Bayley. These original photos, which are believed not to have ever been previously published, transport us back to the...
How many of you would journey 500 miles across country to race a freshly built car whose engine had never...
Then After back-to-back wins at the Indianapolis 500 in 1953 and 1954, Bill Vukovich returned for the ’55 race with...
Terry Bennett says he grew up as both a nerd and a motor-head. It was hardly his fault. His father was a brilliant physician, his mother a concert-grade pianist, and he was born in 1938 in Los Angeles, soon to be the epicenter of sports car racing. Bennett began driving...
The 7th running of the fall races at Watkins Glen, N.Y., was held at the Interim Course, a 4.6-mile, 9-turn...
One of the wildest racecar designs of the 1950s was penned by Mario Boano, for Carlo Abarth, in 1954. From...
“Wow, I could have had an 8V!” Can you imagine if Fiat had hired actor Ronald Reagan in 1952 to promote its brand-new sports car with that mostly familiar slogan? Had Fiat done that, is there any doubt that thousands of units would have been sold? Instead, in 1975 Campbell’s...
I worked for Jaguar from 1952 to 1986 as Chief Test and Development Engineer. Throughout that time I drove some...
Don Blenderman is koo-koo for Kurtis cars. And why not? Frank Kurtis is arguably the greatest American racecar builder of...
The Pikes Peak Hill Climb is the second-oldest major motor racing event in North America. The inaugural race was held in 1916, and the annual happening now attracts tens-of-thousands of spectators. The winding 12.4-mile course features 156 serpentine turns and starts at an altitude of 9,390 feet. The “race to...
When I moved to Tennessee a few years ago, one of the first things I did was look for a...
In my book Vintage American Road Racing Cars, I wrote, “Of all the Kurtis road racing cars, the 500X is...
Few cars have had more racing success and are more legendary than the Porsche 550 Spyder. From the model’s first competitive outing (at the time it was known simply as Type 550) in May of 1953, Porsche immediately knew it had a winner. In a torrential rainstorm, Helmut Gloeckler piloted...
