Hero of the “Heroes”

The Internet has changed our lives in so many ways. In just the past 20 years, the Internet has both opened up the expanse of our immediate world and at that same time made it all closer to hand than we ever could have imagined. It is as a result of this strange global “closeness” that I now sit here, mourning a man I’ve known for over 20 years and yet never met. It is with a heavy heart that I report that Vintage Road & Racecar’s longtime contributor and “Italian Bureau Chief,” Robert Newman, has passed away.

Robert began contributing to VR sometime in 1999. I say sometime in 1999, because it was so long ago, I can’t find any definitive documentation on when he first started with us, other than his first inclusion in the masthead in the May 1999 issue. What I do recall is that the magazine was less than a year old when I received an email from a reader wanting to add a finer level of historical detail to a Maserati 250F article that we had run. While it seemed like minutiae at the time, this reader was going on and on about the importance of the 250F’s long association with Pirelli tires!