Historical Best

Can you hear that creaking sound? That’s the sound of me opening Pandora’s Box once again. At the risk of alienating oh, maybe 95% of our readership—I’m going to go out on a limb here and state that, in my opinion, Formula Ford drivers are among the best drivers in historic racing today. Now, before you start organizing your local editorial recall campaign, let me explain my rationale why.

At the end of June, I was fortunate to be given the opportunity to race one of Sabina Precision Preparation’s 1976 LeGrand Mk21 Formula Fords at the HSR-West Historic Festival at California Speedway. Since it’s been over five years since I raced Formula Ford in my Lotus, I came into this race with pretty low expectations and a fair bit of trepidation as the Historic Festival utilizes all of California Speedway’s Long Course—including 75% of the high-banked oval. For those of you who have raced at Daytona or California Speedway, you know what I mean by trepidation. Having never raced on a super-speedway before, my mind was filled with images of any one of a million speedway crashes that resulted in the car going backward (or worse—forward!) into the wall, with the hapless driver having an early Monday morning appointment with the tailor to have all his pant cuffs shortened by a couple of inches. In fact, for the entire first day of the event, every time I entered the Turn 1 banking—flat out in fourth gear—I found myself reciting a new mantra, “Please don’t break. Please don’t break. Please don’t break…” However, once I realized that the car wasn’t going to break, and that I wouldn’t need that appointment with Terry Trammel after all, I was able to get my head around actually racing the car. And what great racing it was.