Pacenotes – August 2013

• Northern California’s Classic Sports Racing Group will host its 10th Annual Charity Challenge at Sonoma Raceway on the weekend of October 4-6. The event will include all the usual eight CSRG race groups, with Vintage and Historic racecars dating from pre-WWII into the 1970s. The event will feature the Nifty Fifties Sports Cars: Maserati, Ferrari, Porsche, Lotus and other famous names, and include several well-known American “Specials” from the Golden Era of U.S. sports car racing. Highlighting the fund-raising activities will be a raffle of both racing-related and non-racing items, and the popular Charity Track Rides in cars competing on the weekend. In its first nine years, the CSRG Charity Challenge Series raised more than a half a million dollars for Speedway Children’s Charities of Sonoma. For more information, please visit CSRGRACING.org

• G J Wisdom & Co.’s recent online auction of a 1957 Cooper T43 produced a winning bid of £85,800—including the buyer’s premium—with bidders registering worldwide from Australia, Monaco, America and the UK. The Cooper had initially been presented with chassis number F2/14/57 as the original car owned and raced by “Big Bill” Whitehouse, a 500-cc frontrunner during the 1950s, but subsequent investigations revealed another car bearing the same chassis number, and through a process of elimination that car is now believed to be the actual Whitehouse car. The T43 sold is now believed to be F2/18/57, the team car of New Zealander Raymond Thackwell (father of Mike). Thackwell owned and ran a number of T43s at the time, and apparently the chassis number confusion arose when they purchased Whitehouse’s car following his death in a racing accident at Reims.