Raoul “Sonny” Balcaen may not be a name with which everyone is familiar, but he grew up in Southern California...
Morgans were regularly used in England before World War II in Rallies, Trials and Speed Tests. This is a Morgan...
Legendary team owner Frank Arciero has died from the aftereffects of an aneurysm. Arciero was a 14-year-old Italian immigrant when he arrived in America just prior to the outbreak of World War II, and despite speaking no English proceeded to craft a classic American Dream success story in three different...
From 1950 until his premature retirement from road racing and hillclimbing just three years later, Tommy Hoan set his competitors...
Wrong Place for Flying Dear Editor, Years ago I took weekly flying lessons, accumulating enough seat time to solo. I called...
Cisitalia 202 was a ground-breaking post-war design that placed Pininfarina at the forefront of automotive design. The late 19th century was not a great time for the Farina family to be bringing up eleven children in rural Italy. The tenth was christened Battista, and with all these mouths to feed...
The U.S. motorsports community as a whole, and the profession of motorsports journalism in particular, suffered a great loss on...
Historic aircraft and competition cars, classic road cars and military machines will converge on Bicester Heritage in Oxfordshire for the...
In remembering and memorializing John Fitch upon the occasion of his death, Vintage Racecar has produced this brief photographic summary of his racing career. John FitchPhoto: Mercedes-Benz Before, after and during that career, however, John Fitch was much more than a racing driver. He served as pilot of both Light...
1952 Lancia Aurelia B50Photo: Peter Collins On a rare sunny day in late spring, on empty roads in Wiltshire, this...
It’s rather ironic that both the birth of the “Pony Car” movement in the mid-1960s, and its eventual death in...
Motor racing surely can’t complain about the amount of coverage it now receives on television, but transmission of motor sport actually started before WWII, even though there were few viewers of those first programs. There were interviews with drivers, but even when television started again after the war and audience...
“This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny,” said President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the young Americans who grew...
After World War II, Enzo Ferrari began the work of retooling his small company from manufacturing parts for Italy’s war...
For the past 65 years, Formula One motor racing teams have relentlessly chased the dream of perfection that concludes with them winning a World Championship. In the early years of the modern Grand Prix series it was the Italian Alfa Romeo, Maserati and Ferrari teams—with occasional intrusions by the German...
Tim ParnellPhoto: Pete Austin It was my father, Reg Parnell, who first went to Donington Park in 1934. Living near...
The late 1960s brought a host of changes to the famed 24 Hours of Le Mans. The wave of “professionalism”...
Phil Remington, universally recognized as one of racing’s finest craftsmen, has passed away at the age of 92. Remington left his fingerprints all over seven decades of racecar design innovation, with many of today’s standard practices being solutions he created on the run for problems that popped up in his...
The 1936 Bugatti Type 57G was also known as “The Tank” and it won Le Mans in 1939, just weeks...
Two Citroën Traction Avants at the Tampa Bay Automobile Museum, examples of fairly mild French styling of the Deco era....
A shooting star is an astronomical phenomenon which appears suddenly in the night sky, burns brightly for a few seconds as it streaks across the heavens, then disappears from view as suddenly as it appeared. This also is an apt description of the 1950’s racing career of a Northern California...
German racer Paul Pietsch, the last surviving driver of the prewar Silver Arrows era and the oldest living Grand Prix...
Like most German industrial companies, World War II left much of Mercedes-Benz’s Stuttgart factory in ruins. However, with time Mercedes...
100 years ago, almost anyone could become a car manufacturer. The automobile—and the advance in technology to create it—was in its infancy, creating a near level playing field for anyone with an idea and the desire to try their hand. As the years went on, and the segment transitioned into...
High-powered Italian automotive exotica has always had an attraction for a select number of prominent people of means. Today it’s...
Aficionados of the Riley marque, particularly devotees of the Riley Specials raced prior to World War II, will find a...
The history of Automobili Lamborghini is one that almost parallels the success of post-World War II Italy itself, and is synonymous with the word “Supercar.” The founder of the company, Ferruccio Lamborghini, was born in 1916 in Northern Italy, and as a young man studied engineering. Following World War II...
Photo: David Gooley One glance at a late 1937, ‘38 or ‘39 Darl’mat 402 Special Sport tells you it’s classic...
To anyone interested in automotive history, the late 1940s and early ‘50s was a fascinating period of time, especially in...
Neville HayPhoto: Kary Jiggle After a very successful year in 1935, Prince Chula Chakrabongse, who financed Prince Birabongse’s racing, decided that they should strengthen their team of Voiturette racing cars by adding another ERA to “White Mouse Stable” and disposing of, among their other cars, their Aston Martin Sports car...