It was 11 in the morning. A 25-year-old German pastry cook was sleeping after a hard night’s baking. Until the...
This large, domineering man invented the job of motor racing team manager and in doing so changed the way the...
A million clichés come to mind. Giant killer is probably the worst, pummelled to death by a thousand newspaper hacks, but that’s exactly what the original Ecurie Ecosse was. A meteor that came from nowhere and took the world’s endurance motor racing crown—twice. It was a shoestring operation working out...
The story of the Marzotto brothers and their brief but mercurial motor racing careers was mostly about Giannino winning the...
Exotic doesn’t cut it when it comes to describing this gutsy, fun-loving, vivacious show-off of a beauty who was born...
Hero is far too modest a word to describe Eddie Rickenbacker. Racing driver, World War 1 ace, Medal of Honor winner, holder of no fewer than seven Distinguished Service Crosses, car manufacturer, Indianapolis Speedway owner, Pacific Ocean crash survivor, founder of Eastern Airlines. Not even superhero comes close. What makes...
“Sex – the breakfast of Champions” was the legend on the T-shirt the 1976 Formula 1 World Champion wore under...
With a dad like Stan Jones it was hardly surprising that Alan became a motor racing nut when he was still a kid. Stan won the 1954 New Zealand International Grand Prix, four 1955 Victorian Trophies at Fisherman’s Bend, Melbourne, became the 1958 Australian Gold Star Champion and won the...
Carlo Pintacuda was one of the Florentine greats, a motor racing elite from the Tuscan city that also included Gastone...
Unlike those of Jim Clark, Mario Andretti and Michael Schumacher, not a name at the forefront of all our minds....
Two heroes and a heroine. What unites them? The Audi Quattro, rallying’s first four-wheel-drive, turbocharged car. Hannu and Stig each won a world drivers title with the German groundbreaker, and Michèle would have done the same if Walter Röhrl hadn’t got in her way. But she still beat 21 top...
In the 1920s and 1930s, British schoolboys devoured every word they could find about their favorite comic book heroes, like...
Frank Raymond Wilton “Lofty” England was not head and shoulders above many other men just because he was 6 ft...
Dan Gurney’s motor racing career as a driver, car constructor and team owner is just about as star-spangled as his country’s flag. After Phil Hill, he was the second American to win in Formula 1, and is considered the equal of that other American superstar, Mario Andretti. He is also...
Keke Rosberg was a kind of motor racing Cinderella Man. He went from the drudgery of retiring or not even...
This is the story of a hero who was more heroic than most. You may not have heard of Archie...
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...
Just about everything there is to write has been written about American racing legend Mario Andretti, but we would be...
Dario Resta competed in the first race ever held on Britain’s hallowed Brooklands circuit on July 6, 1907, and died...
Hans Stuck first met Adolf Hitler in 1925, when a mutual friend brought the budding Führer to the racing driver’s farm near Freiburg, Germany, for a day’s hunting. Hitler never forgot his day out and, after taking power on January 30, 1933, telephoned Stuck, who had been bemoaning the lack...
Wealthy Belgian aristocrat Olivier Gendebien has the unique distinction of being Ferrari’s most successful GT and sports car racer. He...
Ken Tyrrell once said that, contrary to what had been written about him, he had no special talent for spotting...
Now, here was a giant killer. A man who beat the hell out of Mercedes-Benz at least twice and won Ferrari’s very first World Championship Grand Prix by beating the most successful racing car of all time. Born in Arrecifes, Argentina, in October 1922, Gonzalez was a tubby baby who...
No way did Elisabeth Junek look like a racing driver. She was, well, a woman to begin with, and there...
Enzo Ferrari telephoned his driver Peter Collins before the 1956 Grand Prix of Italy for one of “those” conversations. The Great Man said he would not ask Peter to give up his chance of winning the year’s Formula One World Championship in favor of Fangio, but he wanted to know...
John Watson was one of those rare beasts: an Irish Grand Prix winner. It was a feat pulled off by...
I guess genius rather than hero is the correct way to describe Ferdinand Porsche, whose cars mobilized humanity and provided...
Shot by the Gestapo, executed at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, killed on a death march from Sachsenhausen. All of those horrific things are said to have happened to Captain Charles Frederick William Grover-Williams, Grand Prix winner, member of the wartime ultra-secret French section of Britain’s Special Operations Executive and French...
