Bet you’re thinking of Fangio’s transcendent victory at the ’Ring. The launch of the Fuelie Corvette. The beautiful Scarabs. Jaguar’s...
Pete Lyons Got paper and pen at hand? Or simple fingers will do: Try coming up with a list of...
Still racers, after all these years. That’s what I was thinking as one veteran driver after another mounted the stage and regaled us with stories of his Trans-Am days. Pete Lyons The Trans-Am: It started way back in the mid-‘60s, which means these guys must be, gosh, mumble-mumble years old...
When I were but a lad, my notion of a perfect Saturday was to walk down to the train station...
Losing a child is one of the harshest agonies of life, and even people who don’t personally know John and...
Pete Lyons There is no great genius without a trace of madness,” declared the Roman philosopher Seneca, and can we have any doubt he was looking ahead 1.9 millennia to designers of Can-Am racecars? The wonderful old Canadian-American Challenge Cup series of 1966 through 1974 is justly famed for many...
Can it be 50 whole years since the first Sebring 12-hour? I guess I’ve seen this coming, but still, it...
Pete Lyons Hail the “Mod Scot!” Such a thought must have flickered through many minds as 27 Group 7 machines...
It reads like a plot line no real screenwriter would dare pitch: A little-known transmission engineer who has never designed a whole racing car must draw up a new mount for an F1 World Champion. Constructed clandestinely in an old woodshed, the machine proves so fast that it sets a...
New race courses keep blinking onto our radar screens, which seems like a good thing until they turn up on...
Our sport is gaudy, so noisy, so cherished and studied and conserved … how can so much of racing’s history...
Like all heroes, Brett Lunger denies being one. To him, running into fire broiling from Niki Lauda’s crashed Ferrari, its tanks still first-lap full, was simply what one does when action must be instantaneous. He says he didn’t even think about it. Yet the rescue will forever define this American...
Maybe I’ll change my mind by the end of the column, but as I tap out this opening sentence, I...
Pete Lyons Fair warning: I know very little about my topic, which is Rush, the new movie set in the...
Pete Lyons Come with me to Italy, if you’ve got a minute, I want to show you something neat. We’re standing along a sun-drenched country road, waiting for old race cars in the Mille Miglia Storica commemorative rally to appear. It’s a scene of joyous beauty, with flowers spangling the...
In racing, we sometimes get to cheer wins that come first-time-out. At the other end of the scale lies the...
Pete Lyons You know how someone’s opposing opinion, one that seems inconsequential enough to let slide at the time, can...
In motor racing we meet some very able people, and some very fine ones. It’s wonderful when they’re the same people. We call them gentlemen. Our community has just lost two: Bob Akin and Rob Walker. Let’s honor their memories by stopping to think about how much gentlemen – yes,...
This month Pete is recovering from a “close encounter of the surgical kind.” Pete is doing well and will return...
There was the time I went to the Targa Florio and was strolling by a restaurant in the night-dark streets...
Just after 4:00 pm on the rainy Sunday of June 19, 1966, a trio of squat, massive, 427-engined American coupes splashed by a Frenchman waving a giant, sodden checkered flag, and thereby rumbled into international immortality. Pete Lyons We mark several towering milestones this year, but one of the tallest...
Recent discussion in these pages about a supposed sixth Grand Sport racing Corvette rang two bells with me. First, I...
Here’s a big four-oh for me: That many years ago this month the Can-Am began, and basically so did my...
Exciting; that’s how Jackie Stewart stands in my memory. There’s a lot more to be said of the three-time World Champion from Scotland (and it’s all been said!), but bring it down to a single word and I still think Stewart is one of the most exciting racers I’ve ever...
It exploded at me around a blind embankment, big truck, top-heavy, heeling as it hurtled downhill. What its driver saw,...
Mountaineers have their El Capitans, their Eiger North Walls, their Everests. For racers too, certain challenges rise above all others....
Friday evening before the 1975 Austrian Grand Prix, over dinner in a quiet countryside hotel, Mark Donohue told us about setting a 221-mph speed record the week before with his old Can-Am Porsche. “It’s the only thing I’ve accomplished this year,” he remarked with a small grin. By his high...
Pete Lyons Have you ever crushed an aluminum can, then found yourself wondering, “Could I straighten it back out, like...
The other evening I watched a panel of motorsport reporters on a TV show name their “driver of the year.”...
From time to time someone asks how I got into this business – apparently it looks like fun – and I explain it’s all been thanks to my dad. He taught me to shoot. Not that Ozzie Lyons made me follow his footsteps to a career in photography; but when...
