This one picture is why I’m writing these thousand words. I’m doing so in the first week of August 2008—precisely...
It reads like a plot line no real screenwriter would dare pitch: A little-known transmission engineer who has never designed...
Pete Lyons Our reigning World Champion has forced us to think, once again, about sportsmanship in motorsport. Whether or not you monitor modern F1, you must know of the controversy that Sebastian Vettel brewed up in this year’s second GP at Malaysia. Late in the race he found himself coming...
Did your heart rev up when you heard Dan Gurney was trying to resurrect his old Eagle F1 team? Dan...
Fifty-one years after winning his fifth and final world championship, Juan Manuel Fangio is still my favorite F1 driver. Never...
With F1 about to try another comeback in the U.S., next year in Texas, our minds inevitably reach back half a century to the first such noble experiment. Pete Lyons It was 1959 when promoter Alec Ulmann staged the inaugural United States Grand Prix (USGP) on the old airport course...
Pete Lyons Occasionally here you may notice me express disdain for the twisted state modern Formula One has gotten itself...
Ferrari—let the word roll over your tongue. Doesn’t it taste good? Have you ever experienced—can you even imagine—a better name...
In a Millennium when Ferrari seems all-conquering in F1, it’s hard to remember the bad old days of the late 1960s, when there wasn’t much prance in the cavallino—and not only in formula racing. One of the biggest disappointments to sports car fans was the firm’s off-and-off-again approach to the...
The late news—very late—that U.S. open-wheel racing’s long uncivil war has finally staggered to its hemorrhagic conclusion, fell with less...
Pete Lyons Way back in the Science Fiction period of my youth, I followed a newspaper strip whose title I can’t recall for sure, but it was something like “Alternate Earth.” That’s a common Sci-Fi theme with innumerable variations; this one’s premise involved a duplicate of our planet orbiting diametrically...
Pete Lyons THIS IS OLD news to you, but as I write, we mountain folk are still buzzing about February’s...
That sound! A wild shriek spearing out of the new Japanese F1 sliced like a samurai sword through the dronings...
One of the side benefits of the race reporter trade is getting to hobnob with motor racing’s glitterati at their glamorous soirees. Like the night I went to Stirling Moss’s birthday party, where I stuck my camera lens into his cake. It was my first Can-Am at Bridgehampton in 1966....
Apparently the new Euro is a success. Friends from overseas tell me the changeover to a single, common currency in...
First comes denial. No, it can’t be that bad. The driver will get out ok. There’ll be pain and recuperation...
Forty Memorial Days ago, I sat in the Indianapolis grandstand across from the pits and witnessed Graham Hill capturing the second of the three crowns that still make him unique—the only driver ever to win the 500 (in 1966), the F1 world championship (in both 1962 and 1968) and Le...
From time to time someone asks how I got into this business – apparently it looks like fun – and...
The grass had grown long and dense in the cloudy English spring, and the silver racing coupe – a lean,...
Pete Lyons Night racing. Why do we love it so? I think one reason is, darkness adds another dimension to the defiance. Motor racing has a deliciously illicit taste even in daylight, and doing it after sundown seems sinful. Become a Member & Get Ad-Free Access To This Article (&...
Once or twice over the past few months, I waxed slightly snarky in this space about the plan to revive...
Pete Lyons Partway through an evening of kind words, warm recollections and congratulations, the moderator came on the mic and said: “George, we’ve had several speakers here; I’m surprised the term ‘anger management’ hasn’t been used yet!” Poor George Follmer could only join the laughter filling the Petersen Museum’s banquet...
The steering feel; that’s what I remember best. The pinion perfectly meshing with its rack was a tactile delight in...
Some of you model makers, I know, and probably you historic artists too, have been wondering why Jo Siffert’s 1971...
I’ve had a dream, one of the rare ones I remember clearly and can’t stop thinking about. That must mean it had serious meaning for me. So I am moved to share it. Pete Lyons Although the dream itself had nothing to do with racing, I think I will be...
Can it be 50 whole years since the first Sebring 12-hour? I guess I’ve seen this coming, but still, it...
Here’s a sure bet: a lot of what you know about the Mille Miglia, and most of how you feel...
Telling about cannibalizing a pickup truck engine for his racecar, he said, “Any of you would have really enjoyed” that caper. And a grinning Jim Hall went on to explain that early in his career, when “I was already into the hot-rodding of race cars,” he built a Lister-Chevy with...