Jimmy Clark Biography Jimmy Clark was born in Kilmany, in the county of Fife to a Scottish farming family, roots...
Losing a child is one of the harshest agonies of life, and even people who don’t personally know John and...
How amusing, I often smile, that a breed of racer I associate with conservatism generally speeds around to the left. But we don’t do politics here, just history, so let’s have a look back at interesting times when oval drivers first tried their hands at turning both ways. The big...
Still racers, after all these years. That’s what I was thinking as one veteran driver after another mounted the stage...
In the boisterous opera that has been Italian auto racing, one of the grandest of performers made just the briefest...
Photo: Pete Lyons / www.petelyons.com Pete Lyons If you have a two-car garage, do you keep two cars in it? That would suggest you’re fairly normal. In Robert Judy’s, there must be a hundred racecars. Plus somewhere beyond 1000 racing books. Also magazines and videos and photographs and posters. Then...
Spring must be coming because friends are phoning to talk about races we’re going to this year. It’s that sweet,...
Pete Lyons We start the new season with two interesting notes on the subject of pulchritude. Near the end of...
Racing transcends venue. I’ve done my time at grungy old bullrings, squalid street courses, insipid parking lots, sterile speedways, a forlorn airstrip whose primary enterprise seemed to be the drying of turkey manure—I’ve been to some really ugly race tracks and seen gorgeous racing regardless. Pete Lyons Yet how much...
You know that brief sense of disjointedness between us and some celebrity we meet who up to then had been...
Shanghai’s gaudy new, $300-million supercircuit, home of the first-ever Grand Prix in China, has a truly distinctive first turn complex....
That’s a question I found occupying (the few) idle moments of my mind during October’s Porsche Rennsport Reunion IV at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. That will happen if you spend four days cooped up in a 400-sq-ft tent lined with racing photos on display and notice that some seem to...
Pete Lyons You know how someone’s opposing opinion, one that seems inconsequential enough to let slide at the time, can...
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...
Watching it happen, it was hard to appreciate the magnitude of the achievement. The big blue roadster hardly made any...
Pete Lyons 2006 already! Those mileposts are just whizzing by, aren’t they? I feel like I’m riding up Pikes Peak...
Pete Lyons Mr. Cozza lifted the right side of the center-hinged bonnet and bent over the long, bristling racing engine. His colleague, Mr. Torbelli, flipped switches in the stark open cockpit. There was a complexity of mechanical grunting noises, then a sudden, staccato burst of machine gunfire—16 cylinders raucously voicing...
Thirty years ago the world was no less crassly simplistic than it is today, and many people glancing at Peter...
Sixty years ago was when—for me—the world became modern. Many people will laugh at that; some will understand but have...
Because I came to automobile appreciation late in life – not until 17, when my New York State learner’s permit finally awakened me to the magic of driving – I fear I missed out on an adventure that might have created a different me. Don’t you think a born car...
It exploded at me around a blind embankment, big truck, top-heavy, heeling as it hurtled downhill. What its driver saw,...
Among the array of anniversaries we’ve been celebrating recently, one is a particular standout for me. It’s now 50 years...
This is the sad tale of my first chance to own a sports car and how I blew it—the chance, not the car. No harm came to the car—at least, not until the story was over. I invite you to step back with me 40-some years to the mid-1960s, when...
Nearly 10 years ago in this space (“Sleuths Wanted,” February 2002) I asked if anyone could ID a Can-Am car...
We have a winner! Just as we hoped, a VRJ reader has recognized one of the “Mystery Cars” shown in...
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...
