Height of bad taste or plain bonkers?

Tones:

I don't know if I like the BMW: street cars look all the same to me - I like the racing ones. As Michael says, it seems I have a pimpish taste concerning cars .

Now there was a very beautiful BMW, about 30 years ago: the 3.0 CS. Nowadays they all look fat. But yes, I like slender lines. Although not necessarily sharply angled – I like flowing curves, but I hate the bulbaceous (the urodele like) ones that one tends to see nowadays.

About the Fords GT40. I never liked Ford - I always hoped Ferrari would win: a tiny European racing enterprise against a dollarish Hulk-like approach - the 7 liters, and so on. I always though of it as elegance and taste against sheer money. But, alas, money won, as it usually does.

But the Gulf GT40 is another story. It kept winning when rationally it should be beaten. John Wyer's capability and Ickx's talent were important factors. Ickx's talent was particularly obvious, as you said, at Le Mans 69 but also whenever it rained - for instance, Spa 68: when Redman saw him appear completely isolated in the first lap he thought there had been a massive crash involving many cars behind him. But no; it was just that Jacky was blindingly fast - the others appeared about 20 seconds later...

But my favourite racing car from those times is the 917. The Siffert car especially was a beauty. Also the 1971 Langheck was fantastic to look at.

That said, for my taste, the most beautiful Sports cars (I mean the ones that actually raced) were the Ferraris. They always seemed to take beauty into consideration.

That said, you are right: one doesn't care if the car is beautiful when one races it: one just cares if it goes fast, curves well, breaks well, if the gearbox is comfortable and so on. One doesn't see the car when one sits inside...

 

I had a friend who had a BMW 3.0 CSi and it was indeed a beautiful car - and fast! He confessed that he was too frightened to find out how fast. There was also an aluminium-bodied series, which went like rockets.

It always seemed as if Ford was the giant, but really Ferrari with all that experience was the giant, and Ford had a long and painful learning experience. In the 1966 race, three finished out of 13, but they finished in the first three places. And then there was Dan Gurney's sensational exploit in 1967 when he was supposed to be the pace car, to lure out the Ferraris and break them, but found himself landed with the job of winning when the rest of the team was wiped out in an early morning accident. Gurney even won the Index of Thermal Performance (included so that a French car could win something!).

 

What the hell is that?

 

The funniest story I know of being frightened in a car happened to me.

This concerns me and two friends. One, let's call him O. had a very powerful coupé (he was a successful playboy). The other, let's call him Z., was totally in awe with O. It was kind of ridiculous, but you cannot begin to understand how much until I tell you this story.

O. lent me his car when he went to the States for two months - he knew I drove well, and we were very close friends. I lived in Porto at the time, and so did O.. Z. lived further up in the North, in a mountain region.

One day I decided to invite Z. for a ride through the mountains, and them a drink in a bar there was at the top. He reluctantly said yes (he suggested ordering a pizza and eating it in his house - but I thought he was being silly and lazy and ordered him to come down - I hadn't come all the way from Porto to eat pizza! So he got into the car and, as soon as we left the city, we began the climb.

Now this is an important point: the climb was a one way only road, so it was possible to take the trajectories right and even powerslide a little.

I don't know exactly how many bends we made, but I was going really fast.

I asked Z. if he was enjoying it. The answer did not come. So I asked again, during a short straight and looked at him. He was scared stiff - his usually reddish face almost ashen. And he just said:

'Don't go so bloody fast'

'Why, are you scared?'

'I just don't want to wet O.'s car'.

 

A very complicated formula the ACO (Automobile Club de l'Ouest) came up with that related power and weight to performance in order to (as Tones said), the French (Alpines and such small cars)could win at least that. But they very often did not.

 

Tones:

About the Ford triumph, you are right - Ferrari had the know how, they had to start from scratch. Also they were being vindicative: Ferrari wouldn't sell; well if he wouldn't bow to the dollar power he would be smashed. They took a long time but smash him they did. But they made it by building the most powerful machine possible - 7 litres - not a nimble well designed car (of course this is debatable). But I can only think of the awesome Hulk and other cultural flowers of America.

OK, I'm being *very* biased!!

Gurney's was a very strong race, and he was a fine driver. Clark confided to his parents he was the only F! driver he actually feared.

And he seemed a nice bloke, in spite of being American :JOEL:

 

Sorry, Markus, I was getting the two (Index of Performance and Index of Thermal Efficiency) confused.Here are the explanations:

Two special awards have also been given at Le Mans over the years. The Index of Performance was awarded to the car that traveled the greatest distance in relation to the required minimum distance set for that car's class. The Index of Thermal Efficiency, introduced in 1959, is won by the car that achieves the best ratio of speed and minimum fuel consumption, based on the car's weight, independent of engine size.

As RdS says, the ITE was biased towards small cars (often French), so they were horrified when the Gurney/Foyt Ford Mk. IV (7 litres!) won it in 1967, by comprehensively demolishing every time and distance record then existing.

 

And Gurney's 1967 Eagle-Weslake is my nomination for the most beautiful GP car ever made.

http://www.ddavid.com/formula1/eagle67.htm

 

rds,
but ferrari caved and sold out to fiat later on though. fiat's hardly a small company either is it?
i think he had a problem about hte company being owned by americans which is bound to nark the yanks, what with them having a certain 'over inflation' about their own sense of worth.
cheers


julian

 

Yes, Julian, but it is Italian! And there were always informal links between the two companies (at one stage, Fiat produced a Dino, with the V6 engine designed by Enzo's son). Ford's entry into motor racing (breaking an agreement between the Big Three in the USA that they would not directly enter motor sport) was to prove to the world that they didn't really need Ferrari anyway. It produced big changes in the motor racing world - the Ford V8s which, with Lotus and Jim Clark attached, broke the Offenhauser domination of Indianapolis, and the sponsorship of the Cosworth V8, GP's most successful engine.

Enzo was probably glad, because he only produced road cars to earn money to go racing. And they were badly built and finished! I worked for Australia's biggest paint company for 20 years and they often had to refinish Ferraris. They were a catastrophe - paint applied to unprimed panels, aluminium panels bolted directly to steel chassis, etc., etc. Of course, they were (and are) rich people's toys, and they could afford it. When Fiat took a controlling interest, the racing team was left in Ferrari's hands and Fiat only put in their man when he died.

 

I think it was rather that the big V8 delivered a bit more power than the V12s of the Ferrari 330P3/P4, but at lower revs. Meaning that the engine was not so stressed and would last longer. The adage in American racing is that "there ain't no substitute for cubic inches". Ford used this doctrine in the Le Mans MkII and IV cars. When the rules changed, they were all converted back to GT40 (5 litre) spec. As 50 had been built, they qualified as *GT cars".

The most extreme example came from Porsche, when it decided that class wins were no longer sufficient - it built the 917, with a 4.5 litre flat 12 - and, taking no chances with the FIA's arithmetic, it churned out 60! On the day of the homologation, they were all lined up and the FIA representatives were requested to get into any one of them and drive it (they politely declined).

 

Tones:

I didn't know you were so interested in Sportscars racing!

About the Porsches, I quite agree. I even have a very nice photo of the line-up. But as to the Ferrari 512S, they were lenient: They would see about 25 cars, were told that the others were at another place, gave them a liquid and very long lunch and, while the inspectors were stuffing themselves and drinking, the Maranello men quietly picked up those 25 and put them in another place, where the inspectors saw them later.

It was accepted, 'in the interests of Sport'. But the Ferraris were completely thrashed (except from Sebring).

But then Porsche had three top drivers - Siffert, Pedro Rodriguez and Brian Redman (Leo Kinnunen was also very fast, but Rodriguez kept complaining - Redman says unfairly). Ferrari had Jacky Ickx, but no other sportscar specialist (Surtees was a shadow of himself, that year, and Chris Amon was never good at endurance racing - although he won Le Mans, I think).

Do you know TNF, at Atlas F1. It is sometimes terribly boring and it is stupidly snobbish, but there are occasional points of interest.

 

I was, in the good old days when the Ford v. Ferrari battle added a bit of spice to it. Not forgetting Jim Hall's Chaparral, the first thing with a wing (and an automatic transmission!).

Actually Chris Amon was quite a good sports car driver. He was in the winning Ford with Bruce McLaren in 1966 and he had a very successful career in Ferrari sports cars, which unfortunately never translated into any GP wins (he came second to Jo Siffert in one British GP). The combination of Rodriguez, Siffert and the Porsche 917 was well-nigh unbeatable, and that brought us back to boredom again, when the races became a ho-hum which Porsche is going to win this time...

I don't think Surtees ever got any decent sports car drives after the acrimonious separation from Ferrari. He was a big pal of Eric Broadley, the man behind Lola, but the long-distance version of the successful Lola T70 Can-Am car never did anything, and I think Surtees's interests began to move more towards being a constructor (he has his own short-lived GP team for a while).

I confess, I've never heard of TNF or Atlas.