The Deputy Editor airs the Midlands Motor Museum's Works Team car
When I announced to a couple of Aston Martin enthusiast friends that I was to drive an Aston Martin DB3S - an ex Team car at that - they said knowledgeably: "A better car on the road than the circuit, you know." They may well be right, for the DB3S was less highly strung than some of its thoroughbred sports/racing contemporaries,...
Synonymous with Gulf, GT40s, 917s and Le Mans wins, JW Automotive is a racing legend. We spoke to director John Horsman about life under ‘Death Ray’ John Wyer and the racing heritage underpinning the team’s successes
Writer: Simon Arron
There had been no job advertised, but he applied for one anyway. At the time John Horsman was an engineering student at Cambridge and often spent his weekends...
Road
Motor sport cinema is presently all the rage – the BBC even has a 1970s F1 drama brewing – but it’s unlikely that much will ever match this for power and raw emotion.
Narrated by Liam Neeson, ROAD looks at the world of motorcycle road racing through two generations of the Dunlop family, brothers Joey and Robert and their nephews/sons Michael and William. The headline stories might be...
A Cobra in all but name
Twenty years ago endurance racing was in its heyday, and the Grand Touring category was graced by such machines as the Ferrari GTO (the ultimate in classics today), lightweight E-types and Porsche 904s. Onto this scene came a newcomer, Carroll Shelby’s 4.7-litre AC Cobra, even then a somewhat crude machine which proved fearsomely fast… so fast, in fact, that it led the...
For the past decade, Aston Martin Racing has been a fan favourite at Le Mans. As founder David Richards and driver Darren Turner tell us, those 10 years are just the beginning
Writer Damien Smith
Ten years and more than 200 racing cars. Perhaps that’s the most significant statistic of Aston Martin Racing’s first decade. The big wins, most notably the back-to-back GT class successes at Le Mans,...
Hard Luck LloydJohn Lingle
Lloyd Ruby’s Indycar career didn’t boast the results his talent and determination warranted, with only seven wins to his name.
Much of that was down to luck and circumstance (his sports car record boasted two Daytona victories and one at Sebring and he was one of Carroll Shelby’s go-to guys) and this book aims to set the record straight about ‘the greatest driver never...
Shelby Cars in DetailCars of the Shelby American CollectionFrank Barrett and Boyd Jaynes
This glossy and eye-wateringly expensive book on the cars in the Shelby American Collection is both a useful historical insight and a quite remarkable display of photography. The story of Carroll Shelby’s move into car manufacturing is interesting to say the least. Steve Volk – president of the collection –...
Terry O’Neill
The perception was perhaps frivolous, the intent anything but. This was a race meeting in sunny climes, beyond the end of the mainstream seasons in Europe and North America, but it attracted some stellar names. Take the Governor’s Trophy heat on December 6, 1957, for instance: Phil Hill won in his Maserati 335S, from Masten Gregory (Maserati 450S), Carroll Shelby (450S) and Stirling...
Phil Manzanera is best known as guitarist with pioneering 1970s rock band Roxy Music. As a boy, though, he was a privileged witness to the 1958 Cuban Grand Prix, when Juan Manuel Fangio found himself a hostage to rebel kidnappers. But instead of condemning his polite captors, the great man befriended themWriter: Richard Williams
While the racing engines revved, the small boy sat with his mother...
The 50th anniversary of the AC Cobra will be marked at the 2012 Goodwood Revival with a race dedicated to 30 examples of the Anglo-American sports car.
Goodwood organisers are promising the finest collection of significant and authentic racing Cobras ever assembled in the UK next September.
The special all-Cobra race, the first such event ever run in Britain, will be a 45-minute two-driver...
