The Roaring Season

I think F5000 was forgiven a lot and I think peoples memories of it now are often viewed through rose-tinted glasses, because the cars themselves were so charismatic. But often the racing was drawn out and processional, with little overtaking after the first few laps, and the only question mark ...

For what (very) little it is worth, I was an occasional "Go-Fer" for Tiny Lund once I returned to school after serving in the Army; I had known Tiny somewhat from my time hanging around the various tracks in the Carolinas which helped me when I popped in to take a look and see about writing an ...

Referring to the planked board tracks as "Murder Dromes" seems to be a bit over-dramatic, but then again the sporting press was not much different then from the Talking Heads (although "Airheads" often seems more appropriate -- I find that on the rare occasion I tune into a race that watching with ...

Not to show my considerable lack of knowledge or familiarity with Racing Down Under, but it obvious that it was literally a very different world than that of US F/A & F/5000 racing, even if there were various connections. In the US, there were several factors that seemed to lead to the demise of F ...

I am surprised to an extent that no one has mentioned Allen Brown's excellent site -- OldRacingCars.Com -- during what little discussion there has been on this thread. Lots and lots of "Eye Candy" but little substance for the most part. Thought it interesting that a discussion of F5000 began with a ...

That was Mines Field and, yes, there were definitely considered stock cars. The length of the track varied somewhat for various events, being anything from about 1.9 miles to about 1.5 or so. In 1933, the Elgin Road Races were temporarily revived with stock car events. The Oakland Speedway held an ...

"Revisionism" is not necessarily an epitaph nor is it a sin. Indeed, the "revising" of the earlier interpretations of the past has often brought us closer to those ever elusive truths found in history. One of my former professors hammered the idea that "Popular history is not necessarily History ...

However that other well known historical archive, the TNF, seems to have degenerated into a forum for strange men spewing ego and insult at each other. Which, alas and alack, is not at all what I intended when I founded it close to a dozen years now. David McKinney is trying to salvage something ...

Never confuse "enthusiasm" with "interest." While dedication is obviously a factor in what the historian does, one quickly learns to keep one's enthusiasm in check given that it inevitably clouds one's observations and subsequent interpretations. Of course, historians tend to be very much ...

Actually, I am NOT a "car enthusiast" or even a "motorsport enthusiast" these days (nor for many years for that matter); rather, I am a historian with an interest in an relatively small, niche area of automotive history. Not sure if that makes sense to most, but that is probably a fair statement of ...

A really good movie, and definitely one for the dvd library. Not sure which movie you watched, but it was a terrible movie, making "Grand Prix" look like "Citizen Kane" by comparison and I have little love for "Grand Prix." Both "The Last American Hero" and "Greased Lightning" were nice ideas and ...

Blood and Smoke: A True Tale of Mystery, Mayhem, and the Birth of the Indy 500 , by Charles Leerhsen, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011. The centennial of the first running of the International 500 Mile Sweepstakes at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Decoration Day, 1911, prompted both attention ...

No, I was not "googling" David; I already know where to find David if necessary. Rather, I simply happened to see his name in a thread on this forum, otherwise I probably would not have bothered to stop and look at the forum to be very honest or at least not for long. For what little it is worth ...

I somehow managed to wander in here, the usual serendipitous looking for one thing and then getting distracted by something else, in this case the presence of David McKinney being noted. Not sure that after reading many of the posts that I am all that good a "fit" given the general run of the topics ...