Category Archives: Cars

McLaren

Americana, Cars

McLaren makes awesome race cars, it is in their DNA, just like Ferraris. The founder, Bruce McLaren, was a  race car driver from New Zealand. Early in his career, he started modifying the cars he was driving and, then, designing them from scratch. In the CanAm Series – which featured huge American V-8s stuffed into lighweight bodies, and where I saw my first McLaren in 1967 – they became the dominant manufacturer (if manufacturer can be used for a company making ten to twenty cars a year).  In 1967 they won five of six races they entered and by 1968, McLarens won 11 of 11 races. In 1980 – eleven years after he left home to go to Europe to race, eleven short years – Bruce McLaren died in an accident testing one of his own cars.

As tragic as that was, Bruce McLaren might not have felt that way, he once said about a team-mate that was killed The news that he had died instantly was a terrible shock to all of us, but who is to say that he had not seen more, done more and learned more in his few years than many people do in a lifetime? To do something well is so worthwhile that to die trying to do it better cannot be foolhardy. It would be a waste of life to do nothing with one’s ability, for I feel that life is measured in achievement, not in years alone – the company didn’t die and has gone on to become one of the great racing teams in Formula 1.

The McLaren- Ferrari Formula 1 rivalry is the longest-lasting rivalry in motor racing. Now McLaren, about 49 years after the company was founded, has started making street cars1  to go after Ferrari. I think that there is a difference between a company that races to promote their regular cars and a company that sells cars to help them race. McLaren falls into the latter group…with a vengeance. Their cars can go over 200mph and get to 60 from a standstill in 3.1 seconds. There are ten dealerships in the US and one is in Silicon Valley, where I went to take a look.

They are selling  about five cars a month. Sixty cars a year is terrible if you are a Chevy dealership, but pretty good, I guess, if you are selling a little known car that sells for about $300,000. The cars are more subtle than Ferraris and, to my eye, more elegant. Because McLaren has made its living racing cars – they spend about an half billion a year to race two cars in twenty races – it figures that the cars they make would be all about passion but they really aren’t. The McLaren way is about getting the details right. The McLaren street cars are at their best in their details.

From the doors to service area, to the receptionist’s desk, even to a small flower arrangement – in the McLaren “official” color of orange, of course – everything pushes the McLaren image.

 

Having said that, I am not too sure what the McLaren image is. Perfection, meticulous hard word work and attention to detail, I guess; efficiency and attention to detail, maybe. Either way, they are handsome devils and their detailing is exquisite.

From their carbon brakes and wheels with tires that are less like balloons to cushion the ride than like wallpaper,

to the perfectly detailed, 600 hp, turbo-charged, V-8, engine – visible under glass for all to admire –

to the steering wheel and shifting paddles controlling the seven speed transmission (although I am not so sure that I like the leather doily over the tach).

The major design elements are the the tilting doors and the huge side scoops.

I like McLaren, I root for McClearn’s Formula 1 team. When they are leading a race, as they were today at Singapore, and then have a mechanical failure, I am disappointed. But I think that I admire them more than I love them. It would be hard not admire them, they are staggeringly fast, marvelous to look at, and competent in the extreme but, somehow – to me – don’t generate much lust. In the end, this precision over passion is slightly strange; the company was fathered by a passionate man and the CanAm cars, like the one at the top of the page, are all libido. These McLaren street cars will will probably be driven by a guy that is nice enough -deeply nice enough – that anybody would be comfortable having him take out their daughter and brash enough to have had made their first $100,000,000 by the time he is forty (many McLaren buyers already have a Ferrari that they don’t bother trading in).

1. Although they did make a – sort of goofy – three seat, hyper-fast, hyper-expensive, street car for a while and they did most of the heavy lifting on the $450,000 Mercedes Benz SLR.

 

 

 

 

 

Pebble Beach Tour d’Elegance

Around home, Cars, Photography

From Corvette Expert Jim Gessner, memory by Steve Stern

One of my first car memories and my first racing memory was watching a Mercedes Benz and Corvette race for the Del Monte Trophy on the winding, very narrow, town roads of Pebble Beach. (We were kids and, as the Corvette with the bigger engine lead the MB 300 SL, we said such pithy things as Nothing beats cubic inches, then when the much more expensive MB passed the Vet, we said Except cubic money.)  In those days, before actual racetracks, we all got to stand very close to the action. The Pebble Beach race has moved to the Laguna Seca racetrack and the attached car show has become the  Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, probably the best carshow in the world, with an admission of $250 which does keep the hoi polloi pretty far from the action (the VIP tickets cost $600 and do include lunch [which proves, once again, that there is no such thing as a free lunch]).

To make the cars more accessible, the organizers have started the Pebble Beach Tour d’Elegance. The cars that are entered into Sunday’s show are encouraged to take a tour around the area on Thursday. While they don’t have to tour, if two cars are tied in points, the car that has been on the tour wins. On Thursday, Michele and I went down to the Monterrey Peninsula to check it out. Once again, we are able to stand very close to the action.

1924 Rolls-Royce 20 HP Barker Tourer 

1955 Mercedes Benz 300 SL

1954 Ferrari 500 Mondail Pinin Farina Spyder

At the end, when all the cars are parked, unbelievably close.

1925 Rolls Royce Phantom 1 Baker Sports Torpedo Tourer

But out on the road, listening to the cars go by, for a car nut like me, is thrilling. Getting close and seeing the details just adds to the thrillingness.

1939 Delage D8-120 S Saoutchick Cabriolet

 

1937  Talbot Lago T150C Figoni Falaschi Cabriolet 

 To be continued….

 

 

 

 

Vintage races @ Laguna Seca: Ferrari

Around home, Cars, Uncategorized, ,

I’ve read somewhere – and I completely believe it – that Ferrari is the most hit on luxury website. Why not, it is probably the most famous car on the planet, everybody loves them, and they have become very good at marketing, but Ferrari wasn’t always good at marketing and its history is filled with stories of cranky Enzo Ferrari – who called himself il Commendatore – getting in fights with customers. One famous fight was with Ferruccio Lamborghini who went on to make his own cars.

What Ferraris did have was character. Then know as Scuderia Ferrari – Ferrari Stable – the engines were designed by people with great Italian names like Gioacchino Colombo, Aurelio Lampredi, and Vittorio Jano, usually the bodies were designed by Pinin Farina – who later became Pininfarina – and by Carrozzeria Scaglietti. One of their great engineers was Giotto Bizzarrini, and buyers knew who the designers were of their individual cars.

In the early days, not only was Ferrari a marketing dunce, but not all the cars were gorgeous, like they are now. Actually, not all Ferraris are even good looking, but when they were good looking, they were gorgeous.So gorgeous with character, no wonder they are now so sought after.

This year, the car du jour was the Ferrari 250  GTO, celebrating its 50th birthday. On Sunday, over at the Pebble Beach Concours, there was a gathering of 22 0f the total 39 GTOs that were made. The 22 cars had an estimated total worth of somewhere between $400 million and half a billion dollars. Jeeeze!

Like most great Ferraris, the 250 GTO was built to race. By the late 50s and early 60s, Ferrari was not doing well in the production – street car as opposed to all out racing cars – sports car classes. People were racing street cars like Corvettes or Porsches or Jaguars and Ferrari was not doing well. He wanted part of the action. But, to get into the production car class, there had to be a certain number made. At the time I remember the number being twenty five but I now read it was one hundred.

The most luxurious cars being raced, at the time, were known as Gran Turismo, or Grand Touring, or GT cars, meaning the kind of car one would use to drive, encased in luxury, from Rome to Lake Como or San Francisco to Pebble Beach for a weekend. Ferrari called his new car a GT, but these were not luxury touring cars. They were hard core street racers with racing engines and lightweight bodies. Staggeringly good looking bodies! When these Ferrari GTs were accepted as eligible  to race as regular cars by the FIA – the Federation Internationale de L’Automobile – Ferrari sent each of the owners a chrome “O” making them GTOs and signifying they had been homologated into the FIA’s Group 3 Grand Touring Car category (O for omologata in Italian). (Even though he only made 39 250 GTOs, the requirement to be a production car could have been one hundred as il Commendatore was not above faking car numbers.)

There were so many GTOs at the races this year that they had their own class. Here are a couple, one early and one late, getting ready to go out and play in the fog. The fact that each car is different is part of what makes them so valuable.

And a shot of the luxury interior with the typical, for Ferrari, shifter.

And a couple of details.

My favorite racing Ferrari is the the first Testa Rosa – redhead in English -which was designed to be a fairly inexpensive customer race car designed by Scaglietti. Also and very importantly, the Testa Rosa had drum brakes while the British had disc brakes which are much better. Because disc brakes were a British innovation, Ferrari refused to adopt them for a long time (in racing years). He thought all his cars needed was more cooling air across the brakes, so Scaglietti designed huge airducts resulting in the designative  pontoon fenders. The result was the car below which is similar to one that sold last year for about $16 million.

One of the factors making this such a desirable car is the V12 engine designed by Gioacchino Colombo, with its six carburetors and the red cam covers to show how hot it was. BTW, Testa Rosa means redhead.

Here is a Testa Rosa mixing it up with two other delicacies, a Maserati Tipo 61 – one of my very favorite cars, known as the Birdcage because of its complicated birdcage-like frame – and, on the left, a D Type Jaguar.

 

 

 

Vintage races @ Laguna Seca 2011 – something for almost anybody

Americana, Cars, Evolution, Uncategorized, , , , ,

The thing about races, is that the people who go are generally car people. So, in addition to the races, there are lots of interesting cars: hot rods, old taxis, just nice old cars in general.

For me it is all sorts of cars, Maseratis – although there were few Maseratis this year – Ferraris – a pretty obvious choice – any little, lithe, sports racing car with a big, honk’n,  427, and Formula Jr.s. Formula Jr.s because they are such a great history lesson. Towards the end of the 50’s, Italian Formula One cars were beating everybody but drivers were being killed at an alarming rate. It was decided to start an international training car class called Formula Jr. to train the replacement drivers. Because the cars were limited to a 1.1 liter production car engine, like the FIAT 1100, Forumla Jr. was sort of Italian weighted. Some of the prettiest were the Stanguellinis which looked like miniature Maserati Formula One race cars. Except of course, the Maseratis had 2.5 liter DOHC engines and the Stanguellinis has little FIAT engines. And they were teeny-tiny.

 

But in Formula Jr. Just like Formula One, the British were changing the game.Frank Costin was designing cars based on aerodynamic lessons learned in WWII, cars like Cooper and Lotus were putting the engines behind the drivers, and – another WWII idea – disk brakes were making the British cars stop much quicker. One of my favorite British Formula Jr. cars was the Lola – as in What ever Lola wants, Lola gets – with it’s cute taperesque nose.

 

And Loti like these:

 

Soon the British took over Formula Jr., then small sports-racing cars with cars like the Lotus Eleven

then, when the Brits discovered downforce and the awesome goodness of the Chevrolet V8, we were graced with McLaren M8D  Can-Ams.

And the outstanding velocity stacks that sat on top of that awesome Chevrolet engine, now enlarged to seven liters.

Ferraris, anon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posters as an answer

Cars, Travel, ,

My grandson, August, loves cars. I mean, he Really loves cars. I know the feeling; this blog started when Michele and I went to China and the impetus to our going the Shanghai Auto Show. As much as he loves cars, August is too young  to know the difference between, say, a Ferrari and a Aston Martin. Between a Ford Taurus and a Mercedes C Class. He does know the difference between a Ferrari and a firetruck – even a red one – but his main informer is still the movie Cars.

August’s mother, Samantha, thought it would be a nice generational bridge if August had atleast one of my car pictures on his wall. But, as I went through them, I could not find one that worked. None of them had any relationship with Augie. After all, what is a D-type Jaguar to him?  Then I got an email from Kirk Moore with the answer.

I had recommended the San Francisco Succulent & Cactus Society Show which he had gone by, camera in hand. The problem is that, while there are alot of nice plants, there are not very many big ones and they are all lined up on tables. Kirk’s solution was to come up with the poster shown above. Stealing, I hope, not copying, that idea -hey! Pablo Picasso started it, he said Bad artists copy. Good artists steal. – I made a poster for Augie. Now there is a tie-in.