RACER June/July 2021: The Heroes Issue

 

RACER Oct/Nov 2021: The Great Cars Issue

 

RACER's 2021 Great Cars Issue is Here!

Robin Miller, 1949-2021

As a racing journalist, he was the best there’s been. As a friend and a colleague, his loss is a hard one to take. Marshall Pruett’s tribute is both heartfelt and funny, and a poignant reminder of what made our man Miller such a one of a kind.

Godspeed, Robin.

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A New Name on the Astor Cup

Spain's Alex Palou delivered a sophomore season to remember in the 2021 NTT IndyCar season. RACER.com editor Mark Glendenning sits down with the newly crowned champion the Monday morning after the season-closing Grand Prix of Long Beach to talk through learning new tracks in 2021 and valuable tutelage from legends in Jimmie Johnson and Scott Dixon.

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Great Cars - 1978 Brabham BT46B

The Brabham BT46B “Fan Car.” Conceived by Gordon Murray in a bid to counter the dominance of Lotus and its ground-effect 79 in the 1978 Formula 1 World Championship, it’s a fascinating tale of finding a loophole and exploiting it in an ingenious way.

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Ciao Vale

MotoGP’s G.O.A.T., the one and only Valentino Rossi, calls time on a brilliant two-wheeled career, but isn’t done with competition just yet.

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Great Cars - 2003 Bentley Speed 8

After a seven-decade absence from Le Mans Bentley's return overcame false starts and a near-cancellation before earning a sixth victory in 2003. Mission accomplished, the winning speed 8 never raced again.

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Vintage Motorsport's Nov/Dec 2021 Issue is Here!

Momentum Mustang

By 1965, Detroit’s muscle car wars had heated up considerably and in drag racing, NHRA Factory Experimental classes were all the rage. And with Ford’s “Total Performance” campaign at full revs, it meant that one of its factory supported drivers, Gas Ronda, would receive one of the 10 very special A/FX Mustangs constructed to do battle at dragstrips across the U.S.

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Those Are My Boys

What are the odds for three family members filling a CART podium after a 200-mile Indy car event? Very slim, indeed. And yet, at the Milwaukee Mile on June 2, 1991, Michael, John and Mario Andretti finished 1st, 2nd and 3rd, respectively for a podium “sweep.”

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My Favorite Race - Tom Gloy

For champion driver Tom Gloy, what could be better than beating the Chevys at a downtown Detroit Chevrolet sponsored street race, driving a Mercury Capri in the SCCA Trans-Am Motor City 100? Gloy rates that as his favorite race and read all about it here.

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Penske Camaro Number 1

In the “Search Party” feature, we chronicle a collector’s 25-year barn search for the long missing first Penske Racing Trans-Am ’67 Camaro Z/28 that was driven by Mark Donohue back in the day. Long missing, the car eventually turned up on a used car lot in Austria.

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Lee Dykstra - Speed By Design

Wrapping up our three-part series on race car designer Lee Dykstra, who had a huge hand in the design of earlier Trans-Am Mustangs, Can-Am prototypes, the radical John Paul Racing Porsche 935 and Jaguar’s XJR5. He also did race engineering for CART teams and the Mazda factory on a three-year IMSA RX-7 GTO and GTP program.

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RACER Fall 2021: The Technology Issue

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emailBy Laurence Foster | December 8, 2021 11:59 AM ET

In motorsports, if you’re not moving forward, you’re going backward. And that’s especially the case when it comes to race series maintaining relevancy and meaning in the rapidly changing wider world they exist in.

For RACER No. 313, our annual Technology Issue, we’re taking a look at several series introducing new cars, new rules and new thinking to “get with the program” on real-world concerns over sustainability, the environment, and the need to make future automobiles part of the solution, rather than a significant part of the problem.

In some cases, such as IMSA’s new-for-2023 headlining LMDh prototype class and the FIA World Rally Championship’s incoming Rally1 machines, a switch to hybrid-powered cars is seen as an opportunity for auto makers to showcase and develop road-car technologies. Add sustainable fuels and carbon-neutral race environments to the mix, and this is racing doing what it’s always done best, if given the opportunity: accelerating the rate of learning, and putting technologies through the ultimate stress test.

For other championships, such as FIA World Rallycross and the already-active Extreme E and Formula E series, all-electric is the chosen path. Critics may argue they only demonstrate the current limitations of battery power, but they are a potent platform to work on reducing and overcoming those shortcomings.

Formula 1 has been hybrid powered since 2014. Its turbo-hybrid power units, which recover kinetic and heat energy, are the most efficient ever built. The science and engineering, especially on the heat-recovery side, may be arcane and massively complex, but that’s how many leading-edge technologies begin.

F1 is reinventing itself, starting with the 2022 cars we put the spotlight on, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of progress made. Plans to ditch heat recovery for its next-gen engines may be based on cost, yet the signals it sends on F1’s commitment to being part of the solution are mixed at best.

NASCAR isn’t going the hybrid or all-electric route just yet, but it is moving its Cup Series machinery closer to current street-car thinking with the Next Gen Car. It’s a major departure for a sanctioning body whose mantra when it comes to tech has always been “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and in just a few weeks from now, we’ll start to see what it delivers.

Technology aside, the latest issue includes interviews with newly-crowned IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship DPi champs Pipo Derani and Felipe Nasr, McLaren Formula 1 driver Lando Norris on his breakout season, and Romain Grosjean as he prepares to add ovals to his NTT IndyCar Series slate in 2022.

RACER No. 313 doesn’t stop there, so be sure to check it out and enjoy our final issue of 2021.

Click here to purchase the new issue of RACER, and check out the gallery below for a preview of what’s inside. Interested in having RACER delivered to your mailbox? Click here to find out more about print and digital subscriptions.

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RACER No. 313

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FREE DIGITAL MAGAZINE: RACER’s 2022 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship preview

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emailBy RACER Staff | January 28, 2022 12:00 PM ET

Get ready for the 2022 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship with your FREE digital magazine from RACER.

Click here to enjoy the digital magazine experience and get up to speed with the 2022 storylines from each of the WeatherTech Championship’s five classes, including all-new GTD Pro and the final season of the headlining DPi prototypes.

With stunning images from some of the best photographers in sports car racing, plus insight from RACER’s own Marshall Pruett, it’s the perfect warm-up lap before the Rolex 24 At Daytona goes green.

Want RACER magazine delivered to your mailbox? Click here to find out more about print and digital subscriptions.

 

FREE DIGITAL MAGAZINE: RACER’s 2022 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship preview

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emailBy RACER Staff | January 28, 2022 12:00 PM ET

Get ready for the 2022 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship with your FREE digital magazine from RACER.

Click here to enjoy the digital magazine experience and get up to speed with the 2022 storylines from each of the WeatherTech Championship’s five classes, including all-new GTD Pro and the final season of the headlining DPi prototypes.

 

Back Issue Look-Back: The Y2K Vintage Racing Season Takes Off!

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emailBy Steve Nickless | 2.17.22 9:29 AM

The 2022 Vintage Racing season is already off and running in parts of the country with more temperate winter climates. While I was out of town recently, I took with me a well-worn, 22-year-old Vintage Motorsport issue celebrating the joy of another fresh new season underway.

Issue 2000/4, the July/August 2000 issue arrived just as “Y2K Fears” subsided (we Masters- and Fossils-class racers well-remember the end-of-the-world terror posited by the alarmist media—armageddon as computer systems all crashed in the advance from “1999” to “2000”) bearing text and photos to prove the world had not ended.

On the cover, a pair of sports racers battling at Sonoma Raceway (then and always known as Sears Point) in a combined CSRG/HSR West race weekend—a partnership that allowed HSRW 2.0 Liter Sports Racer Challenge competitors with post-‘67 machinery then not eligible for CSRG events to compete, boosting entries to more than 180.



That was just one of many season-opening races covered in this enjoyable issue which featured, prominently, a red Italian race car (the marker for me between “great issues” and “forever keepers” in my Vintage Motorsport back issue stack): the 1948 OSCA #1101 which, writer Harry Newton observed, “not only launched a car company, it helped establish the very definition of a sports car.”

As valuable a resource today was when the late Art Eastman wrote and photographed it was a three-page story on the Collier Automotive Museum’s four-day “Connoisseurship of the Sporting Car” symposium—a primer on and article titled, “Learning How To Collect”.



Perhaps the highlight for me was L. Spencer Riggs’ cover feature on the brilliant post-war Maserati and, later, Lancia star Luigi “Gigi” Villoresi who had passed away at age 88 in 1997, just three years before this issue came out. Less well known than contemporaries Nuvolari, Ascari, Carracciola and Fangio, the Italian had a brilliant career that will be forever linked to tragedy—the racing deaths of his brother Emilio and great friend (and Lancia teammate) Alberto Ascari. That he carried on past his prime and died virtually penniless cast a shadow on an otherwise amazing career. Truly one of the greats.



Much more fun was BS Levy’s Vintage Racing Primer entitled “Choosing the Proper Pathway to Perdition” which should be required reading by all who dare to venture into this sport. Consider well these Levy’s opening words and the wisdom behind them: “Based on no better corroborative evidence than a wink from the fellow on the next bar stool (himself a seriously infected Triumph racer), I’d come to the conclusion that the TR3 was the car to have in my chosen class.”

So much to be re-learned here as the 2022 season takes flight …