Videos

Donohue & Penske Documentary

Written by Brock Yates, I think “Four Hands on The Wheel” came out in 1970. The film is a 47 minutes look into the partnership between Mark Donohue and Roger Penske. Fantastic to see Penske’s blue and yellow Sunoco cars of the late 60s, from Camaros to Lolas. In other words, a must see for gearheads fans of vintage racing.

Le Mans 1968

Found this one yesterday. All in all, 33 minutes of very nice footage of the 1968 race. As a bonus, it has an English voice-over narration (the original film is in French). And best of all, this time there isn’t that typical gut-wrenching seizure-inducing awfully terrible elevator music that you hear a lot in many of the 60s and 70s documentaries.

PS: This is the third nice film I found about the 1968 race. While from some years you can’t find zilch, for some reason 1968 was prolific.

Auto Union’s Silberpfeile

After I found that old Grand Prix racing video I posted a few days ago, I stumbled upon this. This one is exclusively about Auto Union’s Silver Arrows. Almost 42 minutes long, the footage is pretty good. Yet, being quite old, it is far from the “movies quality” we’re currently used to. And of course, the race noises and tires screeching dubbed over the scenes are not exactly high quality…🙄 Even so, pretty nice for the Silberpfeil fan.

Golden Age of Grand Prix Racing

Though this has been on YouTube for many years, I first saw it last night. The original documentary is pretty old (80s, perhaps?), so the video quality is far from what we expect today. Even so, it’s a delightful 49 minutes about the Golden Era of Grand Prix racing. The last third part of the film is almost solely about the Silberpfeile, which of course was the best part in my opinion. In fact, this was the first time I saw color footage on the Silver Arrows. All in all, a very nice documentary about the Silberpfeile and something on their predecessors.

Passion for Matchbox

This is the story of Charlie Mack, and his 42,000+ (!!!) collection of Matchbox cars and toys. As a kid, I grew up on Matchbox, at a time that Hot Wheels were the el cheapo toy cars and Matchbox was the good stuff. Good times… 😊 Anyway, it’s nice to see such passion (obsession?) in a toy collector.

By the way, who else still have their old Matchbox and Hot Wheels? I still have quite a few of mine. Though all are stored away and not on display, I’m proud to say that most are in very good shape.

2022 WEC season review

Though I only watched yesterday (🙄), WEC posted this some two weeks ago. Almost an hour long, it shows the highlights of the 2022 season. With that, each race receives a little bit of coverage, so all in all it gives a good idea of how was 2022. However, they don’t focus much on the smaller teams. Basically, they talk about Porsche, Toyota (duh!), Corvette and Ferrari, and just a little on LMP2 (mainly WRT and Jota). I definitively would like to see more on the small teams, specially Glickenhause.

I think that concurrently they also released a “behind the scenes” video called Unmasked. This one is 41 minutes-long, and again, almost nothing on the small teams. Even so, still nice to see some of what happened at the garages and paddocks.

Gold. Pure gold…

The video above is about John Wyer’s Gulf Porsche 917 team. With interviews with Pedro Rodriguez, Jo “Seppi” Siffert and John Wyer himself, it focuses on the JWA team in 1970. The video, 33 minutes long, covers all the 1970 championship races, from Daytona to Zeltweg. The most interesting part is John Wyer’s take on the team’s performance on each race. In the end, a delightful half hour that will please any vintage gearhead.

Daytona 1970: the 917’s finest hour?

As most have surmised by now, I’m a Le Mans nut (duh). Yes, the 24 Heures du Mans is THE greatest car race of this mud ball we call Earth. No questions asked. PERIOD. However, some times, very rarely in fact, some races come very close to that title. And one such race was the 1970 24 Hours of Daytona. John Ficarra of VINwiki tells the story of how the Porsche 917 came to fame at Daytona in 1970. The video is about 16 minutes of pure joy. Watch. Now.

PS: I absolutely need to get that 917 #2 winner 🧐.