Two for the Road: Different Cars Mark the Eras of a Marriage

Director Stanley Donen's "Two for the Road" was released in late April 1967, right before the Summer of Love, but it reflected the concerns of a generation a decade older than the Flower Power crowd. At the same time, it served as a template for later road movie comedies, adopting nonlinear storytelling and sharp, witty, sometimes profane dialogue.  The musical themes, their tone reflective of a look into the past, were penned by Henry Mancini. If there's a more qualified candidate for our "Cars in Movies" series, we haven't seen it. The film begins with Mark Wallace (Albert Finney), a successful architect, and his wife Joanna (Audrey Hepburn) as they fly to France for a Riviera tour in their Mercedes 230SL. They reminisce about their previous trips to this coast, and what those trips have meant to them...

The cars mark the different eras in their summers and lives as students and later as a married couple.  They meet during a 1954 trip, first when Joanna rescues architecture student Mark's passport on the ferry from England, and later when the VW microbus carrying Joanna's choir is run off the road on the way to a music fest.  Mark comes to the rescue, but the choir (except for Joanna) comes down with chicken pox, and Mark and Joanna decide to hitchhike...

The hitchhikers find things to argue about, and eventually an Alfa driver picks up Joanna, but leaves  Mark by the roadside.  This is one of the few anachronisms in the car chronology.  The Bertone-bodied Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint was new in spring of 1954, but not this Giulia 1600 version with the big tail lights, from 1963.  Not long after this scene, the couple are reunited at the roadside, and in a scene at the beach, Joanna tells Mark she hates him.  He suggests they get married, and she agrees.

As the story develops, director Donen reinforces the irony and maintains the comic tone by using quick jumps forward and back in time.  This allows him to underline how the protagonists have changed, and to heighten the contrasts between the characters and their approaches to life.  These conflicts reach a hilarious boiling point in the 1957 trip, when Mark and Joanna, now married two years, share a new Ford Country Squire with Mark's ex-girlfriend Cathy, her husband Howard and their spoiled brat of a daughter Ruthie...

The American Maxwell-Manchesters are prototype permissive parents, spouting Freudian psychobabble at each other and at Mark and Joanna.  The Wallaces abandon the Maxwell-Manchesters not long after this scene, when Ruthie throws a tantrum and pitches the car keys into the grass, stranding the party in their Ford at the roadside overnight...

The English couple finally gets to take a trip in their own car in 1959, when they bring this perky but hard-to-start 1950 MG-TD.  This was before product placement played such a big part in the production design of films...

But if they'd read the script of "Two for the Road", the minions of Morris Garages, now part of BMC, might have paid a ransom to keep this product of theirs off camera.  The couple's MG beings to make a funny noise on the way south, and eventually bursts into flame.    

This disaster paves the way for a critical plot turn, when the Dalbrets, a wealthy French couple, rescue the Wallaces and take them in this Bentley S1 to their seaside retreat at the Cote d' Azur.  Monsieur Dalbret introduces Mark to his Greek business partner, and this leads to a series of architectural commissions.  

A couple of years later it also leads to a solo trip to France for architect and new dad Mark, who has a fling with a blonde named Simone driving a blue Renault Floride. Lke many developments in this prototype road movie, the affair is presaged by a scene on a winding two-lane, when the two literally make passes at each other.  The red '61 Triumph Herald is Mark's new ride.  In summer of '63, the Wallaces go again to the Riviera and bring their young daughter Caroline. Mark is absorbed with work, and Joanna has an affair with David, a brother-in-law of client Dalbret.  A moment of truth occurs when Joanna returns to Mark, and he asks her why she has given up on David.   She replies, "He's too serious."  And this points out a theme of the story; Mark and Joanna are never so serious that they cannot laugh at themselves, or each other.

At fleeting moments in the story, the young couple on the roadside gets passed by their older, possibly wiser and certainly more prosperous selves. Towards the end of their "current" (1967) trip to Europe, Mark and Joanna have an argument in the Mercedes which, like this movie's quick cuts and sudden flashbacks and flash forwards, echoes French New Wave films, as well as dialogues between existentialists in Beat Generation cafés.  "What would you do if I didn't exist?" asks Mark.  Joanna replies, "I'd probably marry David."  When he says she's made his point, she replies, "But you do exist." 

The running gag of Mark misplacing his passport is repeated at the film's conclusion, when the couple stop at the Italian border control to present their documents.  Mark, nervous about making a meeting in Rome with another high-profile client, begins to panic, but Joanna quietly places the passport on the SL's steering wheel.  "Bitch", he says.  "Bastard", she replies.  In a movie marked by a consistent comic tone from start to finish, the viewer can assume this couple will continue their own comic interplay in the many miles (well, kilometers) ahead of them.

Photo Credits:  

Top and 2nd from bottom:  20th Century Fox

Remainder:  IMCDB.org (Internet Movie Cars Database)

Book Review: A Walk Around the Halls - Volume II (6 Decades of Motor Shows)

I just received a copy of the new book shown above, featuring six decades of amateur photos focused on car shows from the UK, USA, Europe and Japan.  The cover shot is by Ron Budde, who was my college roommate during our year in Versailles in 1970-'71. Ron's photos of our visit to the Paris Salon de l'Auto from October 1970 were good enough that when I posted them on this blog* they caught the attention of Lewis Mitchell at Motor Show Publishing in the UK.  A car enthusiast who has been obsessed with motor shows since childhood, Mr. Mitchell has collected decades of images from amateur photographic efforts and published them in 3 books, including this latest one.  

The book takes us through the Fifties and a decade into the present century, and just before the middle there's a 7-page spread with Ron Budde's photos documenting our experience at that long-ago show. The chapters are organized chronologically, and locations are highlighted, so you know whether you're wandering through exposition halls in Paris, London, Geneva, or Detroit. There are color shots of exotics like the Lamborghini Miura above and the Maserati Ghibli below, and shots of concept cars and specials from 1950 onwards, but one of the most intriguing things about the collection is that there are cars that this writer, who after all has the gumption to post a blog series called "Forgotten Classics", has never seen before. For example, there's a Bertone-bodied Borgward in the Fifties section that we'd missed even though we did a post on Borgward racers, and numerous glimpses of automotive oddities and exotica that show up in strips of  black and white shots at a smaller scale than color shots like these.

In his role as author and editor, Mr. Mitchell gives special attention to standout designs like the Abarth Biposto below.  Bodied by Bertone to a design by Franco Scaglione in 1952, the car incorporated some of the themes that would appear a year later on the first of three Bertone BAT show cars for Alfa Romeo.  On the cars selected for special attention, the author provides text with model names and histories, often including mechanical notes and even some production figures.  

This book is an enchanting journey down Memory Lane, until you run into something you don't recall at all.  I need to admit that this book was my first exposure to Toyota's RV-2.  I'd never heard anything about it, despite the fact that Toyota apparently went out of its way to publicize this one-off show car.  It displayed an unlikely split personality, first as a GT sports wagon (130 hp. six, 5-speed) and then as a camper with fold-out living space.  A bit like that Seventies Saturday Night Live commercial about the All-Purpose Substance: "It's a dessert topping, but you can use it as a floor wax."  Still, one has to admit the RV-2 has a kind of zany appeal.

Among the other unknown and / or forgotten delights was the Saab Aero-X below, from 2006. This concept car appeared 6 years after General Motors acquired full ownership of the Swedish car maker (they'd bought 50% in 1989).  GM claimed the carbon fiber bodied, AWD one-door coupe with turbocharged V6 power was a forecast of their new Scandinavian design language for the company...

One door?  Well, as the photo below shows, the design traded conventional entry and exit for a raised canopy that allowed 180-degree vision, but might not have made for an easy exit in a rollover, or allowed for easy production.  In that it was like the one-piece canopy on GM Styling's Corvair Monza GT show car from 1962.  Three years after Aero-X appeared, the Great Recession sent GM into bankruptcy, and Saab went the way of the Corvair.  

"A Walk Around the Halls - Vol. II" is in 6" x 8.5" format, with 191 pages of photos and text, plus fold-out covers with color images.  It was printed in the UK on paper sourced from FSC-certified forests.  It is available from Motor Show Publishing Ltd.; their complete catalog can be viewed by visiting www.motorshowphotos.co.uk. 

*Footnote: 

Ron Budde's car show photos appeared here on April 21, 2021 in "Lost Roadside Attraction: 70s Car Show on Paris Streets, and in the Parc des Expos."  After Lewis Mitchell contacted us about Ron's photos, we checked in with Ron, and he supplied more great shots for "Lost Roadside Attraction Sequel:  1970 Salon d l'Auto at the Parc des Expos", which we posted July 12, 2024.

Photo Credits:  

Top:  Motor Show Publishing Ltd. (photo by Ronald Budde)

2nd & 3rd:  Ronald Budde

4th:  Gruppo Bertone

5th:  Toyota Motors Corporation

6th & bottom:  Wikimedia

Chicago Story: Reclaiming a Stolen Volvo, and Discovering a Masterpiece Album

"Good music is beyond category."

                                                                                                   Duke Ellington

It was springtime in 1973. Sometime in the previous fall I'd decided to share a big Old Town apartment on Burling Street with high school friends Bob and Ruby Houdek and their little daughter Sasha. It was a different kind of time than now.  I'd just worked hard in a Presidential election campaign and my candidate had lost, so maybe it wasn't so different.  No, cancel that. It was different.  We'd have a party and Ruby would make her amazing moussaka and we'd have drinks and music, and sometime after midnight a bunch of new people would show up, a replacement party really, and Bob would assume I knew them, Ruby would assume one of the two Bobs knew them, and in reality none of us knew them.  Sometimes little Sasha would toddle into the front room to try on hats in front of a full-length mirror.  It was new living in the city, and having a small child around...

Ruby worked in a landmark plant store called Green Inc. near Lincoln Park; it's still there. Bob, on the road to being a cartographer (people used maps then) worked there too. I commuted 11 miles north to a drafting job, often riding my bike along the Lake Shore bike path. One day Bob's trusty old Volvo PV 544 disappeared.  It was just gone.  Sometime in late spring or early summer, the record store next to Green was the victim of a heist.  Just about everything at Ears Records was gone.  Bob walked over to talk with Tom, the manager.  Tom picked up some records from the floor and gave them to Bob, telling him that this might make it a total loss.  Because we were all music critics at heart, we had different takes on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.  Bob and Ruby preferred the spacey mysticism of the early Floyd, so it wasn't the hit with them that it was with the public.  Bob thought maybe Pink Floyd was turning into a bunch of English essayists like the Moody Blues. We were floored by a record called Solid Air, though.  English / Scottish songwriter and guitarist John Martyn was completely new to us, and he'd crossed a line from acoustic folk into uncharted territory, with brooding, boozy vocals over a yearning sax on the title song, shimmering vibes and a kind of syncopated lounge rhythm behind the piano on "I Don't Want to Know", and a jangly, stuttering use of something called an echoplex on "I'd Rather Be the Devil."  We were hypnotized, and listened to the thing over and over.  In an apartment that already had plenty of candidates for a session on the turntable, Solid Air came to define the space, and our season in it.  We were still getting used to the city, and the curves that it threw at us. One day Bob was walking in the neighborhood and he found his stolen, pale blue Volvo.  It was a little scruffy, but intact; I guess you can't expect thieves to wash the car they've stolen.  Bob still had the key in his pocket, so he just got into the thing a drove it back home. With another amateur photographer, I took photos of industrial zones at night.  The alley wall behind me was sprayed with Gangster Love; this was almost 3 decades before the phrase appeared in a song.  We didn't think much of it at the time.  I thought of the Mob when I thought of gangsters, and knew there were more of those guys in plush suburbs like River Forest than in our Old Town neighborhood...

It was sometime in the late summer when something changed. I was sitting on a front porch in the neighborhood with other friends, Toni and Geoph and Susan. We were talking about moving out a bit from the city, maybe to Evanston, where Toni had a job at Northwestern. We were sitting on the steps eating ice cream when a loud bang came from the corner store to the east.  Somehow we knew it wasn't a car backfiring, but we went running anyway, down to the corner to see what was going on.  Maybe we were thinking we could help; this was before anyone thought much about drive-by shootings, and long before mass shootings became a recurring theme in American life.  We got to the corner and there was a guy on the ground with a hole in his head. Another guy was standing in the doorway with a gun; maybe this was the store owner.  The police came, but I don't recall any of us being interviewed.  In the fall I moved north to Evanston, and when we divided up the record collection from Burling Street I hung onto that copy of Solid Air.  I returned to it again and again; it was as if carefully wrought sound could somehow be a source of light...

Photo & Image Credits

Top: Island Records, front cover photo by John Webster

2nd:  Historic Chicago ("Looking North on Dearborn, 1973")

Bottom:  Photo by Bob Jecmen, from a birthday card by Reiko Fujii

Forgotten Sometimes-Classics: Renault in the USA

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Renault released its rear-engined, water-cooled Dauphine in 1956 and brought it to the US the following year.  By 1959, when the "Le Car Hot" ad campaign began, they were marketing the 89.4" wheelbase, 845cc 4-door as an alternative to VW's Beetle (94 inches, 1,200 cc, 2 doors). And for a brief moment, the promise of the New French Revolution ad campaign seemed to be coming true.  While nearly 120,000 new VW vehicles were registered in the US that year, Renault sold around 102,000 Dauphines.  But that was the stylishly rounded little car's best year here.  It turned out that the Dauphine was not well-adapted to life on the Interstate, and that Renault dealers were not as ready to provide parts and service as VW dealers, whose cars seemed to need less of both.

By 1962, when Renault produced the R8 with a 956cc inline four and radiator still at the rear, the lines had become more rectilinear to provide more interior and trunk space on the same wheelbase as the Dauphine, and its 4-wheel disc brakes were new to this class of sedan.  By 1964, they'd released a Gordini version named after their engineer, ex-race car maker Amédée Gordini*, with engines ranging from 1.1 to 1.3 liters, and producing up to 95 hp, twice that of the original R8.  Rally success gave the Gordini a certain cachet, and this California example survives in fine condition.  

Jean Rédelé's independent Alpine firm first produced his fiberglass-bodied A110 berlinette, based on the R8 drivetrain in a variety of engine sizes, with steel backbone chassis like the previous A108, starting in 1963.  The little 2-seater had a long and illustrious rally career, winning the World Rally Championship in 1973. The author captured the example below after the Tour de France Auto in 1974.  The car was never imported into the US, however...

The A110 became enough of a collector's trophy, though, that when Renault decided to produce a mid-engined GT car in 2016, then named it after the rear-engined A110 from the Sixties and Seventies. The new car is in the foreground below. 

Other detours and adventures occupied the years between 1977, when the original A110 finally ended production, and 2016.  In 1971 Alpine released the A310, still rear-engined but with the radiator in front, with styling by Trevor Fiore and six covered headlights marching across the sleek fiberglass nose, a clear reference to Alpine Renault's success in international rallying.  The A310 below was also photographed after the '74 Tour de France.  

While rear-engined Renaults were beginning to have rally success, Renault engineers were launching production cars with front-wheel drive. First was the R4, a competitor for Citroen's 2CV, in 1962.  By '65, though, they'd released the R16, a serious effort to redefine the mainstream sedan.  It featured a longitudinally-mounted aluminum inline 4 (from 1,470 to 1,647 cc) driving the front wheels, a hatchback configuration with folding rear seats, those 4 disc brakes, and a practical orientation not unlike the pitch Volvo used to attract US customers.  An unusual feature was torsion bar rear suspension design with non-aligned rear axles, which resulted in different wheelbases on each side of the car (104.3" right, 107.1" left).  The R16 was less successful in the US than in Canada, where it was popular enough to justify a Quebec assembly plant.

Renault's R5 was introduced in 1972 with similar front-drive and rear suspension, and by '75 was competing with the VW Rabbit / Golf and Honda Civic for US customers.  It was marketed in the US as Le Car, harking back to that late Fifties advertising campaign. 

The R5 / Le Car dramatized the divergent views of the engineers who saw front-wheel drive as a universal format, and those who wanted to promote Renault and Alpine Renault as rally winners.  In 1980, the rally crew got a mid-engined Turbo based on the R5 as a rally weapon.  The mid-mounted, turbocharged inline 4 of 1.4 or 1.5 liters sent power to the rear wheels through a 5-speed gearbox, and took the place of the rear seat in a body adapted from the front-drive R5.

Bodywork is credited to Marc Deschamps and Marcello Gandini of Bertone, along with the futuristic interior.   Sales greatly exceeded what was required for a "homologation special" over 5 years of production, with nearly five thousand cars sold.  A few "grey market" cars made it to the US...

Likewise, some V6 versions of Alpine's A310 came to the US through specialists willing and able to certify the cars.  These all had flared wheel wells and rally spoiler kits to go with the 2.7 liter PRV engine and 5-speed gearbox that might have made the lighweight GT an interesting alternative to Porsche's 911, had Renault taken an interest in selling it here.  The example below is from 1984, when production ended...

By then, however, Renault had taken a different route into the US market, focused on front-drive compact versions of the Renault 9 and 11, redesigned for the US market in a $90 million program with American Motors that gave Renault a 46% share in AMC. The resulting Alliance sedans and convertibles, and Encore hatchbacks, were sold in the 1983-'87 model years, but discontinued when Chrysler bought out Renault's share in AMC.  Still, the cars represented Renault's biggest sales success in the US market, with over 623,000 specimens sold.  American Motors was renamed Jeep-Eagle and merged into Chrysler in 1990...

From the '89 to '92 model years, AMC built and sold the Eagle Premier in the US.  A mid-size car by US standards, it was related to the Giugiaro-designed front-drive senior Renaults, and available with 2.5 liter inline four or Peugeot-Renault-Volvo 3.0 liter V6.  Pre-production prototypes had Renault badges, but these were replaced with Eagle badges.  The Bricklin lurking behind our example is a reminder of the difficulties of launching a new make of car, and the Jeep signs above it suggest that AMC's path to success may have been easier if it had invested as much effort into renewing the Jeep brand, in the face of growing demand for SUVs.  After all, it had a decade earlier produced AWD Eagle versions of its Hornet, and Audi was having some success with its Quattro line. When Chrysler bought out Renault's stake in AMC, it was because Chrysler management saw Jeep as the prize.  But that is a story for another day...

*Footnote:  We took a closer look at the Alpine Renault A310 and its A110 predecessor in "Forgotten Classic: Alpine Renault A310", posted here on January 9, 2021, and profiled Amédée Gordini's racing cars in "The Etceterini Files Part 6—Gordini: French Connection, Chicago Subplot", from March 27, 2016.

Errata:  When we posted this piece we noted that the Alpine A110 was based on the Renault R8 chassis.  Wrong; as we noted in our "Forgotten Classic Revival Follies Part 4" (posted here Dec. 27, 2023), the Alpines (including the predecessor A108 and the Brazilian Interlagos) had a steel backbone chassis. Think of something like a Lotus Elan, but turned around so the engine is at the wrong end...

Photo Credits:
Top, plus 5th, 7th and 8th from top:  Groupe Renault S.A.

2nd & 3rs:  Gogo Heinrich
4th, 6th, 9th & 10th::  the author

11th::  bringatrailer.com

12th & bottom::  Wikimedia

Ferrari and Vignale: Happy Together...for a While

This writer was intrigued by Vignale-bodied Ferraris before he knew they were designed by Giovanni Michelotti*, and a dozen years before he encountered a twin of the above car in a parking lot in Southern France in 1974.  Why?  Well, they seemed to hide complexities under their seeming simplicity, and even in a neighborhood where a grade school kid could get hit on his bike by a '54 Corvette (the author did) and drool over an Ace Bristol (the author did), nobody had one.  Also, they were light and fast.  The 166 coupe above, a 2-liter V12, is from 1950.  The simple, inwardly-curving alloy flanks are relieved by a subtle indent linking the front fenders to the rear, and in an era of flat, 2-piece windshields, this one-piece glazing is slightly curved.  Delightful, but rare.  Alfredo Vignale* liked the design enough that he built a similar-looking coupe on an Abarth chassis..

By 1951, Michelotti was experimenting with forms and details that would appear on many Vignale designs on Ferraris and other cars through the Fifties.  On the 212 berlinetta above, chassis #0179EL, headlights have been moved into the grille, now an oval egg crate that would become a trademark, and they are flanked by fog lights and projecting front fender forms.  Barely visible here is the extension of the vertical metal at the window sill into embryonic fins inset from the outer contours of the rear fenders. That effect is more pronounced on chassis #197EL, where the yellow fins contrast with black fenders on the Bumblebee car, a 212 model from 1952.

The Bumblebee also has an indented, contrasting panel echoing the curve of the front wheel well, like the larger Cunningham C3 coupes and convertibles produced by Vignale for American Briggs Cunningham during these same years. Where the Cunningham had conventional headlights, the Bumblebee sticks with the headlights-in-grille theme, with smaller fog lights than #179EL, and those projecting fenders that will soon enough show up in Mexico on some famous racers...

The 225 Sport below shows that Michelotti and Vignale would delete some decorative effects when their assignment was a road racer.  The 225, a one-year model (1952), and marks the steady increase in the displacement of the Colombo-designed SOHC V12, in this case to 2.7 liters. Apparently Buick hadn't patented the idea of cooling portholes, or Vignale didn't care. Road racers, unlike GT cars, usually had sliding windows instead of the roll-up variety.  Ferrari built only 21 of the 225 Sport. 

The coupe below, from the same period, shows how non-standardized Vignale's efforts were. Note the taller greenhouse and recessed grille, and the flanges in the alloy fenders around the wheel openings.  Roll-down windows are a concession to comfort, but steering is still on the right.  Maserati was already offering left-hand drive.

At the rear, the bright trim at the color separation line emphasizes the tidy, rounded contours, along with the recessed tail lights and gently wrapped rear window. Upon first seeing a Vignale coupe in Road & Track during an era of big chrome and bombastic fins, the author and his classmates were thunderstruck...

1952 was a busy year for Ferrari and for Vignale.  The 225S gave way to the 250MM (after the Mille Miglia road race), and the V12 was now at the 3-liter displacement that would help make it famous.  As you may have suspected, Ferrari models were named after their individual cylinder displacements during this period.  Thus, a V12 model 250MM and a 4-cylinder 750 Monza were both 3-liter cars.

This 250MM coupe (or berlinetta, in Italian) has a lower-profile, more forward-slanting air intake than the earlier cars, and this one lacks the portholes.  

Vignale also built some 250MM spiders, and Phil Hill took delivery of one from New York Ferrari distributor Luigi Chinetti in spring of 1953. That's Hill's car on the left, on the way to the Pebble Beach road races, a bit more than 8 years before he became Formula One World Champion in a Ferrari. Note that Michelotti's design emphases the concave, inward-sloping panels below the doors with some bright trim.  Yes, some car makers were still putting trim on road racers.  Mr. Hill might have preferred disc brakes instead.  Despite the drums and the presence of the big 340 Mexico on the right, he won at Pebble Beach anyway. 

That tubular-chassis 340 Mexico above is the only one of the 4 Mexicos built in 1952 as a spider.  The others were coupes like the one shown at dockside below.  Note the projecting front fenders, an idea Michelotti adopted from his earlier work on the 212 chassis, and low-set headlights fronting a trough between those fenders and the hood.  Under that hood was the bigger engine NYC dealer and race driver Luigi Chinetti had requested, a new Lampredi design, still an SOHC V12, but at 4.1 liters, and linked to a 5-speed gearbox.  It would eventually grow to 4.5 and then 4.9 liters...

And it give the 340 Mexico its distinctive proportions, with around half the car's length taken up by the engine bay, as shown below. The cars were named for Mexico's Carrera Panamericana, a long-distance road race, and they competed there.  In 1952, Luigi Chinetti and Jean Lucas took 3rd place in a 340 Mexico coupe.  A small vent behind the door directs air to the rear brakes, and the vertical metal strip behind the door's leading edge may be an early effort at boundary layer air control...

Later in 1953, Michelotti sketched out a more aerodynamic approach to the competition spider. Overhangs were minimal front and rear, and on several of the cars the headlights were covered by plexiglass shrouds.  Vignale built this body style on the 166 Series II chassis, on the 250MM (the car below) and also on the 340MM.  

Note how the air outlets (to cool Ferrari's soon-outmoded drum brakes) visually elongate the stubby, rounded tail. This new, pared-down look might have foretold more work for Vignale and his designer Michelotti, but Scaglietti produced sleeker, lower-profile Ferrari competition cars based on Farina designs in '54. That year Pinin Farina's share of Ferrari's production increased, foreshadowing Ferrari's order for 30 Farina-bodied 250GT cabriolets in 1957, and the 250GT coupe the following year. The latter was the first series-produced Ferrari, with over 350 finding buyers before production ended in 1960.

Footnote: 

Michelotti's designs for Vignale on other chassis, including Maserati, Lancia, Cunningham and Triumph, are surveyed in "Michelotti and Vignale in the 50s & 60s: Pioneers of the Italian Line", in our archives for June 14, 2020.

Photo Credits:  

Top:  The Jensen Museum

2nd:  carrozzieri-italiani.com

3rd & 4th:  bonhams.com  

5th thru 9th:  the author

10th:  The Phil Hill Collection

11th:  youtube.com

12th:  George Havelka

13th & 14th:  youtube.com

 

Book Review: "The Formula" by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg

The Formula, a  book about Formula One during the period when it was essentially taken over by a British car salesman named Bernie Ecclestone*, appeared in 2024, when Ecclestone, who had divested himself of his ownership and management role,  announced that he was auctioning off his collection of F1 racers. The timing was just about perfect, and the authors, both of whom write for the Wall Street Journal, are well-suited to the task of focusing on the financial aspects of a sports story, as J. Robinson is the European sports correspondent and J. Clegg the sports editor.  Early on, the authors highlight the irony of Formula 1 being the only sport named after its rulebook, when, unlike in the worlds of soccer or baseball, Formula 1 rules are deliberately and drastically changed every few years.  Chapters are devoted to the efforts of teams to seek temporary advantage by meticulous and sometimes devious intepretation of those rules in engineering drivetrains, aerodynamics and tires.  And, against a background involving big corporate suppliers and sponsors, this effort involves lots of money...

Luckily for the reader, the financial story is far from a dry, statistical slog, because Ecclestone (at right above), who sold his Formula One Group to Liberty Media in 2017 at age 86, became famous during his 40 years of running F1 as a cunning, sometimes shifty deal maker who was one of the first to grasp the importance of TV contracts, deals between teams and corporate sponsors (especially the tobacco industry), and celebrity promotions. The Ecclestone era became known as a time when teams began to see bigger profits (though nothing like Ecclestone's), when costs of designing and building race cars snowballed, and when the control of the sport was essentially ceded by millionaires to billionaires...

It wasn't at all like that in the era when Ecclestone got interested in Grand Prix racing.  That period, covered in Robert Daley's The Cruel Sport*, was a time when driver fatalities were frequent, when teams often lost money shipping their cars from race to race, and when the cars themselves were painted in national or team colors, not with graphics or logos demanded by corporate sponsors. The first sponsorship logos appeared on a Brabham and a Lotus in 1968, a year after the last covered in Daley's book.  And it's kind of shocking to realize that seatbelts were not required by the FIA (Federation Internationale de l'Automobile) until 1972, the year that Ecclestone bought the Brabham team for 100,000 pounds. As a team owner, Ecclestone was a founder of FOCA (the Formula One Constructors Association) in 1974, and kept ownership of the Brabham team until 1988, after Nelson Picquet had won World Championships twice with it.  The drama surrounding the World Championship plays as big a part in the book as the high-level deal-making, with chapters on Ayrton Senna, Michael Schumacher, Lewis Hamilton's move from McLaren to Mercedes, and a gripping chapter on the Abu Dhabi GP in 2021, when Hamilton saw his hopes of a record 8th World Championship dashed by F1 race director Michael Masi's failure to follow the correct restart procedure after an accident. The authors are effective at highlighting the interpersonal conflict and professional discord that have escalated along with the financial stakes in F1. It all reminds this writer of a brief conversation he watched at Road America decades ago, when a boy of grade school age looked at the big wing on the back of a Can-Am racer and asked his dad, "Does that thing keep the car on the track?"  The dad replied, "No, son, it's money that keeps the car on the track."

 

*Footnote:  Our  brief review of "The Cruel Sport" was posted here on October 29, 2024 in "Book Reviews in Brief: Source Material for Car Wonks and Historians."  Our first mention of Bernie Ecclestone was in connection with his 1957 purchase of two historic Formula 1 cars, in "Celtic Rainmaker:  Connaught Ended the Longest Drought in Grand Prix Racing", posted on July 24, 2016.

Photo Credits:  

Book photos are by the publishers.  Photo of Bernie Ecclestone with Brabham BT44 is posted on youtube.com, from an interview by Tom Hartley Jr.  Photo of Lewis Hamilton is from motorcities.org.