Looking for date night movies, I ran across a documentary about the 1,000-mile Mille Miglia endurance races held between 1927 and 1957 in Italy. Too bad it’s not available through Netflix (although here’s the trailer). But I was reminded about a wonderful interview I heard on This American Life — Dan Neil, automotive critic for the Los Angeles Times talks to Stirling Moss, the race car driver who holds the speed record for completing the race. Neil takes a drive with Moss in the famous winning car — that’s the car in the photo, a Mercedes Benz 300 SLR. If you take a look at the podcast, it’s the last piece — “Act Five. End of the Road”. By the way, Moss is still going strong, and even has a website worth checking out!
Instead of a yearly vacation to the beach, my husband & I spread ours out over 5 or 6 track weekends a year, some with our local Porsche club and some with the Northern California NASA. In May, we were at Buttonwillow Raceway in the hot center of California. Several friends were commisserating about their bad backs, and John, in particular had some unorthadox advice — he tapes medicinal magnets to his back to reduce his pain. He also was emphatic that his back didn’t hurt when strapped into his GT-3 raceseat. Well, I didn’t think of it again until I found this office furntiure made from car seats (fancy ones, too — not just Porsche but Ferrarri and Maserati).
This past March Bertoia Auctions sold part of a collection of antique toy cars — 1,400 pieces from a collection of over 7,000! I’m a collector too, but nothing on that scale! The video below shows off the collection, and some of the prices they fetched are listed on the auction houses’ website. There’s also a nice story about how the Kaufmanns collected their stash at the NY Times here.
I guess I’m just a sucker for movies about old guys and their motor obsessions, because this “unabashed mash note to a lovely character from New Zealand’s recent past” (to quote a review on Amazon) was the perfect date night movie. In the The World’s Fastest Indian, Anthony Hopkins plays real life 60-something Burt Munro, a Kiwi who’s been tinkering with his 1920s-era Indian motorcycle for years, pushing it to faster and faster speeds. His dream is to take the bike to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah and try for a land speed record, and when he realizes he won’t live forever, he sells everything and heads for the US. About riding fast he says: “You live more in five minutes going flat out in one of these things than most live in a lifetime.” Burt is completely captivating and I cheered for him even when I though he was nuts.
I wouldn’t say we have too many cars. It’s the extra stuff that turns out to be a problem…. where to put those priceless wheels, the tires in 5 different sizes, and of course the spare part that we probably don’t need but would be too hard to replace? In most houses, open a closet door and you’ll find coats or suit cases or shoes and boots. But at my house, you’re as likely to find wheels. To the left you’ll see our downstairs hall closet (and our cat, Elwood). It’s always a balancing act when we acquire something new — what to move, where to put it. It was all easier when we didn’t live together, there were more closets and two garages. But since consolidating, I have fewer clothes and shoes and extra sheets for the bed.
My husband & I own six cars — most of them old and
a lot of maintanence — but always joys to drive. We run
a website for selling, buying and auctioning anything automotive: Roonuts the Car Hobbyist's Market. And this is my online journal of what absorbs most of our free time: our enthusiam for all things automotive.
Looking for date night movies, I ran across a documentary about the 1,000-mile Mille Miglia endurance races held between 1927 and 1957 in Italy. Too bad it’s not available through Netflix (although here’s the trailer). But I was reminded about a wonderful interview I heard on This American Life — Dan Neil, automotive critic for the Los Angeles Times talks to Stirling Moss, the race car driver who holds the speed record for completing the race. Neil takes a drive with Moss in the famous winning car — that’s the car in the photo, a Mercedes Benz 300 SLR. If you take a look at the podcast, it’s the last piece — “Act Five. End of the Road”.
By the way, Moss is still going strong, and even has a website worth checking out!
I wouldn’t say we have too many cars. It’s the extra stuff that turns out to be a problem…. where to put those priceless wheels, the tires in 5 different sizes, and of course the spare part that we probably don’t need but would be too hard to replace?
