Category: Film

The really first Silberpfeil

In January last year Jay Leno released a very interesting episode in his “Jay Leno’s Garage”. I talked about this car in the second part of my Silver Arrows series last month. This is the replica of the original 1932 Silberpfeil that Mercedes Benz built in 2019, and Jay Leno made a fantastic 28 minutes video about it. In this video was the first time I heard Mercedes admit that it wasn’t Alfred Neubauer who originally coined the term.

Historical origins aside, as usual, Leno produced a fantastic video that’s really worth the watch.

The coming of the disk brake

Just a few minutes ago, going through my YouTube page I found this gem, and had to share it. From what I understood, this short film was filmed in 2012, but released in late 2020. Just 32 minutes, but to hear Stirling Moss reminiscing about those “poetic times” was absolutely fantastic. And it’s not just Stirling Moss, but Norman Dewis as well. A true legend when it comes to Jaguar, he talks about how he got involved with the Jaguar C-Type and his almost victory (together with Moss) at the 1952 Mille Miglia.

The film doesn’t show much technical details about the project’s development, however the participation of Jackie Stewart, Martin Brundle and Derek Bell make these 32 minutes totally delightful.

Railton-Mobile Special – one of the coolest LSR cars ever

On September 15, 1938, John Cobb took his Railton Special up to 568.58 km/h, a new world land speed record. The car was a technological marvel, with many ingenious solutions that made it basically a rocket without wings. The Railton Special was the first ever car to breach the 560 km/h (350 mph) barrier. On August 23rd, 1939, Cobb drove the car again to a new record, 594.97 km/h. After the war Cobb tried once again, this time with Mobile Oil sponsorship. On September 16th, 1947, the Railton-Mobile Special averaged 634.39 km/h. That record lasted 25 years.

LSR cars are something I always liked, and most of the famous ones are available in 1:43. However they’re really big (= take up a LOT of shelf space) and invariably quite expensive. Therefor, my admiration for them will unfortunately be limited to just knowing their stories 😏.

Ruf cars and Jay Leno

Last year, Jay Leno produced a video about Ruf’s CTR, also with an interview with Alois Ruf himself. Not only did he show the three generations of the CTR models, but also Alois Ruf and collector Bruce Meyer reveal very interesting tidbits about the cars. Being an episode of Jay Leno’s Garage, it is a well-produced video and a very enjoyable watch.

When NASCAR Raced at Le Mans

I told this story here before, or at least mentioned it, but it’s nice to see some footage of the feat. Yes, in 1976 you had NASCAR cars racing at La Sarthe. Something that may sound utterly absurd, but as GT Rain explains in the video, at the time it wasn’t so out of the question.

Well, that was the one time NASCAR was interesting… 🤣😂🤣😂

Derek Bell at Le Mans in 1982

Surfing around YouTube, I found this gem. It’s a feature about Derek Bell’s perspective of the 1982 race – which along with Jacky Ickx, he won by the way. You will see a delightful 26 minutes of original footage from the race and behind the scenes.

Not counting the actual footage, which was awesome, I loved to hear Bell’s thoughts throughout the race. Also, I learned that at the time, refueling stops became much longer, because of the restrictions on fuel flow.

So all in all a very nice film 👍

Spa, 1961

This is a short film of the Belgian Grand Prix, at Spa-Francorchamps on June 18th 1961. Frankly, the editing is a bit of a mess, not being sequential or chronologically set up. The GREAT part about it though is that it’s in 60 FPS. That being so, you can really appreciate the details, specially on the onboard parts. As a comparison, you can see here “regular footage” of that race.

According to legend, it was footage like this that inspired John Frankenheimer to make one of the most famous racing films of all times, “Grand Prix” of 1966 (you can watch the whole film from that link).

The future of race cars?

A few months ago Top Gear did a piece on Volkswagen’s ID.R, their full-blown racing monster. Their goal was to conquer Pike’s Peak, which they did in 2018 and then, in 2019, conquered Nürburgring. On both runs Romain Dumas was at the helm, and it’s eerie to see him going flat-out and just hearing the electric whine of the engine.

As always, Top Gear made a fantastic video, and specially nice since it’s presented by the great Chris Harris.