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Was the 2020 race a “good Le Mans”?

Don’t think anyone will say it was a bad race, but it was certainly atypical. The pandemic forced it to be closed to the public, so there were no fans and only the technical pre-race events happened. The pre-race parade and all the fan events did not happen, and media coverage was limited. So all in all a very peculiar race compared to the traditional “Le Mans experience”.

Petrolicious wrote a very nice article about this year’s race, and touches exactly on those points. In the future people will look back and see 2020 as the last LMP1 race, where the TS050 won it’s third Le Mans in a row. But for us experiencing all this first hand and live, it sure was something strange.

New 1:18 917K from Amalgam

Thankfully it’s 1:18, therefor too big for the W-143 Garage. Because it’s EXPENSIVE – US$ 1300,00 (Classic Driver) 😲😲😲. Ultimately, however, it’s g-o-r-g-e-o-u-s! Though I’m not a big fan of weathered models, for a jewel of this caliber I would easily open an exception.

Amalgam will only make 100 models of the 1970 Daytona winner 917K, so don’t wait too long to go after yours.

The new 1929 Bentley Blower is coming along

Back in October last year I wrote about Bentley making a brand new 1929 Bentley Blower. The plan was to produce 12 new cars that are exact replicas of the original model. For that, a specialized team at Crewe, in the UK, took apart the second car of the 1929 “Team Blower” and laser-scanned every single part of the car. Recently Bentley showed photos of some of the new parts already made for the prototype model.

From the images that Bentley released, the new “Continuation Series” car will look absolutely fantastic. The cars are expected to be available by 2021, and all 12 are already spoken for. As I said before, sometimes it’s really nice to be rich…

New camera!!!

new camera

Last month I wrote about my new dioramas, since I thought that my old track diorama was not good anymore. I even mused that the next upgrade would have to be a new camera, since my old Nikon D90 is by now totally dated. A great camera, but released in 2008, so it just can’t stand up to current hardware. AND, it’s a cropped-sensor camera, so the resolution isn’t the best. But since good cameras are far from cheap, specially a full-frame one, I thought it would take a while.

However, my adorable wife and my dad (!) teamed up and got me a new one for my birthday 🥰. And not just any new camera, but possibly one of the best ones available right now, the Sony A7III!!! The A7III is one of Sony’s professional mirrorless full-frame models, with features that I never dreamt of. With a Zeiss 24-70mm lens it’s a true powerhouse.

Boy oh boy 😊!!! Now I need to learn how to use all those features.

And we have a winner!

Rebel Williams Esports #1 won the first 24 Hours of Le Mans Virtual! 🏆
Piloted by Raffaele Marciello (factory Mercedes GT driver), Louis Deletraz (Haas Formula 1 reserve), Nikodem Wisniewski (sim racer) and Kuba Brzezinski (sim racer), it started eighth in the grid. But slowly the team climbed up and finished in first.

In GTE, the #93 Porsche dominated the race. Piloted by Nick Tandy (Le Mans winner), Ayhancan Guven (Porsche Supercup), Joshua Rogers (Porsche Esports Supercup champion) and Tommy Ostgaard (sim racer), they took the flag. Pretty nice, since this weekend was Porsche’s 50th anniversary of their first overall Le Mans win.

Not the real thing, of course, but you know? It was cool to watch. Graphics were fantastic and the inboard filming looked like you were seeing it from a real race car.

Made me want to fire up Forza 7 on the Xbox One…

Mercedes-Benz Classic workshop

Mercedes has a HUGE (and fantastic!) museum at Stuttgart. The museum counts with around 1100 cars, and for a gearhead it’s basically paradise. And to maintain all those cars, they have a team of highly specialized technicians and mechanics exclusively dedicated to the museum’s cars. Last Tuesday Petrolicious aired a very nice article about the museum’s workshop.

Interestingly though, the director of Mercedes-Benz Classic recounted the story about why the paint was scraped off the W25 to get the car at the maximum 750 kg limit. However, that’s a confirmed fairy tale made up by Alfred Neubauer in his autobiography. Nothing against a little embellishing of an historical event, but I would expect that the head of such an endeavor as the Mercedes-Benz Classic department would be more factual.

Fairy tales aside, Petrolicious’ article (full of photos!!) is a treat.