Videos

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 🧐.

T80: another video

Last week, Scarf And Goggles published a very nice video on the Mercedes’ Blackbird. It has a different perspective than B Sport’s video (I showed it on April 3rd), and with different footage. So if you have an interest in LSR cars and/or the Silver Arrows, be sure to watch this one too.

By the way, Scarf And Goggles has some VERY interesting on vintage LSR cars.

T80: Mercedes’ LSR monster

A couple of days ago, totally by accident, I stumbled upon this video. Well, it was in my YouTube suggested videos, however under the “Classic cars” label. Since it wasn’t on the front page, I almost missed it. Fortunately, that night I clicked on the “Classic cars” tab and to my surprise I saw a new video on the T80. Since the car never actually raced (when WWII started Mercedes had to halt the project) there’s not much information about it. Info is scarce and footage is even rarer. Even so, B Sport managed to unearth a lot of details and even some images that I’ve never had seen before. With that, if you have an interest in vintage LSR cars or motorsports engineering, this is a very interesting video.