Why am I starstruck by rally lately?

Courtesy of https://www.instagram.com/dirtfishrally/

As I’m sure you noticed, there’s been a lot of rally cars around here. The fact is I just can not be totally flabbergasted by the kind of racing you can see above. It takes some very special skills (and a certain type of crazy) to drive like that 💀. Out of this world! If you want to see more, head to Dirtfish that they have a ton of content like this short video above.

New diorama – Rough Road

In early October, I showed a photo of a new project I was working on. It took a while, but I finally finished it. Nothing fancy, I only used simple stuff – I guess the most “pro technique” I used was static grass. Nonetheless, I had to test my ideas every single time, since I wasn’t sure things would work out as I expected. Also, lots of PVA glue and painting, that took sometimes more than a day to dry. With all that, it took me basically a month to get it done 🙄. Well, good or bad, here it is! And I think it worked out okay. Pretty soon I’ll use it in my review photos 😎.

Donohue & Penske Documentary

Written by Brock Yates, I think “Four Hands on The Wheel” came out in 1970. The film is a 47 minutes look into the partnership between Mark Donohue and Roger Penske. Fantastic to see Penske’s blue and yellow Sunoco cars of the late 60s, from Camaros to Lolas. In other words, a must see for gearheads fans of vintage racing.

Le Mans 1968

Found this one yesterday. All in all, 33 minutes of very nice footage of the 1968 race. As a bonus, it has an English voice-over narration (the original film is in French). And best of all, this time there isn’t that typical gut-wrenching seizure-inducing awfully terrible elevator music that you hear a lot in many of the 60s and 70s documentaries.

PS: This is the third nice film I found about the 1968 race. While from some years you can’t find zilch, for some reason 1968 was prolific.

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.