lehman hill: Identifying Cars from the Video

In the last post, I showed a video based on home movies of car racing. One of the things that fascinates me is the variety of cars on the track and in the parking lot. Some of these cars would be worth millions of dollars today. Others, we don't even know what they are.

The one that shows in the frame before you start the video is an Elva Courier, I would love to have one of those.

Starting with a mystery, the sports racer in this freeze frame is quite unusual and I haven't been able to even come close to identifying it. It is very wide and low and has a very rectangular shape in plan view. My memory tells me that this is the Flying Shingle raced by Ken Polman, but the existing pictures of the Shingle don't match at all. By the way, the Flying Shingle was a very creative effort. It had a steel tube chassis with no suspension (go-kart style) to save weight. It was powered by a 700cc Mercury Outboard boat engine. The complete car was said to weigh about 300 pounds.

Somehow, I remember that Mercury outboard engine in this very low car, but memory does funny things over more than 50 years.

Staying in at Waterford, I love the smaller classes. Mini Cooper .vs. NSU Prinz TT .vs. Hillman Imp with Volvo, Fiat 500, and Beetle thrown in for fun. One of the fun things about Waterford is that it puts a premium on handling, so the feature race on Sunday was when all of the closed wheel cars raced together and there was usually a ding-dong battle between a Mini and a Corvette for the overall win.

I also love the battle between the front engine and rear engine Formula Junior cars in the early years.

The big cars had lots of Corvettes, Mustangs, Camaros, and one E-type, but there was also a few pure, big bore racing cars. The 1969 part of the video has an amazing range of big bore racers.

McLaren Mk 1 Can Am racer

Lola T70 Can Am racer

Porsche 906

Porsche 904

Pretty fancy stuff for a little club track like Waterford.

By the time we got to Watkins Glen for the F1 in 1971, things were pretty interesting in F1. If you remember, 1971 started out with outrageous, suspension mounted wings flying high above the body. The crashes mounted quickly and so did the regulations that limited height and forced wings to be body mounted. By the time the cars got to Watkins Glen near the end of the season, the cars had evolved into some of the prettiest and ugliest F1 cars ever.

Does everybody remember the "tea tray" March? It was there and competing.