Car Racing in my Youth

My father was a great guy.  My parents recognized my love of cars early and my father supported that any way he could.  One example is the homemade go-kart that I posted about a few years ago.  He also supported my racing bug with slot cars which is the step that got me building my own stuff.

But the biggest influence was when he took me to a car race at age 10.  That was Waterford Hills road racing in 1964.  The best I can tell, we went back in 1969 and went to a lot of races in 1971 (Waterford, MIS endurance race, and Watkins Glen F1).  Somewhere in there we also attended the first Can-Am at MIS and a Formula 5000 race at MIS as well.

For several years, I have intended to go through our home movies of these races and turn them into some sort of video.  I finally took the time and the result is linked in this post.  Be forewarned.  This is no great cinematic accomplishment.  They are just home movies with the usual lack of cinematic skills.  More than that, these come from Super 8 film which means they are blurry flickering with no sound.  What I do hope you find interesting is the thin slice of culture and time that they represent.  The cars are fascinating and surprisingly diverse.  The shots of people are interesting, both as fashion and the size of the crowds showing the popularity of road racing at that time.

The video is about 12 minutes.  Feel free to freeze frame and see if you can identify the cars.



Early Waterford and Other Road Racing from Jac Brown on Vimeo.

 I will try to identify interesting cars in the next post.  Should be fun.