David Soares down in Monterey “I never bought a ride in my life.” That’s what Tony Adamowicz told me as we stood in the back of the David Bull Publishing tent in the Vendor Village at the 2005 edition of the Rolex Monterey Historic Automobile Races watching Derek Bell, Vic Elford, Gijs van Lennep, and Brian Redman autograph Bill Oursler’s new coffee-table tome “Porsche Prototype Era” (this is not a plug; I gladly paid full-pop for my copy). The long line snaking its way to the cash drawer never made its way to Tony A-to-Z and he didn’t seem to mind. As we talked, the life achievement he was most proud of was raising his son as a single parent. People probably didn’t recognize him because he looked about 10 years younger than his contemporaries at the autograph table. “I never bought a ride in my life,” seemed to best sum-up the 2005 edition of the Historics. The cars and drivers I was most interested in didn’t race, with the exception of Brian Redman, who made up for the others by racing three cars – none of which he had driven in anger during his career. Even the Redman connection was particularly dissonant to me seeing that Jim Hall’s Chaparrals were the quasi-featured marque and Redman won some of his greatest championships in Hall’s F5000 Chaparral Lolas. Back, way back…. It's outta here ! When I first started attending the Monterey Historic Automobile Races twenty-odd years ago, the event was sort of a social gathering for a group of people who had managed to get a hold of cast-off racing cars. For the first 10 years of the event I hadn’t been in the least interested although I had heard that there were some neat displays. This wasn’t racing after all, it was just a bunch of hobbyists playing around with discarded racing cars. Then shameless mining of nostalgia took root in the auto industry. Steve Earle has held a tight rein on the selection criteria in hopes of keeping his old-car party real as the latest generation of big-money collectors have slowly but surely bought-up much of the nostalgia that makes the event great. Earle can be seen behind the curtain like the Great Oz, trying to keep the event from becoming another Goodwood – some people take offense at that. The West Coast Goodwood is across Laureles Grade (and Earle’s reputedly got a hand in that). Real racers are more often than not hired-guns who didn’t buy their rides at Barrett-Jackson or Bonham’s. The History Channel Watching the people plunking down their plastic while I stood in the shade with the only living guy OTHER than Derek Bell to race both the Ferrari 512 AND the Porsche 917 in F.I.A. championship events during the 1970-71 “Golden Age” of prototypes made me wonder about all this nostalgia mining. Do the people buying it really remember it? Tony A-to-Z had a heck of a lot better record than Bell in the Ferrari (in 1971 a strong second at Daytona and a third at Le Mans behind the more reliable Porsches). Tony looked wistfully at the pictures in J.J. O’Malley’s Daytona book – the account of the race in which he and Ronnie Bucknum almost beat Rodriguez and Oliver’s Gulf 917 featured a two-page spread of Penske’s 512M. “I beat Penske’s car all day long, but that’s the one everybody wants to remember.” I suppose that’s the problem with Monterey nostalgia. Oursler’s book has Elford’s and Redman’s 917’s on the cover entering Tertre Rouge during the 1970 race made famous by Steve McQueen. Never mind that both cars blew up and that Adamowicz made an unclassified 10th place finish that beat them both and involved a four o’clock push to the line from Maison Blanche that was far more Hollywood than “Larry Wilson’s” run to the flag in the Solar production. We’re buying New Beetle and “Let’s Motor” nostalgia. Mr. Natural visits the past I know that most readers by this point are dismissing me as another grumpy old man, but bear with me. Stirling Moss was at the Historics for the Farewell Tour of the “722” Mille Miglia 300 SLR. That was a hell of a neat win and I’ve had the pleasure of watching Stirl slide the old girl down the Paso della Raticosa during the Storico, but there’s a lot more history there that might not sell the R-Classe. John Fitch was also hanging around, looking fit and healthy for a man of his age, and I noted that D-B’s press materials touted the ’55 Mille, Tourist Trophy, and Targa, but left out the incident with Fitch’s co-driver at Le Mans that year, despite books out by Brock Yates, Eoin Young, and Christopher Hilton commemorating the 50th anniversary of that event. This June there was a big flower display under the new plaque at Le Mans where Fitch’s team-mate got squeezed into the crowd. Fitch will never forget that day, and I’ll never forget Fitch every time I pass those barrels of sand on the freeway. I love cars, and I love racing, and I’m as nostalgic as the next 50-ish gent, but it strikes me as odd when brands obsessed with Bernie-Karts and NASCAR taxicabs drag up sportscar heritage for the marketing department. It was more awesome to wonder what Aguri Suzuki and Juan Fangio II might have done with their beautiful demonstration laps with the Toyota GT-One and the Eagle GTP if there hadn’t been so much crap on the racing surface than to watch any of the “races.” Quick Vic Elford clearly wanted to exercise the “Sucker Car” once they got it running, but he wasn’t part of the “races.” Stick a fork in it…. No, the Monterey Historics are about “bought” rides. They’re about a revisionist nostalgia for things in movies and books. There was a professional race over in Wisconsin this weekend and those guys will give us a real race at Laguna in October. Hell, there were a couple of real professional races that nobody even came to watch at Laguna in May. I’ll keep coming back to the Historics, but the cars and drivers I came to see weren’t racing. The Collier Museum slipped Porsche 550-01 (the car that welded the name Carrera to Zuffenhausen) into the paddock along with Cunningham’s “Le Monstre” and Bu-Merc; Toyota brought Suzuki in the TS020 GT-One and Fangio in the Eagle Mark III; Daimler Benz brought Moss and Fitch to accompany the 300 SL Le Mans winner and the Mille Miglia-winning 300 SLR; the Petroleum Museum let loose the Chaparral 2C, D, E, F, G, and H along with Jim Hall, Phil Hill, and Vic Elford. Going the distance, going for speed….. Tony Adamowicz was a Trans-Am champion, a F5000 champion, a Daytona and Le Mans podium finisher in the days they still print books about, drove in the Can- Am, in Ferraris, in Porsches, drove development for the IMSA Nissans in GTO and GTP. He could have been as anonymous as me on the high-Saturday of the Monterey Historics. I got the feeling that he really didn’t care about all the fuss. To him the best thing about the weekend was that he might get a ride in an RX-8 with Derek Bell later this year. Not “bought.” A professional ride. One that matters to him. |
David Soares |
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