Really great motor racing photos...

[Ray Bell]

Sometimes you see a photo from a race somewhere and you just draw breath and look at it...

"Isn't that a great photo!" you say to yourself.

It might be the angle, the content, that you know the circumstances and maybe the drivers and understand just what a moment it is that's been captured. Sometimes it's somewhere you've never been and it suddenly enlivens and brings to life that place.

I had such a moment the other night googling up images of Porsches from the Targa Florio of 1970. Compounding my reaction was the fact that I've driven some of these roads, perhaps even the bit that was in the image I found. I came away from the Targa Florio saying to myself, and to others in due course, "A quick car, saw a V12 Ferrari, would be in second gear between the corners, accelerating through the turn and taking up all the road, then immediately setting up to do the same again as they were already arriving at the next turn."

Just to add a little emphasis, here are a couple of pics of the circuit as I found it four years ago:





And worse, how it is collapsing into the valleys today:



But this is not about what I saw, just how it assisted my appreciation of the photo I found the other night. That photo was of Jo Siffert in a Porsche 908/3, one of which won the race that year in the hands of Leo Kinnunen, who wrapped up the lap record with a final lap of 33:36 (one and a half minutes off the previous record and the 'forever more' record for the circuit), and Siffert has local schoolteacher Nino Vaccarella on his tail.

As you look at the photo and appreciate what you see... the lack of room to pass, the obvious tension for both drivers, the very positions they are in on the circuit... and you wonder what is immediately ahead of them. Is there a braking area (to which I would almost certainly say, 'Yes!') or a potential passing spot? Why is the schoolteacher, who knows the road intimately from the thousands of laps he's driven in road cars and hundreds in the race, placing his car just like he is?

And this is the photo:



Do you agree that it's a great photo?

[Roger Dowding]

Ray Bell, I do agree and know of a couple places that I have been to that have the effect on me
- One is the corkscrew at Laguna Seca - which I have been to and seen [ sat there for much of two days in 1982 ] but never driven on.

Cheers

Roger