Frank Shaffer photographed the Jim Pauley Nardi at Watkins Glen in 1950. Below, the full article about this famous Nardi can be ordered from VeloceToday.
Getting by with a lot of help from our friends
This week VeloceToday is devoted to Enrico Nardi, triggered by the publication of an important new book about the man and his cars. Here is the backstory:
Three years ago a request came in from Dino Brunori in Italy who wanted contacts for information about Nardi. We sent Brunori to John de Boer, one of the foremost and thorough historians of Italian automobiles in the world. In late 2009 we received “Enrico Nardi, a fast life”, the final result of the author’s long journey.
Brunori knew of us through an article we wrote about the Perry Fina Nardi-Danese 2500 for Sports Cars International in 1988. The photos of the Nardi Danese were taken by Mary Decker Vack, and at the time the car was owned by Homer Tsakis of New York. We later created a pdf version of the Nardi story, but it wasn’t the whole story.
For a free pdf of this 6 page article,
email pete@velocetoday.com
In Williamsburg sometime in 2004, we met Frank Shaffer, who spent much time at the Watkins Glen road races in the early 1950s. Eventually, Frank passed to us his collection of early Glen photos taken with a Leica camera. In this collection were photos of a Nardi Danese, which can be seen here.
Philippe Defechereux has been contributing to VeloceToday for several years, but is best known as the author of “Watkins Glen, 1948-1952”. Trying to update the history of the Tsakis Nardi, years after we had written the original article, we consulted Philippe’s book and we were able to verify that Frank Shaffer and Mary Decker Vack took photos of the very same Nardi-Danese, 38 years apart, something we had suspected but not confirmed until all the information was made available from all the great people who help us with VeloceToday. The Tsakis car was the Jim Pauley Nardi which, as noted in Brunori’s book, placed 7th overall and first in class at the Glen in 1950. Brunori had further identified the car as serial number 948/5.
Further tying all this together are the efforts being made by Cliff Reuter with his website, Etceterini.com. We featured Cliff, his father, and the Reuter Bandinis a few years ago in VeloceToday, but Cliff has now offered to contribute a few articles to VeloceToday; his first is about of course, Nardis in America.
Below, more Free Nardi stuff. If you want higher res images, email per above.
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For more on Nardi click the story of choice:
HUGE HUGE Fan of Enrico Nardi, and http://www.nardiwheels.com Awesome classic pic!