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The Online Magazine for Italian and French Classic Car Enthusiasts

This Month’s Drawing Winner

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The winner of this delightful book is Eduardo Prado! Become a Premium subscriber now to be eligible for next month’s drawing.

Please help support VeloceToday and our contributors by becoming a Premium Subscriber at one of three levels; $9.95 for one month, $7.95 per month for six months, or the best bet, $4.95 per month for one year ($59.40). Use the mediapass form found with each article to subscribe. If you need help, just email us at vack@cox.net.
CLICK HERE TO A PREMIUM SUBSCRIBER

For Premium Subscribers ONLY!!
The 2012 F1 season has just begun. Did you ever wonder how the team of David Hobbs, Steve Matchett and Bob Varsha do their magic on SpeedTV? Read this two part exclusive interview conducted by David Seibert with Speed’s F1 host Bob Varsha!

VeloceToday Interviews Bob Varsha
The F1 season begins soon, just in time to find out the real story behind SPEED coverage of the races. In an exclusive two part interview for VeloceToday, David Seibert talks to SPEED Formula 1 anchor Bob Varsha about life behind the SPEED cameras, and if Formula 1 will get another chance in the United States. Don’t miss this candid interview with a master Anchor.

VeloceToday Interviews Bob Varsha, Part II
In Part II of the Bob Varsha interview, David Seibert asks Speed’s top anchor about his favorite driver, Ayrton Senna. Varsha also reveals why it is so difficult to create content the typical VeloceToday readers enjoy, such as “Behind the Headlights” and the series “Victory by Design. He also explains why the BJ Auctions succeed in spite of the hype. Don’t miss this very revealing interview.

Cars and Chic Chicks

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By Patricia Lee Yongue

Cars and Chicks

From the most elegant of international auto salons, posters, publicity photos, and magazine ads to the sleaziest of car shows and rags, a fetching female posed by—or slathered over—an attractive automobile remains an icon of Western popular culture. Occasionally, a woman sits behind the wheel and smiles through the side window. Less occasionally, she is depicted actually driving the vehicle. At the fancier shows and salons, she may move with the car by means of turntable. She and the car are assuredly objects of the ‘male gaze.’

Of late, some manufacturers have trained attractive young women to demonstrate the technology and other normally “guy knowledge” of the cars, but pretty girls talking in business-like voice about camshafts, rpms, and torque somehow diminishes the sexual sell despite the “smart is sexy” pitch. In a retro move, Ferrari offered a silent, stiletto-shod blonde-tressed female with a yellow 458 Italia at the 2011 Detroit Auto Show. And, for the most part, whether in print or at show, the non-driving, contextually sexually well-bodied and well-dressed (or undressed) young woman decorating an eminently drivable, beautifully bodied car still drives the marketer’s and, presumably, the target consumer’s desire.

The association of decorative women and cars dates back to the very introduction of the automobile at show. The poster for the opening of the first Salon de l’auto, organized by the Automobile Club of France and held in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris in June, 1898, featured a gowned, wasp-waisted goddess of speed reigning over the exhibit. In a poster for the French constructors A. Teste Moret and Cie Lyon-Vaise, a winged young lady in fancy dress pilots a voiturette encircled by a swarm of speeding flies. [Read more…] about Cars and Chic Chicks

Tony’s Talbots

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Peter drives his first Talbot Lago, #110007, ex-Chiron. Courtesy Peter Giddings.

Hindsight is a good remedy for perceived mediocrity. Looking back on the 20-odd year run of the French Lago Talbot, it is easy to see that the cars of Anthony “Tony” Lago (born on this date in Venice in 1893)were not only were winners on the concours circuit, but significant winners on the Grand Prix tracks in the post war era. After five major Grand Prix wins, nine lesser ones and victory at Le Mans in 1950, Cyril Posthumus would write, “Lago, in his retirement years could look back on a remarkable chapter of accomplishment.”

On the day of his birth, we remember the cars of Tony Lago, thanks to VeloceToday reader and longtime vintage racer, Peter Giddings.

From the dramatic concours-winning Figoni et Falaschi coupes of late 1930s to the last-of-the-line Lago America coupes of 1956, Lago Talbots came on the scene with style and flair, making the most of a meager budget and limited facilities. In between the flashy sports cars were the real stars…the series of remarkable 4.5 liter Grand Prix cars that were campaigned primarily by privateers from 1939 to 1952.

Peter Giddings can claim to have been racing Lago Talbots for over thirty years. Although he recently parted with the ex-Etancelin car #110054 (which went to his good friend David Duthu), Giddings has an enormous amount of experience with the GP Lagos. He also owned and raced the ex Chiron/Whiteford French/Australian Grand Prix winning Lago Talbot #110007 for ten years. Like no one else, Giddings is the guy in the know.

The ex-Ron Smith Talbot-Darracq 150 which inspired Peter Giddings. Photo courtesy of David Venables.

[Read more…] about Tony’s Talbots

Malaysian Grand Prix 2012

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Felipe Massa

By Pete Vack

Photos courtesy and copyright Ferrari Media, unless otherwise noted

Recipes and a Witches Wet Brew

First it promised to rain and it didn’t. Then it promised to rain again and it didn’t. In between it rained Malaysian cats and dogs. Grey skies made for an exciting race with surprise outcomes.

Most surprised of all was probably Alonso, who managed to pull off the impossible, winning with a car that everyone says is a dog even in the dry. Or maybe they are just saying that. Or maybe it was so last week but not this week.
[Read more…] about Malaysian Grand Prix 2012

Enter NOW for a Chance to Win this Alfa Giulietta Book!

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In January Premium Subscribers were eligible to win an official 2012 Ferrari Calendar; in February we gave away a copy of Dino Brunori’s “Nardi, a fast life”. This month, for our Premium Subscribers only, we are having a drawing for one of the best books on Alfa Romeo ever written: Alfa Romeo Giulietta, tutto su tutti I modelli della Giulietta by Tito Anselmi and Lorenzo Boscaraelli. This is a second edition published in 1998 by Giorgio Nada Editore, (text in Italian). Shipping is free! If you are a subscriber or subscribe before March 26th, send an email to me at vack@cox.net. Drawing will be held on March 27th.

Please help support VeloceToday and our contributors by becoming a Premium Subscriber at one of three levels; $9.95 for one month, $7.95 per month for six months, or the best bet, $4.95 per month for one year ($59.40). Use the mediapass form found with each article to subscribe. If you need help, just email us at vack@cox.net.
CLICK HERE TO A PREMIUM SUBSCRIBER

For Premium Subscribers ONLY!!
The 2012 F1 season has just begun. Did you ever wonder how the team of David Hobbs, Steve Matchett and Bob Varsha do their magic on SpeedTV? Read this two part exclusive interview conducted by David Seibert with Speed’s F1 host Bob Varsha!

VeloceToday Interviews Bob Varsha
The F1 season begins soon, just in time to find out the real story behind SPEED coverage of the races. In an exclusive two part interview for VeloceToday, David Seibert talks to SPEED Formula 1 anchor Bob Varsha about life behind the SPEED cameras, and if Formula 1 will get another chance in the United States. Don’t miss this candid interview with a master Anchor.

VeloceToday Interviews Bob Varsha, Part II
In Part II of the Bob Varsha interview, David Seibert asks Speed’s top anchor about his favorite driver, Ayrton Senna. Varsha also reveals why it is so difficult to create content the typical VeloceToday readers enjoy, such as “Behind the Headlights” and the series “Victory by Design. He also explains why the BJ Auctions succeed in spite of the hype. Don’t miss this very revealing interview.

Ferrari’s Birthplace Now a Museum

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Alessandro Gerelli captures the old and the new.

Photos by Alessandro Gerelli

We’re sure everyone has seen the news about the opening of the Museo Casa Enzo Ferrari. We are also sure that no one covers it better than VeloceToday. No PR here, but a good many insights from the Man himself.

ferrari-museum

The workshop next to the new Museum building: ‘My brother and I shared a room over the workshop and were awakened in the morning by the ringing of the hammers. My father Alfredo…made gangways and sheds for the State Railways.’—Enzo Ferrari

The photo is at the entrance of the old buiding and reads 'I am the one who dreamt of being Ferrari.' The yellow museum poster reads 'If you can dream it, you can do it.'

The Ferrari house has been completely restructured and adapted as an art gallery. Enzo Ferrari’s activities during his life are displayed via multimedia with video, documents and car displays. A very futuristic building has been built side by side to the old house: the new structure, when seen from above, looks like the bonnet of a car in yellow, the color of Modena. The new building was designed by Jan Kaplichy, who unfortunately died in 2009 without seeing the final result of his genius. It was completed by Andrea Morgante of the Shiro Studio. Photo courtesy Museo Casa Enzo Ferrari.

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Post War Tatra 600

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Lightness prevails…

Photography by Don Hodgdon, text by Pete Vack

After months of digging through an unfamiliar subject, being assailed for mistakes I shouldn’t have made, assaulted for writing about a car which at one time was made behind the Iron Curtain and spending a great deal of time looking for Tatra books that don’t exist, we present below the fourth and final Tatra story.

That having been accomplished below, we can now sit back and take joy in the catchy, silly, enormously bad puns for titles foisted upon researchers by magazines around the world.

Just think what they had to work with…

Look, Vladimir, No Vladiator; Car, September 1973
Party Time..T603; Classic and Sportscar, July 1994
Tatra for Now; Custom Car, August 1973
Reach for your Czech Book; Classic and Sportscar, October 1992
Prague Uprising; Performance Car, July 1993
Czech Mate; Car Australia, December 1993
Czech Matey; Top Gear,May 1994
Bouncing Czech; Wheels Australia, August 1998

And the final blow, yet another article with the very same silly name, “Czech Mate”, from the good folks at Automobile Magazine in January of 2005.

But just one more; we almost forgot, “Czechmate of the Year”, Special Interest Cars, April 1987. Which leads us to our subject car, for that long ago article featured the very same car now owned by David Russel and photographed for VeloceToday by Don Hodgdon.

The T600 was a definitely a postwar car, refined, thought out, ready for mass consumption. It was similar to the ill-fated Tucker, but went into production in 1948 and continued until 1952.

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More on the Ala d’Oro Stanguellini

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Stanguellini's Ala d'Oro bodied Fiat 1100. Photo by Graham Gauld.

Some time ago, reader Bill Spear emailed a photo taken from Life magazine back in the 1950s. We don’t know when or where the photo was taken but he had no idea what the car is or who built it. So of course he sent it to us. But after that was published, we hear more about this post war classic Stanguellini.
[Read more…] about More on the Ala d’Oro Stanguellini

Australian Grand Prix 2012

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Photo by Andrew Coles.

VeloceToday readers are already familiar with the work of Andrew Coles (see Fiat Nationals, Australia). Coles attended the first round of the F1 World Championship at Melbourne and filed this report for VeloceToday.

Story and Photos by Andrew Coles and Ferrari Media

Formula 1 has always been the holy grail of motorsport. It doesn’t matter if you’re a driver, an engineer, an official or even just a spectator, the FIA’s premiere category has an attraction that no true motor racing fan can deny. It was this magnetic-like pull that brought me to Melbourne for the opening round of the 2012 season. Being there live is a world class experience. No matter how many cameras are used to televise the event, no TV coverage can match. In many respects, TV does a very poor job of portraying what actually makes Formula 1 so special.
[Read more…] about Australian Grand Prix 2012

Special Drawing for Our Premium Subscribers

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In January Premium Subscribers were eligible to win an official 2012 Ferrari Calendar; in February we gave away a copy of Dino Brunori’s “Nardi, a fast life”. This month, for our Premium Subscribers only, we are having a drawing for one of the best books on Alfa Romeo ever written: Alfa Romeo Giulietta, tutto su tutti I modelli della Giulietta by Tito Anselmi and Lorenzo Boscaraelli. This is a second edition published in 1998 by Giorgio Nada Editore, (text in Italian). Shipping is free! If you are a subscriber or subscribe before March 26th, send an email to me at vack@cox.net. Drawing will be held on March 27th.

PLEASE SUPPORT VELOCETODAY BY BECOMING A PREMIUM SUBSCRIBER

In addition, the Premium articles about Alfa Romeo described below are available only to our Premium Subscribers. Please help support VeloceToday and our contributors by becoming a Premium Subscriber at one of three levels; $9.95 for one month, $7.95 per month for six months, or the best bet, $4.95 per month for one year ($59.40). Use the mediapass form found with each article to subscribe. If you need help, just email us at vack@cox.net.

Racing Giuliettas
The Alfa Giulietta did not come on the sports car scene as Porsche did, with dramatic wins and startling performance. Instead, it kind of slid into the U.S. market, and began to race two years after its introduction in Italy. Carl Goodwin devotes two full articles to provide all the details of Alfa’s early days in the U.S.

Doing Villa d’Este
Some guys just dream, other guys dream and do. Oliver Collins is one of the latter. But better yet, he not only lives his dream but comes back and is glad to tell the world (via VeloceToday) what and how he became a contestant in the Concorso d’Eleganza at Villa d’Este.

Alfas on the Track
Jeff Allison, editor of “Prancing Horse”, switches to Alfas and writes a firsthand tribute to Alfa Romeo’s 100th anniversary. Many unpublished color photos from races where Alfas competed in 1972 and 1974. In two parts.

Driving the 8C2300
VeloceToday was provided an opportunity to drive the Alfa Romeo 8C2300 MM Spyder on display at the Simeone Foundation in Philadelphia. It is the only 8C 2300 Spyder to be bodied by Castagna. Why are these pre-war Alfas are so great to drive? Find out.

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