Review by Pete Vack
First came the Bahamas Speed Weeks (Veloce Publishing, 2006, second edition Dalton Watson, 2011), then Northeast American Sports Car Races, 1950-1959 (Veloce Publishing 2010) followed by the Mid Atlantic Sports Car Races, 1953-1962 (Dalton Watson, 2015), and now the amazingly prolific Terry O’Neil has completed his next stated goal, a two-volume work entitled The Golden Days of Thompson Speedway and Raceway 1945-1977. Together, Terry O’Neil’s books constitute a massive body of work, as well as a massive amount of work. (Links to all three reviews are below.)
On the surface, his books appear to be a simple compilation of race reports, results data and photos, but in reality, this is a herculean task. It would be one thing to imagine that the SCCA, the largest and longest lived sports car club in America had in its archives the results of the thousands of races they sanctioned in the 1950s and 60s; they do not and O’Neil had to research each and every event via sports car magazines, rare event programs (including the often sparse reports from the SCCA magazine the Sports Car) and local sources to come up with ‘the best obtainable version of the truth.’ We add that there were other clubs who sanctioned events, and with even less material available. [Read more…] about The Golden Days of Thompson Speedway and Raceway 1945-1977