Tim Considine

On Thursday March 3, Tim Considine, 81, passed away. Actor, author, photographer and historian, Considine dedicated many years to making sure that American drivers were recognized for their achievements on the international racing scene. First, with American Grand Prix Racing Considine devoted a chapter to each one of the Americans who tried their hand at Formula One racing. Second was his masterpiece, Twice Around the Clock, Yanks at Le Mans the book that won him international acclaim. He was working on his second set of Yanks at Le Mans when he passed away at home. Our condolances to his wife Willie and his family.

Many of our readers were close friends of Considine. We begin with Jodi Ellis, who worked with him on his last book and became a good friend:

I was honored to meet Tim when he was getting ready to publish his Yanks at Le Mans books in 2017. I was lucky enough to design those wonderful books and work beside him to bring his vision to life. In doing that, we became friends. I looked forward to our calls and hearing the fabulous stories – not only the ones about the car guys, but everything in between. He knew everybody! And the stories were legendary. His work life was full – acting, photography, author – but that is just a small part of who he was. He was incredibly generous and a true gentleman, he treated me like I was family, and to me, he was family. He and his wife, Willie, shared an incredible life together and are the poster children for the perfect love story. We were starting to work on the next two volumes of his Yanks series and I look forward to finishing them up in his honor. My heart is broken to bits, I will miss him terribly. I know I am not the only one.

Earl Gandel was doing advertising for Johnny von Neumann and later managed the Bridgehampton race track:

Tim, a great writer and journalist himself, knew a lot of writers who can and will pay tribute better than I can. I helped him put together an event with Bob Bondurant, Dan Gurney and James Garner, among others, where they discussed “Grand Prix”, the movie. He was a great wit, funny and smart, and a good friend. He hosted a viewing party at his house for every F1 race, where his wife, Willie, prepared lunch based on whatever country the race was in. His 3-volume book on Yanks at Le Mans was a “can’t put down” read and should be in every car enthusiast’s home and library in the country. A lot of people are going to miss him.

Jim Sitz needs no introduction to our readers:

In 1956 Considine or ‘TC’ as he liked to be called, had just bought his first car from Ernie McAfee’s dealership, an Alfa Giulietta spider. The next year Tim bought an OSCA from McAfee engineering, telling his mother needed another car. She replied “Timmy, isn’t that one a little impractical?” He was not allowed to drive it in races so had his mechanic Gene Curtis do so. In 1989, Considine asked for my help writing an article about the last race at Pebble Beach, as I had covered the event for Auto Age magazine. It was the beginning of a long friendship. Over the years he often spoke of the definitive book about Yanks at Le Mans, and had the determination and knowledge to do it, in three volumes! I was very pleased to be involved and see the book completed. He will be sorely missed.

Mike Martin is an automotive historian and author of USRRC.

Back in the 1990’s when I was writing the USRRC book Janos Wimpffen gave me Tim’s contact info saying he might be able to help. Indeed! Tim gave me a lot of contacts for the USRRC book. When I was in LA doing research for USRRC Tim let me stay at his place. I got to sleep in his office which was a nice outbuilding. I got there late and he showed me around and said to feel free to look at anything in there. The place had 4 rows of bookshelves and one was covered with soccer balls signed “To Tim, Thanks for the help, Pele” and there were loads of photos of Pele. Plus he had a nice assortment of motor racing and car books. The next morning we met in their kitchen for coffee and I asked what’s with all the Pele and soccer balls and photos. He said, “Oh, I was Pele’s personal photographer for years before I got into writing about cars”. Over the years I traded irregular emails and phone calls with Tim. Each one felt like we just picked up with our last conversation. Attending Fab Fifties parties were always a treat because Tim and Bill Pollock MC’d them and told great stories.

Evi Gurney, a former junior executive at Porsche headquarters in Germany, a journalist and long-time AAR historian was married to Dan Gurney from 1969 to his death in 2018. She has many stories to tell:

A good friend of over 50 years has abruptly left us to join the other “Yanks” in heaven.

Talented, modest, kind, generous, funny and on occasion cantankerous, Tim Considine was everywhere where motor racing happened in the last half century; as a photographer at turn nine at Riverside, as an MC at the panel discussions at Amelia, and as a historian challenging Dan Gurney to come up with the detailed pedigree of a vintage car they were both admiring at the Pebble Beach Concours.

An annual visit to All American Racers was always on Tim’s schedule. He became an enthusiastic chronicler of the various engineering projects we were tackling and followed their development. He photographed the birth of the Alligator motorcycle as it emerged out of a Styrofoam egg at the Petersen Museum gala in 2003, and he was one of the very few journalists invited to witness the Deltawing (according to “Road & Track”, the most original race car to run Le Mans since Jim Hall’s 1967 Chaparral 2F) doing its first laps around Willow Springs in preparation for Le Mans in 2012.

His versatility from pen to camera, from research to on-site reporting is reflected in his wonderful books “American Grand Prix Racing” and “Twice Around The Clock, The Yanks At Le Mans” his ambitious oeuvre that included every American – engineer, designer, mechanic, sponsor, and team mate – who ever set foot at Le Mans through 1979.

Years before Yanks at Le Mans became a reality, he called Dan asking him to write a foreword for his future project. “Why now Tim? Isn’t this a bit early?” Dan asked. “Well Dan, one never knows. I will have it, just in case,” said Tim. Prophetic words. Dan never saw the publication of Twice Around the Clock but Tim came to lunch at our company and presented our family with one of the very first published copies.

He was a big fan of the Long Beach Grand Prix adventure. One night the three of us found ourselves in the vast parking lot outside the brilliantly lit Queen Mary after a dinner in the Winston Churchill room. While walking towards our cars and competing with each other who could come up with the best Churchill quote, Tim suddenly stopped under a street light and asked, “Do you know that I am the soldier George Patton slapped in the movie ‘Patton’?” We were dumbfounded. He then proceeded to act out the scene of George C. Scott slapping him multiple times, a memorable film episode for the ages.

An episode which amused us for years afterwards but was not very amusing when it happened, might be described as “almost twice around the clock through the forest on the 17 mile drive,“ in Carmel. We started out at the Pebble Beach Lodge after an evening party to drive to our hotels in downtown Monterey. Tim decided to follow us. Soon Dan got lost driving up narrow roads and back down again to the sea; no signs, blocked roads, no street lights, dark pines, fog, no GPS. After about 20 minutes we arrived at our starting point, Dan stopped, and Tim did as well. A flashlight and an old map was found which they studied bent over the hood of our car. “I got it now,” Dan hollered triumphantly. “I know the way!“ We jumped into our vehicles and did the whole exhausting thing all over again! After another frantic 40 minutes, we arrived by sheer luck at the downtown Monterey exit. Tim, good sport that he was, proclaimed that “Chasing Gurney lost in the forest was the biggest fun I ever had!”

Tim sent me an email on Valentine’s Day three weeks ago quoting a famous song lyric: “But a moment’s sunlight fading in the grass.“ Willie and I love and miss you, he wrote.

So will we Tim, so will we.

Peter Vanlaw is an old friend and movie producer:

I can’t remember who or what got the two of us together, but it was back in the 80’s or 90’s. We met at Jerry’s Deli in Sherman Oaks, and found we had a lot in common, swapping racing stories and a few from show biz as well. As a result lunch turned out to be quite extended. From that meeting we began working together, collaborating on short films for the Mother Press Guild, the Petersen Museum and other events like Phil Hill’s eightieth birthday. And from those fondly remembered experiences, a long term friendship evolved, lasting right up until now.

One strong memory remains from that first lunch at Jerry’s Deli. We almost immediately began recalling events from the various sports car races that we’d been involved in back in the day, and the people we knew. That included showing each other the many photos we both had shot. One of mine really stands out in my memory because of Tim’s reaction to it. It was from 1958, at the annual Cal Club Labor Day event at Santa Barbara. It was a shot I’d taken of my friend, Jack McAfee and Vasek Polak, on the starting grid, in anticipation of the 1500cc modified event. There was also a shirtless teen age kid In the shot, who wanted to get close to Jack’s 550 Spyder. Surprisingly Tim’s attention wasn’t on either Jack or Vasek…because after a long pause, he shouted out, “That’s me!!!”

William Edgar a fellow motorsport historian and author, and curator of the William Edgar Archive at www.william-edgar-archive.com

I knew Tim Considine well from our delightful in-person and telephone conversations and typed and email correspondences, going back for many years. These communications were particularly active during the period when TC was writing his first tour de force volumes of “Twice Around the Clock, The Yanks at Le Mans.” The former and affable TV and film actor proved himself time and again to have a wizard’s way with words and an aptitude to prowl and reveal the deepest innards of this insatiable narrative-hungry creature we call Motorsport Journalism.

And how he did shine brightly with the craft and talent he brought to his job. Tim insisted to do it thoroughly with verve and style and, above all, to get it right so those who tried and will forever try to follow his genius don’t get it wrong. Referring to himself and kindred motor-scribblers as “exhaust-pipe-retentive folks like us” he set high standards in everything he wrote. TC then added his own outstanding photography to illustrate what his words had already wrought, candidly seeing himself and camera colleagues as “us old crocks with a lot of vintage negs and slides” to preserve the history of what we cherish. The car thing. The driver thing. The whole thing. His profiles of people, of the Yanks who drove at Le Mans were, and remain, pitch-perfect. A handful of these Americans who went abroad for the 24-Hour French Classic were guys I knew, who had already driven, and scored well, in my father John Edgar’s 1950s racing team machines: Carroll Shelby, Richie Ginther, Masten Gregory, Dan Gurney, Bruce Kessler and Phil Hill. Tim Considine was a marvelously fine man, a great and joyous friend, a huge and lasting asset to our ever-pursuing motor sporting journey from green flag to finish.

Doug Stokes is a journalist, publicist, and editor at large at LACar.com

Tim and I were the same age*, so … when he was doing his thing playing a teenage kid in movies and on television, I really was not watching much TV (busy chasing girls and denting car fenders just as he was doing for the cameras).

I “knew of” him of course, but it was not until I started reading his tightly written guest columns in AutoWeek, that I sort of put two and two together.

We finally met when I was working with Harry Kelly & Associates doing special events for Chevrolet/Geo. In 1990, I contacted Tim through the magazine to ask if he’d be a celebrity driver in the Los Angeles edition of annual “Braille Rallye” that we wrangled for the marque. Good start.

Through the ensuing years we both had our ups and downs, but the friendship never wavered. We never went carousing or on long journeys together but we both were on the same path: motorsports. The operations (on my part) side and the stories about the people (Tim’s work) side were the field of play and we had a damn grand old time keeping each other up to speed on each other’s part of that mix.

In the past few years, Covid had quelled a lot of the in-person activities, but it did not interfere with my calling him to (flippantly) ask: “…What year are you on now, pal?” as he worked on a project that he already knew would never be finished until they stopped running the 24 Hours of Le Mans event.

My dumb question was almost always met with an exact date (rarely without an exact time) and a verbal lap chart of the event that he was writing about just then.

… Tim never failed to end any conversation we had the same way, asking when I was coming over and directing me to: “…put a squeeze on your lady for me, would ya”.

As many have already noted: Tim’s friendliness and ever ready shoulder to laugh, cry, complain, exalt, or just simply rest a while on, was always there, regardless of what he was doing at the time.

I’ll let others take it from here, missing him as much as I will is still just a dull ache right now.

I take some solace in the telling ways that he’s being remembered here and elsewhere. We were fortunate to have shared the road with Tim … but you already knew that.

One more thing … his “Yanks” … If any book I’ve ever read ever played anywhere near so like a feature film in my head as I read it, I can’t tell you its name. Tim’s way with the story seems simple, direct in it’s telling, but the impact builds quietly and his (often first hand) knowledge and portrayal of the story is, for lack of an even more descriptive word, palpable.

*I am, factually, half a year younger, which I never let him forget … and especially at his annual New Years Day (birthday) gathering at his home, when friends from the film side of his life intermingled with people from the motorsports side, we parked race cars on his front lawn, and stories were told that only could be told there … it was always a wonderful gathering.

Thanks to Bruce Benedict for the beautiful shots of Tim at his home. Please visit his website at
www.BruceBenedictPhoto.com