Poetics of Speed: The Racing Photography of Dale Kistemaker

One of the great things about having a blog is getting emails from fascinating people you never would otherwise meet.  Such is the case with Dale Kistemaker, who shared some wonderful tales with me regarding his time as a racing photographer both at F1 races as well as Le Mans in the early 1980s.  The best of them involves Dale being driven round La Sarthe by Derek Bell in the Le Mans Porsche 956 at racing speeds!Dale has been posting images from his archives at his aptly-named site: Poetics of Speed. His work is not typical motorsports photography, because a lot of it focuses on what is going on around the main attraction rather than focusing directly on the main attraction.  His focus on the details, the textures, and the atmosphere of Grand Prix racing, allied with the vivid colors and sharpness of his imagery are quite an intoxicating combination. I personally love all the intense driver portraits he got (see Keke Rosberg below, and study all the activity going on in his reflective glasses as he coolly smokes his cigarette.) as well as the garage and tool-box still lifes that really paint a picture of the time period, the technology, the people, and the tools. Below are my personal favorites from the site.All images copyright Dale Kistemaker, used with permission. Poetics of Speed

Anatomie d'un Depart: Well worth 11 minutes of your life

In 1985, Elf made this stellar little documentary showing the lead-up to the start of an F1 race.  All the wonderful master drivers of the turbo era are there, from Keke Rosberg to Niki Lauda to Nigel Mansell, and of course the young Senna who we watch as he applies a sticker to his own helmet visor with fastidious precision. The music is awesomely period. Well worth the 11 minute running time.

Chapeau, Amaury!

Video of the Week: Stirling Moss on the Art and Craft of Racing

Though the venerable Sir Stirling has now retired from racing, here is a video from probably about 15 years ago with some fantastic onboard footage and interesting commentary on how to driving rapidly in a 1959 Formula One car.

Book Review: "The Limit" by Michael Cannell

I just finished reading "The Limit" by Michael Cannell, which tells the tragic story of the 1961 F1 world championship season.  The detailed narrative culminates in a fascinating title chase, which ultimately saw Phil Hill triumph as the first American F1 champion, while his closest rival and Ferrari team mate, Wolfgang von Trips met a gruesome and fateful end at the Italian Grand Prix.  Along the way, we are treated to a vivid and occasionally shocking portrayal of the time, and of all the colorful characters who inhabited the world of motor racing in the late 1950s.

This wonderful and enthralling new work comes from an unlikely source: Michael Cannell is best known as a design/architecture journalist and author who professes little interest in or knowledge of cars and motor racing. Yet his journalistic research and storytelling powers are so strong that I never for a moment felt I was being narrated to by a neophyte. The highest compliment I can pay to the author is that his book is so thoroughly researched, it gives the impression the author is steeped in racing history, and understands the technical side of the sport rather well.

But it's really the human story that interests Cannell, and he delves deeply into the psyche of the neurotic, obsessive Phil Hill and the brash, yet boyishly charming Wolfgang von Trips. Making use of extensive interviews, diaries, letters and historical material, Cannell is able to weave together a remarkably human portrait of each driver, allowing us to really understand each man's philosophy about his sport, and how he coped with triumphs, setbacks, and the inevitable tragedies that were an all-too-common facet of racing in that most dangerous era.By 1957, Phil Hill (at center) and Wolfgang von Trips (to Hill’s left in a polo shirt) had joined the Grand Prix, an international fraternity with a grisly mortality rate. Credit: Klemantaski CollectionI personally picked up this book knowing relatively little about the personal biography of Hill or Trips, but by the end of the volume, I felt I had seen the fascinating intersection between two men's very different trajectories both as people and as athletes. This book is essentially the story of two men who came from wildly opposed circumstances, but came to share the same métier.  The randomness with which one triumphed and the other perished illustrates so poignantly the callous omnipresence of death in that era of racing.

While much is discussed about the 1960s as a "killer era" in F1, Cannell describes the death toll of the late 1950s with great aplomb and gruesome detail. The deaths were as grisly as they were frequent. Whereas the 1960s was an era predominated by drivers belted in to die in horrific fires, the 1950s saw drivers ejected from their mounts, causing broken necks, decapitations, dismemberments, and sometimes massive civilian casualties due to poor circuit safety.  The author, with whom I have become personally acquainted through his blog, likens the bloody F1 battle of the era as a proxy war that continued the nationalistic overtones and unfinished business of the second world war. And while I agree with him, I would add that the legacy of the war also seemed to steel the public against the shock of senseless death that became a regular occurrence.  We learn, for example, that as a young lad, von Trips was a member of a team looking for survivors in the cadaver-strewn rubble after the Allied fire bombing of Cologne.  Having seen humanity at its most shattered, surely this anaesthetized him to the scenes of carnage that were often on view --most notoriously at the 1955 running of Le Mans or the 1957 Mille Miglia.  The ability to look past tragedy and focus on winning, even at the risk of one's life, is the central enigma of the racing driver that is well examined in "The Limit."

The book is already available on Amazon, and although it's a little early in the season, I definitely recommend it as a holiday gift for anyone interested in racing history. The book should be on shelves in bookstores across the nation in the coming weeks.  Below is a video trailer for "The Limit" that you might enjoy watching:

Porsche in Formula One - What could have been?

Throughout its history, Porsche has flirted several times with single seater formula cars, but never more seriously than in the early 1960's when Dan Gurney, Jo Bonnier, and Wolfgang von Tripps campaigned their Formula One cars.  The best result acheived was Gurney's 1962 French GP victory at Rouen. Gurney is shown above, at rapt attention behind the wheel of the 804.

At the end of the 1962 season, Porsche withdrew from F1 citing costs, and there is also a belief that they felt F1 was too far divorced from their road cars. Perhaps they just didn't like to lose, and they had never been in a truly competitive position with their air-coooled flat 8 engine, in a time where V-configured engines were far more par for the course.  All this makes one wonder what might have been had Porsche decided to double down on F1, and put the sort of technical and financial resources behind it that saw them develop their world-beating Sports Car prototypes as the decade progressed.  It is also interesting to consider that Ferrari, a smaller volume carmaker (also probably more mismanaged at the time!), was able to carry on simultaneous F1 and Sports Car programs in the 1960s, yet Porsche was not seemingly willing to shoulder the expense. We'll never know what might have been had Porsche gone head to head with Ferrari and  Lotus in the mid 60s. They coulda been a contender. For additional historic photos, click HERE. 

All photos credit: Julius Weitmann