Sports Car Weather is Back in NYC!

I imagine that today, across the Northeast, car enthusiasts everywhere are dusting off their machines for a first topdown ride of the season today.  It is that perfect out.

Automobiliac Video of the week: Jim Clark Onboard in 1963!

When I saw this on youtube I got very excited.  Clark was known for being one of the most naturally gifted drivers of all time, and for being smooth and effortless in his style.  This video is probably the only onboard footage that exists of him driving, since onboard camerawork was relatively rare in those days, and he was tragically killed in 1968 at Hockenheim in Germany.  The narration is a little distracting, but has some good historical nuggets in it.  Obviously Clark had a large camera mounted on his spindly Lotus for this shot, but it still gives a great impression of how fast he was, and what Grand Prix circuits were like in the early 1960s: No barriers, no curbing, lots of elevation change, lots of deadly objects (and people!) right at the edge of the track.  And yet his movements are precise, economical, and really convey that he is complete control of the car. Enjoy!

Book Review: Go Faster - The Graphic Design of Racing Cars

Go Faster: The Graphic Design of Racing Cars by Sven Voelker is, on the face of it, a very cool book. When I saw the promotional video for it online, I got so excited that I went immediately to Amazon and ordered it!  The book arrived this morning, and I thought I'd write a review.  Voelker, a graphic designer, professor, and car enthusiast based in Berlin has clearly created a labor of love in this book. But after managing to read through the entire thing just during my dinner -there are just about 12 pages of body text in this 144 page volume- I began to feel more satisfied by my chinese food than by this book.  The cover design is really neat and attractive, the layout is clean and beautiful.  The printing quality is very good.  From a purely aesthetic point of view, the book is gorgeous. As a designer, I often find most books written for the enthusiast to be thoroughly lacking in the layout and graphic design department. Sadly this book, while delightful eye candy, is lacking in the content department.

The first portion consists mainly of a very cursory historical background of car liveries, from their origins as national colors all the way to the beginnings of big tobacco sponsorship in the late 1960s.  Any serious racing enthusiast will already know just about everything contained in this section.  Most disappointing was that the author's selection of historic photographs, while visually interesting, are not presented chronologically, and don't really go far enough to illustrate his points.  For example, he mentions but never depicts the 1968 Lotus 49B with iconic Gold Leaf tobacco sponsorship.  This is a real omission, for it was the first car in Formula One to use a commercial livery, basically changing the sport forever.  The first section could have benefitted enormously from more and deeper research into the history of the national colors and also a contrast between North American and European approaches to graphic design on cars, which were and still are quite divergent.  For example, cars at Indy had sponsor logos on them going all the way back to the 1920s, for example. This is not discussed in the book. A mention of NASCAR would also have been appropriate, given the fact that the principal difference between the cars is the paint scheme. The book, being German, focuses mainly on Porsche racing cars, and it made me wish that the author had simply chosen to focus exclusively on the history of Porsche graphics. Perhaps his scope was way too broad to start with, and the topic of Porsche 917 graphics alone is enough to fill a good book!

The second section of the book is purely pictorial.  Voelker wanted to show off the cars' liveries from above and from the side, as well as contrast the painted cars with blank white examples of the same forms. He is chiefly interested in how the two-dimensional shapes warp and distort when applied to three-dimensional form. Instead of jetting around the world to photograph all the actual cars, which would have been incredibly costly, time consuming and just plain difficult, he cleverly uses model cars as stand-ins for the real thing. The idea is novel, and I love the poetry of having the blank white car next to the painted version for comparison.  However, the models he chose were from his own collection, and most of them were cheap vintage diecasts rather than accurate scale models that really convey the beauty of the real cars. So the resulting page layouts are somewhere between an automotive butterfly collection and a value guide for dinky toys or hot wheels.  Many of the models suffer from flaking decals and cracked plastic windows. All this distracts from contemplating the paint schemes and the shape of the actual car.  I really wish he could have used higher quality models for his photos.  A few of his pages have recent Minichamps models that are reasonably realistic, and these pages are by far the most effective.  By the end, I concluded that the chosen method of using model cars was lazier than it was clever --not to mention that he ended up painting his whole model collection white in the end!

The difficult but effective way of making this book would be to create renderings of the cars from the top views, or even line drawings in color.  This way you could really enjoy the graphic design, and the author could easily show multiple versions of the same car with little effort.  If you think this is unrealistic to expect from a book, just check out any good book on WW2 aircraft.  In some of these books you will find page and page after page of meticulous airbrush renderings of fighter planes showing every possible marking configuration from every squadron.  It's been done many times, and the resulting books are both informative and beautiful.  But Voelker's book seems like a shortcut in comparison. In the introduction the author bemoans the fact that such a dearth of published material exists on the topic of racing car graphic design, but in the end, he has produced a colorful coffee table book contributing no real new scholarship to fill the void he has pointed out.  I am still glad I bought it, but the book really fails to live up the the hopes I had of learning more about the subject.

You can order your own copy here and let me know if you agree!

Roadside Eating: White Manna Hamburgers

If you ever find yourself driving through Hackensack, New Jersey, make sure to visit White Manna Hamburgers. Like the onion-laden sliders they serve, the building itself is diminutive, plunked down in at the corner of River Street and Passaic in 1942.  This weekend, after a few rounds of Karting at a nearby track, my friend and I stopped by to sample their burgers. I love American roadside architecture, and White Manna has a wonderful aged appearance to it; one that speaks to decades of simultaneuous love and neglect.  The sign on the roof used to have white lettering painted on it, but all that remains today are the neon tubes and the faintest traces of the letters that once were behind them. Like an unrestored vintage car, it retains all its original character, yet it admittedly looks kind of shabby.

Once inside, you are greated immediately by the cooktop, which is right in front of the door.  You give the cook your order, and she smacks some balls of ground beef on the greasy grill along with the other orders, already sizzling away.  It takes a few minutes to get your burgers, but in the meantime you can savor the archetypal diner environment around you.  The place is tiny and cramped, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

The food itself was ok. I have had much better burgers in my life, and I left smelling like onions. But who really cares? The beef sliders are tastily complemented with potato buns, and the comfort food rounds out the complete nostalgic roadside burger experience perfectly. The Automobiliac approves.

Click the image for more photos of the diner.

Automobiliac Video of the Week: Disney's Magic Highway

In 1958, Disney created this fascinating and creative film to showcase what the highways of tomorrow might be like.  While some of the infrastructure notions are quite far fetched, a surprising number of the car-centered innovations have actually come to fruition.  In the late 1950s, the future must have seemed so boundless with possibility.  If only we could recapture that optimism and open-mindedness in today's cynical, pessimistic, and short-sighted age. I want cantilevered skyways!