Sweat and Research

One of the easily forgotten aspects of being interested in motor racing history today is the relative ease with which someone can acquire information. The advent of the Internet and its companion the World Wide Web has transformed the ability of someone to do research almost beyond recognition in some cases. No longer is your view of the world restricted to what is on the shelves of your local library or can be found at the local newsstand - or from that bookstore somewhere far beyond your doors.

I first became interested in motor racing history by my interest in the present. Naturally, my idea of the "past" was a bit limited, more in the line of a few seasons than a few decades - although that was soon to follow. I first began attending races in the late-1940's and can recall some races from the very early-1950's at Lakewood Speedway in Atlanta, as well as various tracks in the Carolinas and Virginia.

The first road race I recall attending was in Europe in 1954, the 1954 Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps. The area around the Spa-Francorchamps circuit was quite familiar to my Dad, having fought in that area scarcely a decade prior to the race. He told me that they were surprised to suddenly find these grandstands almost in the middle of nowhere. An officer in Dad's battalion said they were left from races that had been held there before The War.

I grew up as a member of what had been heretofore a rather miniscule segment of the American population - the Army Brat. After The War, we exploded just like the rest of the population. And, we were mobile with a vengeance. And, we were now living in large numbers where Americans had generally been a curiosity, not a Presence. Germany was simply one of those places. Britain, France, Italy, and the Netherlands were among the others. Naturally, this was to make one's view of life take a bit of a skew.

By the end of 1954, I was building a library of motor racing books and magazines. We were fortunate to not only have American magazines and books at the Post Exchange newsstand, but those from Britain as well. Naturally, this meant that one was initiated early on into the worldview of British motor racing in the mid-1950's, a time completely alien to those today who make the assumption that Britain was always a world power in motor racing. In addition, there were the newsstands downtown where you could pick up German and Italian racing magazines and books. There was great motivation to be multi-lingual if you were a young racing fan.

My earliest "heroes" were the obvious ones: Alberto Ascari, Bill Vukovich, Juan Fangio, Froilan Gonzalez, Tim Flock, Herb Thomas, Curtis Turner, Mike Hawthorn, Phil Hill, and Stirling Moss. But, I found that I really liked them all. I was lucky enough to meet great gents such as Karl Kling, Hermann Lang, Hans Herrmann, Rudi Caracciola, and Juan Fangio thanks to various Mercedes-Benz agencies. Although I loved my toy M196 Streamliner, my toy Maserati 250F was my favorite racing car.

Although we all "liked" Mercedes when it returned to Grand Prix racing in mid-Summer 1954 - after we were living in Germany - the divisions among we schoolboys was marked most by the split between the Italian marques: Ferrari, Maserati, and Lancia. I was in the Maserati camp. I also sidled over into the Lancia camp because of Ascari, but for whatever reasons I was just never much of a Ferrari sort. I didn't dislike Ferrari or anything like that, indeed, quite the contrary. Phil Hill drove for Ferrari and that was reason enough to refrain from being too doctrinaire about such things.

For my birthday in 1959, I asked for a book. It was by someone few now remember, Norman Smith. The book was Case History and it delved into the subject of racing cars as being something akin to individuals. Largely drawn from his articles in Autosport, Smith and his book opened my eyes and led in directions that would have consequences years later.

From the Summer of 1954 until late-Fall 1960, most of the races I attended were in the company of a group that worked for my Dad. This was a group of German men who were in love with racing and formed a club to enable themselves to attend as many events as possible during a season. Nearly every weekend a part of the group was on its way to a race somewhere in Europe. Quite often, I was literally along for the ride. It was great to be the envy of my classmates.

To arrive at school fresh from Torino and experience not only a seating in a Maserati 250, but a short talk with Alberto Ascari - this was to be elevated to near-godlike status. And more than a few hated my guts. At any rate, these gentlemen spoke of the races they had seen before The War. The awe of the raw power of the Mercedes-Benz and Auto-Union still echoed in their stories. I was hooked, addicted at any early age.

What Norman Smith did was to make me look at all this from a different perspective. It made me begin to take notes and keep records. It was also very frustrating. While it was difficult enough to just find relatively complete race results, any idea as to the actual nomenclature of many of the cars by Type number was problematical. The identity of individual race cars was virtually an impossibility to determine, not least of the reasons being that it never occurred to most of us to record that sort of data. Besides, they were just racing cars and once they were used up, out they went.

However, I did have a curiosity as to such things and once had the temerity to approach someone and pose that very question. It was someone whom I had observed jotting down in his notebook some sort of information from the cars and chatting to the mechanics about that information. So, at Zandvoort I point-blank asked Denis Jenkinson a question as to how one kept the identities of the individual cars straight, since it couldn't be the race numbers because they constantly changed. Since I had asked a forthright question in a forthright matter, I got a forthright answer: did I understand aircraft serial numbers? Yes, I certainly did. The same applied to racing cars. Question answered.

When we finally returned to America in 1961, Dad settled in South Carolina. Fortunately, it was in Columbia and there was a newsstand which not only carried foreign magazines, but among them were a few racing magazines - mostly British and the German Auto Motor und Sport. In addition, there were bookstores that I could do business with by mail or visit whenever in the area - Autobooks out in Burbank and Gordon's in New York City being the best examples.

What all this is leading towards is that for years upon years, I worked at keeping notebooks and collecting books and magazines in this unspoken mission to develop a record of all the races I thought important. Once again, I was fortunate since the local State and Record newspapers - the morning and afternoon editions of the same paper from my point of view - had a staff writer whose primary focus was racing, Joe Whitlock. And Joe could write. Plus, he was a pretty neat guy once he realized that I wasn't all that much of a pest.

The task of building a complete record of Grand Prix results was a formidable one. There were gaps in your records since there were gaps in your books and magazines. There was not a book that actually laid all this information out for you to gaze at with a certain sense of envy. Finding fairly complete information for simply the world championship Grand Prix events was difficult enough, results for events such as Sebring, Le Mans, or any number of other events bordered on the impossible at times. Only the good fortune of being able to subscribe to Competition Press allowed me to have a clue about many American sports car events, including more than a few that I attended!

As for Grand National events, that was hit and miss, the Columbia papers being among the better at providing this data. However, it was usually devoid of much detail or even very complete. We lived lives that depended on others to "see" our races for us. Joe went to just about every major Grand National event and his reports were invariably what shaped my views when I started doing the same on a much lesser scale.

I laboriously copied material by hand from books that I found in the local library or in other libraries that I visited. Automobile Year was a great source as was Autocourse. I did manage to obtain many issues of the latter when it was still a quarterly, bimonthly or whatever it happened to be at the time, and the first annual edition which covered the 1961 season.

Personal sob story time, so either read and weep or just skip this part. One of the problems with being a member of the military and moving is that things simply go missing during moves. They don't get lost, they simple become among the missing items that plagues such moves. As both a child and later as a member of the military, this was a fate that I was to suffer time and time again. Despite your best efforts, things just disappeared. No rhyme, no reason, no clue. Also, from time to time, you are forced to live in what are known euphemistically as "temporary quarters."

Generally this means that your stuff is stored in a warehouse by the military or you find a place to shove everything until you can move to either a set of "real" quarters or to wherever you will live - for the time being. In one such situation, we had many of our boxes jammed into a spare room. Unfortunately, in one corner of the room there was a leak whenever it rained, which it does quite frequently during the Summer in the Coastal plains of the Carolinas.

Over a period of weeks and months, a large number of boxes containing many of my books and magazines - many which I had been dragging around for years - not only got soaked and re-soaked and baked, but mildewed and were totally beyond saving. Worse was that many of my pictures from growing up in Europe and most of my photos from Viet-Nam and elsewhere were destroyed.

However, most of my ratty little notebooks survived - information intact.

By the mid to late-1980's, I had developed a pretty near complete record of the Grand Prix championship events. This had entailed sorting out just what the Cooper type numbers were, what the complete results were for the various Grands Prix, what the chassis numbers were for many of the entries, and lots of other details and notes on the races themselves. It was great that were there people like Doug Nye publishing books and articles which lifted the veil little by little and more and more of the gaps in the records disappeared.

The publication of the first volumes - they actually began with Volume 7, covering the 1960-1964 period, I believe - of A Record of Grand Prix and Voiturette Racing by the members of the Formula 1 Register under the leadership of Paul Sheldon and Duncan Rabagliati and a host of others was the start of less sweat in the research process. It was great stuff to where you had been correct and had managed to deduce something which The Black Books - which is how they are generally referred to due to their black binding - seemed to confirm. Or, find yourself at great odds and wonder just how that happened.

In the 1990's, there were more and more books revealing more and more of the information that you had once sweated and sweated harder to ferret out from its hiding places in various books and magazines. Now someone could buy ready-to-read all the information that had taken you decades to develop. And, it was to get worse.

By the end of the 1990's, the material in The Black Books and other similar reference works was now absorbed into the World Wide Web. Today, there are literally no end of WWW sites which have come and gone or stayed at which one can easily and almost effortlessly find such obscure information as the starting grid for the 1954 Spanish Grand Prix, the entry list for the 1959 British Grand Prix, or the complete results for the 1968 Canadian Grand Prix.

What is very telling is that if one looks carefully, you can easily determine which sites "borrowed" their information from The Black Books or from others who had "borrowed" it before them before they in turn "borrowed" it. So much for sweat and research it would appear.

While I have very dark thoughts about one aspect of research that the WWW has dumped upon us, there is another much more pleasant thing that the WWW has done for motor racing research: it has made it possible for authors and amateurs to interact and communicate with an ease that never existed before this. Letters and the often long waits that the "snail mail" forced upon us - especially if the correspondence was trans-oceanic, has now evaporated. It is now possible for scholars to share information in timely manner that was simply a dream only a short time ago.

Naturally, there is still a lead lining to this cloud: there are still many who think that research is merely asking a question on a forum and expecting - even demanding at times - an answer. In a number of cases there is no problem coming to the aid of some because it's obvious that they have "sweated." As for the others....

I am still a Book Person. As much as the WWW is touted as a Great And Wonderful Thing, it is marred by the fleeting existence of many sites within it. Information posted on the WWW is not Something For The Ages, but only until the site is closed for whatever reason. I sweat every time I consider the possible fate of much of the information that has been generated here at Atlas and elsewhere. I know, I know, there are no end of things in place to prevent the loss of this data, but....

So, the next time you want to take a shortcut and just skip all that sweaty research stuff and just ask a question that perhaps took the person relying years to find the answer or look up something on the 1962 Italian Grand Prix in a book that is sitting on the shelf, give a thought to the idea that somebody generated that information through lots of sweat.

Research isn't supposed to be painless, you are supposed to sweat...try it.