"Chris Clarke" (shiftsandgiggles)
10/24/2013 at 12:45 • Filed to: None
5
1|
"Chris Clarke" (shiftsandgiggles)
10/24/2013 at 12:45 • Filed to: None | 5
| 1 |
Eugen Böhringer und Klaus Kaiser (Start Number 705) piloted (literally, at times) a 300 SE. They went on to win the race. No guts, no glory.
Ewy Rosqvist and Ursula Wirth power through the wet in their 220 SEb.
Argentina, 1963. After 4624 km of rallying in some of the most intense conditions known in racing history, four teams finished on top. They all drove Mercedes-Benz.
Telumektar
> Chris Clarke
10/24/2013 at 14:21 |
|
I have a really nice book named "Apuntes del Camino" ("Road Notes", roughly translated) by Héctor Morás. It's only in Spanish and was printed in low quantities AFAIK, which is not good as it is probably one of the best recollections of data and anecdotes from all those years ago (the book has photographies dating to 1913 or so), it really captures the feeling of that racing, way back and tremendously different to what we see today. Plus, the writer is/was close friends with many Road and F1 racers, including Fangio.
Those long-ass rallyes were the norm, there are some charts in this book. In one of them it says:
1940 Road Racing Championship, International Northern GP, Buenos Aires-Lima-Buenos Aires. (13 stages, 9445 Km/5867 miles)
The winner was Juan Manuel Fangio, racing a 1940 Chevrolet Coupe Master 85, making it all in 109 hours 36' 16'', with an average speed of 86.2 Km/h. There was roughly a 5-hour difference between him and the 5th racer (Hector Suppici Sedes) and about an hour between each racer, 1st to 5th. So this guys raced like hell for 13 stages, through Argentina, Bolivia and Peru, WAY before any kind of tarmac road was applied and way before basic stuff like helmets and cages where invented (it's said Supicci was the one who invented helmets, or at least a concept, these guys were actually pretty handy, most of them their own mechanics, having invented many practical solutions present-time racers take for granted), racing Targa-style for thousands of miles on super-rough roads and sometimes just balls-out Dakar-style.
I mentioned Suppici because he was one of the greatest back then, a personal friend of Fangio and because he died some years after that in one of the longest rallyes ever: Buenos Aires - Caracas... and back.
This kind of Targa-racing has completely disappeared today, mainly because of safety reasons and not much later than the one mentioned in your post.