Attn: SonicBoom

[[AK]Hylander]

Curt,

As I mentioned in my PM, here is a shot I took last fall at Watkins Glen of the McLaren:



I'm on vacation this week, actually heading to the NY International Auto Show tomorrow so I should have a ton of pictures from that as well.

But I just moved my photo editing to a combined Adobe Lightroom / Photoshop CS2 workflow and I'm still learning the editing in Lightroom. What a fantastic piece of software for photography though. I have about 500 of the 3,000 shots I took last September to go through yet and pick which ones I'm going to upload to The Racing Historian site. Now that I'm starting to get an inventory, I can be a little more selective in which shots I upload. Being I just took up photography last year, I didn't have a ton of "great" shots to choose from and had to do alot of post processing to get them looking decent. But I want to document as much as I can in terms of sports cars so I'll continue to add / subtract as I go. I was quite surprised that I sold about 30 total pictures from my September visit to the Zippo at Watkins.

Anyways, thanks for the heads up on the torrents, those vintage Can-Am videos rock! They take a long time to download because there are only a few seeders, but it's worth it!

I should be uploading more pictures by the end of this week, including more Can-Am and Trans-Am Reunion pics.

[[AK]Sonic Boom]

Absolutely awesome. Can-Am cars were my favorites of all time. For those others of you who read this thread, Can-Am was literally unlimited no-rules racing from the early seventies. Here's a few tidbits that Hylander and I have known for years.

That McLaren was unbelieveable, 1200 lbs. and a 500 cubic inch all-aluminium fuel injected big block Chevy. It was the fastest, most amazing race car the world had ever seen, but to think Porsche would outdo them only two years later with the 917/30. A true technological marvel, it produced something like 1400 horsepower while weighing around 1200 lbs. It would accelerate 0-200 mph in 12 seconds flat and the rear tires were 22 in. wide. Just to see what it could do, Mark Donohue set the world closed course speed record, turning a lap at 221 mph at Talladega... in 1973! That record stood for 13 years.

It still has the record for the highest top speed ever on a road course, 258 mph down the straightaway at Paul Ricard, France in testing.

Damn, I love Can-Am. Those guys had balls of steel. Makes drivers today look like pansies.

I'm starting to get those vintage videos now. Hopefully you're still seeding them. Should help me D/L them a bit quicker.

[[AK]Hylander]

I'm starting to get those vintage videos now. Hopefully you're still seeding them. Should help me D/L them a bit quicker.

Can-Am is my all time favorite series, followed closely by the Trans-Am series. To me, those two series defined sports car racing. I'm a huge Mark Donohue fan. Funny thing, my boss is from Summit, NJ and he worked at a car wash where Mark's mom use to bring her Donohue AMC in to get washed. Wish I could get a hold of one of those in good shape.

I'm still seeding, so you should be OK. I have my upload capped at 5 per upload, but I'll bump it up since I'm not doing anything in particular. I'm at 90.1% on the 1967 Can-Am round at Road America, but only 50.8% on the 1971 Can-Am event at Watkins Glen, which is the one I really want. But I still have 1d 14h on that download with the current 5.0 download speed from the 4 peers and 0 seeds of that video. Only 10 min left on the Road America video though.

I just got back from the NY International Auto Show in NYC. We just went in for the day. Got there about 11, left about 4:30. It was OK, but didn't seem as impressive as years past. Oh, and one thing for sure, the auto manufacturers sure cut the budgets on the quality of booth babes if you catch my drift.

I need a new car badly. My 1999 Dodge "Route 78 Battle Cruiser" Stratus ES is at 135,000+ miles and still plugging along. I'm really loving the new Volvo C30. You can get a damn nice little T5 bugger with the higher HP engine for about $29K.

[[AK]Sonic Boom]

Cool. Thanks for continuing the seed. I was getting a bit nostalgic last night and dug out my original copies of The Unfair Advantage and Eoin Young's McLaren! The Man, the Cars & the Team. Still love 'em after all these years.

For the rest of you, here's a photo of the greatest racecar ever made. BTW, in case they got beat with their 1400 hp turbocharged 12-cylinder, Porsche had a turbo 16-cylinder motor waiting in the wings that was good for 2000 horsepower.

You can imagine what I think of NASCAR...

[[AK]Hylander]

Curt.. it's the one "car" page I actually have up on the site so far. LOL

Porsche 917/30

Here is a picture of the Porsche as it set the land speed record at Talladega.



Here are some shots of Donohue in the 917/30 - courtesy of Paul Powell at UnfairAdvantageracing.com who gave me permission to use their material on my site.

Then of course, a little more about Mark himself.

And finally, buy one of these Curt, well worth the $300.00.

[[AK]Devil_Dog]

You guys are getting a little too sappy for my liking, you need to take it off line...

But, thanks for sharing this stuff, I had no idea those cars were that powerful, and that dangerous!!!