Another Aussie member here!
I'm a late-30's married petrolhead with mortgage, three kids (ie NO disposable income :laugh
whose autmotive tastes trend somewhere between the sublime and the ridiculous. While I avidly follow the indiginous predisposition toward touring car racing, I do vaguely recall a time when Australian racing cars didn't HAVE to have four doors, or mudguards, or V8's, or a financial interest in a promotional group intent on destroying any semblance of competition in the interests of nest-feathering or cornering of the "spentertainment" market...
Having grown up in the 70's, Supercars didn't get much more exotic than Porsche 911's, although the high school library, with a collection of old motoring magazines and weathered-looking books, filled with Ferraris and Lamborghinis, began to broaden my horizons.
The day I happened upon a section in one such book, with a chapter devoted to the GT40 was a revelation: it didn't look like anything else I'd seen to that stage of my life... and it was a Ford, which was a VERY important consideration at that time...
In my early teens, I collected, for a time, a series of thin magazines, titled "The Car", featuring all sorts of great cars, great races and automotive curiosities... with articles written by any number of notable scribes.... Doug Nye was a notable, and amongst the features on great racing cars such as the Porsche 917, Lotus 79, Williams FW07, the one I re-read most often was the GT40, and the subsequent narration of the epic tale of Le Mans 1969. These articles captured the heart and mind of an adolescent car nut, and I was later overjoyed to find an article in one of the old Wheels magazines in the bottom of a library cupboard, with a (then, being early 80's) recent road drive of a GT40... much was made of the amount of fuel that leaked from around the fuel caps, streaming up the windshield, of the recalcitrance of the hard tune on the 289, with the Weber carbs flatly refusing to play nice... until the author inadvertantly reached 3500rpm... when the whole experience was transformed into a near-religious experience.
Further endorsements of the car via the endless multitude of "Greatest Car Of All Time" lists that appear periodically, which repeated the mantra that this little car was more-than-capable, and utterly willing to mock the performance of so much of what followed across the decades after its production, did nothing to shake my belief that the GT40 was one of the most beautiful and significant "super cars" ever conceived.
In any case, here I am, in the midst of so many of you living them dream, building your own homage to a Legend and enjoying it... while I am so close - only 1 lottery win away from it :laugh:- to building my own, I would love to enjoy your experiences vicariously until all the pieces fall into place!
I'm a late-30's married petrolhead with mortgage, three kids (ie NO disposable income :laugh
whose autmotive tastes trend somewhere between the sublime and the ridiculous. While I avidly follow the indiginous predisposition toward touring car racing, I do vaguely recall a time when Australian racing cars didn't HAVE to have four doors, or mudguards, or V8's, or a financial interest in a promotional group intent on destroying any semblance of competition in the interests of nest-feathering or cornering of the "spentertainment" market...Having grown up in the 70's, Supercars didn't get much more exotic than Porsche 911's, although the high school library, with a collection of old motoring magazines and weathered-looking books, filled with Ferraris and Lamborghinis, began to broaden my horizons.
The day I happened upon a section in one such book, with a chapter devoted to the GT40 was a revelation: it didn't look like anything else I'd seen to that stage of my life... and it was a Ford, which was a VERY important consideration at that time...
In my early teens, I collected, for a time, a series of thin magazines, titled "The Car", featuring all sorts of great cars, great races and automotive curiosities... with articles written by any number of notable scribes.... Doug Nye was a notable, and amongst the features on great racing cars such as the Porsche 917, Lotus 79, Williams FW07, the one I re-read most often was the GT40, and the subsequent narration of the epic tale of Le Mans 1969. These articles captured the heart and mind of an adolescent car nut, and I was later overjoyed to find an article in one of the old Wheels magazines in the bottom of a library cupboard, with a (then, being early 80's) recent road drive of a GT40... much was made of the amount of fuel that leaked from around the fuel caps, streaming up the windshield, of the recalcitrance of the hard tune on the 289, with the Weber carbs flatly refusing to play nice... until the author inadvertantly reached 3500rpm... when the whole experience was transformed into a near-religious experience.
Further endorsements of the car via the endless multitude of "Greatest Car Of All Time" lists that appear periodically, which repeated the mantra that this little car was more-than-capable, and utterly willing to mock the performance of so much of what followed across the decades after its production, did nothing to shake my belief that the GT40 was one of the most beautiful and significant "super cars" ever conceived.
In any case, here I am, in the midst of so many of you living them dream, building your own homage to a Legend and enjoying it... while I am so close - only 1 lottery win away from it :laugh:- to building my own, I would love to enjoy your experiences vicariously until all the pieces fall into place!
