My friend Mike Parris had a several lap ride in a Porsche 917 at the Riverside International Raceway before it became a shopping mall. He took his tape recorder. This is the sound track. 12 minutes.
Listen to the sounds of the 917K.
Over an hour of racing excitement…
…if you can tolerate old 8mm home movies. Riverside International Raceway, Stardust Raceway, Fontana, Ontario Motor speedway, and Mid Ohio road courses. Can Am, Trans Am, SCCA club events, drag racing, and NASCAR. Mercifully spliced from hundreds of feet of movie film. The soundtrack is of various racing cars including [...]
I’ve known Gray Counts since the mid ’70s. We became good friends and used to car pool together. One of my favorite Gray Counts stories has to do with coffee. There was a coffee maker in every studio, and someone would usually make a fresh pot after lunch. There often weren’t a lot of coffee [...]
In 1964 at the United States Road Race of Champions (USRRC) at the Riverside International Raceway in Riverside, California, GM had a show car exhibit in the infield. I remember seeing for the first time the Corvette XP-755, the Monza SS, and the Monza GT. I can’t overstate the impression the Monza GT made on [...]
The Firebird III was on display in the Research Staff lobby for several years. Research Staff was on the opposite end of the lake from Design Staff, and often I’d go inside the lobby to look at it during my frequent lunch time walks around the lake. It is an extraordinary car representative of an [...]
General Motors created many specialized brochures. Featured in this post is a 8.5″ square, 8-page grayscale brochure of GM Design Staff from the early 1960s. The photos are captioned, but if others know of the names of other people in the photos that I don’t recognize, let me know and I will update this post.
An enormous amount of beautiful artwork was routinely thrown out.
The individual designer’s furniture at GM consisted of a wooden drawing table, a taboret, an uncomfortable broken chair, and a large wooden table with a large flat drawer for artwork. We also had an even larger drawer in the back room for storage. At the rate [...]
It all started with Gray Counts.
Several decades ago when I was a young designer at GM, I bought a few acres in Hooterville—I mean Ortonville—Michigan. Owning vast acreage (four) means that there will be weeds to cut and snow to blow. So I anted up and bought a new 16-hp Ariens tractor with a 48-inch mower deck [...]
