A Leslie Wong Blog

I drove my Alfetta Sprint Veloce to the Alfa Romeo Association of California’s 2011 All Italian Car and Motorcycle Show last Sunday.

I took the photo (left) of my car and started thinking, was Sports Car Market correct? In an Affordable Classics article from the September, 2007, the author used the phrase, “Along with wretched refuse like the Alfa Romeo Alfetta GT…” The photograph seems to bear that out; it appears that nobody wanted to park next to my Alfetta. The reality was that it was late in the afternoon and the cars that had been parked next to the Alfetta earlier in the morning had left.

My Sprint Veloce was the only coupe present that represented the Alfa Romeo Alfetta family but there was an Alfetta sedan too (plus several GTV-6s). There were plenty of Alfa Romeos, Ferraris, Fiats, a few Panteras, a few Lancias, a few Maseratis, and a lot of motorcycles – everything was interesting to me.

Before the 2011 Italian Grand Prix (Gran Premio d’Italia), the BBC’s Jake Humphrey did a nice story comparing the cars and driving styles of 1964 F1 World Champion John Surtees and 2005 & 2006 F1 Champion and current Ferrari driver Fernando Alonso. The comparison between the number of team members in 1964 compared to 2011 is astounding.

The 2011 Formula 1 Shell Belgian Grand Prix at Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps is coming up on August 28, 2011. Peter Windsor, back working for SPEED (channel), interviewed the 1964 Formula 1 World Champion John Surtees, the winner of the 1966 Belgian Grand Prix in a Ferrari.

According to Wikipedia, John Frankenheimer used race footage from the 1966 Belgian Grand Prix in his film, Grand Prix. “The live footage shows Surtees, Bonnier, Bandini, Ligier, Clark & Gurney in action. Surtees doubles in the scene for the fictional Sarti while Bandini doubles for the fictional Barlini.”

One of my first “scratch-built” slot cars used a Dynamic Dynaflex motor mount with a brass tubing/piano wire front end and a Dubro Ferrari 312 body that was based on the Ferrari 312 F1-66.

Jeremy Clarkson’s tribute to Ayrton Senna gives my photograph of Senna at the 1990 Grand Prix de Monaco some perspective. (From season 15, episode 5 of the BBC’s Top Gear, original airdate 25 October 2010)

On the show, many Formula One drivers, including Fernando Alonso, Rubens Barichello, Martin Brundle, David Coulthard, Mika Hakkinen, Lewis Hamilton, Felipe Massa, Michael Schumacher and Jarno Trulli regard Senna as the greatest Formula One driver.

I hope the Senna film will have wide distribution in the US soon.

Bruno Senna, in a visceral driving demonstration in a 2010 Formula One Renault R30, advises against using your iPhone while driving, especially going through Eau Rouge at the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps. The drive (and doughnuts) took place at the World Series by Renault last week.

Nico Rosberg, Mercedes Grand Prix Petronas Formula One Team driver, explains all the buttons and dials on Michael Schumacher’s 2011 steering wheel.

I saw this video originally on Wired.com and I was going to embed their video but they just took it from the Official Youtube channel of the Mercedes Grand Prix Petronas Formula One Team and stuck the Wired brand on it.

I was reading Robert Scoble’s post about the AT&T-T-Mobile deal (One bad company buying another: AT&T buys TMobile) and he mentioned, “Devil’s Slide (cell service) is non-existent for AT&T and TMobile, but works the entire way on Verizon for me.”

Devil’s Slide is an area of steep cliffs along the Pacific Ocean about five miles south of San Francisco, California. This stretch of Highway 1 can induce acrophobia if you start thinking about driving your car off the road. This is a good piture of it showing the road slicing right across Devil’s Slide. This part of the highway is “remote,” in that the extreme terrain doesn’t allow for much habitability for a few miles on either side. Maybe that’s the reason AT&T and T-Mobile didn’t care about a dead spot for a few miles, though I wouldn’t recommend checking your phone’s signal while driving this stretch of road, especially if you are driving in a sporting manner.

The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) started building a tunnel in 2005 to bypass the area prone to rock slides so Highway 1 won’t keep getting closed. The tunnel is 4200 feet (1,280 m) long and will be completed in 2011. On October 1, 2010, they punched through one of the tunnels. I just wrote all this because the video reminded me of Total Recall.

The Petersen Automotive Museum show, Supercars: When Too Much Is Almost Enough opens March 5, 2011.

The first supercar I remember was the Lamborghini Miura. In the ’60′s, I read a road test in Car and Driver or Road and Track, where the author (Brock Yates? P. J. O’Rourke?, David E. Davis?) recalled driving at a sedate 100 mph in Nevada when a Porsche came up from behind flashing it’s headlights. He said they’d normally be polite and move over, but in the Miura, they downshifted two gears and left the Porsche way behind.

Photo courtesy of createordie

emigre100 over on YouTube, is working on a stop motion version of director Peter Yate’s famous car chase scene from the Oscar winning film, Bullitt. Emigre says, “The completed film will be ready for youtube in early 2011.”

from Hemming’s Blog