1954 Pebble Beach Race Footage: COLOR!

Ran across this killer color footage of the 1954 Pebble Beach race.... maybe the best road racing footage I've ever seen from this era. Plenty of sports cars of the day like Allards, XK120 Jags and MGs, but also plenty of homebuilt specials too. The Edwards Special gets a lot of screen time. Great stuff!

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Pretty cool, thx for posting!

 

so awesome...as an ex-comp licensed SCCA and NWCSSC racer - I can appreciate those guys driving on what was available for tires back in those days....plus it was just sweet seeing so many of those old iron warriors wheeling around that circuit as if those cars would last forever...now they're collectibles....but SOVREN and others still haul around those tracks, just slightly less aggressively.

thanks a lot for sharing that

dj

 

Speaking of tire technology, I love seeing the slides around corners. There were quite a few wrecks at that event- I'm surprised none of them showed up in any of the footage. There's other footage of this race in the original Fast and the Furious movie.... they shot the final scenes at Pebble Beach. The track footage isn't as good as this stuff though.

 

Was that a '52 Chevy at about 52 seconds?

 

Thanks for posting! Great footage, the best I've ever seen form this era.

 

Yeah, I think he was distributing the hay bales.

 

Back in the day when hay bales were considered a safety barrier. LOL!

 

Interesting that they had some vintage racers even back then, but they were REAL vintage.

 

Is the car in your avatar Nick Bradjeviches old car?

 

The car in my avatar is a Fibersport-bodied Crosley special from the Midwest- I don't know whether the chassis is Fibersport (it would be the only tube frame Fibersport if so) or if it's a homebuilt that someone dropped a FS body on. I found it a few years ago and have been researching the history ever since, but so far I haven't definitively documented anything before about '62. I suspect it was built in the mid-late fifties. Here's some more pics: http://sportsracernet.smugmug.com/gallery/6373384_p3hUB#!i=402917218&k=a6ejD

You might be thinking of the Gardner Special, which Nick owned for a long time. sadly I had the chance to buy that car about 10 years ago but I didn't know what it was at the time. I passed and it has since been sold several times- and has tripled in price. Beautiful car!