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Leitzinger at Le Mans: Speed, Strategy, and Soul

October 7, 2025

Some names echo with thunderous acclaim – others hum with quiet consistency. Butch Leitzinger belongs to the latter. His career, spanning decades and disciplines, is a masterclass in understated excellence.

Born into a racing family, Butch’s path seemed predestined. His father, Bob Leitzinger, was a successful IMSA racer, and Butch grew up immersed in the rhythm of engines and pit lane strategy. But unlike many second-generation drivers, Butch carved his own identity – not by emulating his father, but by quietly outperforming expectations.

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Much of Butch’s career is synonymous with Dyson Racing. His tenure with the team spanned nearly two decades, during which he became a fixture in American sports car racing. Whether piloting a Riley & Scott Mk III or a Lola prototype, Butch’s driving was marked by precision, patience, and a deep understanding of endurance racing’s demands.

He wasn’t just fast – he was smart. Teammates and engineers alike praised his feedback and racecraft. In an era of evolving technology and fierce competition, Leitzinger remained a constant: adaptable, reliable, and relentlessly focused.

Synopsis

On this episode of Evening With a Legend, we welcome Butch Leitzinger, a renowned ALMS driver best known for winning the Daytona 24 Hours three times and competing in the 24 Hours of Le Mans six times. Butch shares his journey from his first visit to Le Mans in 1994 as a crew member to his near-podium finish with Bentley in 2001. He recounts his transition between different teams and cars, including Panoz, Cadillac, and Bentley, as well as his experiences and challenges in endurance racing. The discussion also touches on the technical aspects of racing, the mental and physical demands of Le Mans, and Butch’s advice for aspiring drivers. The episode concludes with reflections on Butch’s motorsport career and the significance of the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

On this episode we peel back the layers of this enigmatic figure, revealing a driver whose legacy is built not on bravado, but on brilliance.
Your podium finish with Bentley in 2001 is one of the highlights of your career. What was it like to be part of Bentley’s return to Le Mans after such a long absence?
The 2001 race was a defining moment for both you and Bentley. How did the team dynamics and camaraderie play a role in securing such a prestigious finish?
What was the atmosphere like at Le Mans during those intense final hours in 2001, when you were battling for a podium finish with Bentley?
2002 was also a huge achievement, same team, same car, same drivers…and almost the same results. Tell us a little more about the 2002 attempt.
Throughout your six attempts at Le Mans, what were some of the most difficult challenges you faced, and how did you overcome them?
For up-and-coming drivers who dream of racing at Le Mans, what advice would you give based on your experiences, especially dealing with setbacks and staying focused?
How did your experience at Le Mans shape your approach to other racing events in your career?

Transcript

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] Evening With a Legend is a series of presentations exclusive to legends of the famous 24 hours of LeMans giving us an opportunity to bring a piece of LeMans to you. By sharing stories and highlights of the big event, you get a chance to become part of the Legend of LeMans with guests from different eras of over 100 years of racing.

Crew Chief Eric: Tonight we have an opportunity to bring a piece of LeMans to you. Sharing in the Legend of LeMans with guests from different eras of over 100 years of racing. And as your host, I’m delighted to introduce Butch Leitzinger, best known as an ALMS driver with Dyson Racing. He has also driven for a variety of other teams and race series.

He’s a three time winner of the Daytona, 24 hours in 19 94, 97 and 99. He won [00:01:00] two IMSA drivers championship titles in both 97 and 98 while driving for Dyson Racing. And he was named. 2002 Rookie of the Year in the TransAm series and has raced in both the next tail and a Bush NASCAR series. Butch has attempted to conquer the 24 hours of LeMans six times in his career, driving for Panos in 97 and 99, team Cadillac in 2000.

Then clinching a podium with Bentley in 2001 and returning to Bentley in 2002 with a final run with Risi in 2003. And he’s here with us tonight to share his motorsports journey. And with that, I’m your host crew chief Eric from the Motor Inc. Podcast Network. Welcoming everyone to this evening with a legend.

Butch, welcome to the show.

Butch Leitzinger: Yeah, thank you very much, Eric.

Crew Chief Eric: Like all good stories, there’s an origin. So take us on your road to Lamont. What led you up to your first race in 97?

Butch Leitzinger: Well, it, the first time I was ever actually at Lamont was 1994. I drove the Nissan 300 ZX Turbo and we won at Daytona. And that meant an invite to [00:02:00] Lamont with Nissan, but I was only in the second car and I was, you know, the, the reason I was even in, in the car in the first place was as, as reward because I won GTU Championship the year before.

You know, I’ve been trying to go to Lamont for forever. So it was always kind of like, well, you know, we don’t have a budget for a second car. And they had Paul OSI in the second car and he had some means, and Eric Vanderbilt had some sponsorship with lease plan. They had a third seat that still wasn’t filled.

Frank Kitz was running a Nissan Motorsport, and so I was bugging him all the time, you know, get me there, get me there. And I made the mistake of saying, just get me over there and if I can’t drive, you know, I’ll do tires for you. And I kind of said that as a throwaway comment, but came back to bite me because I got sent over there two weeks early because they found out that I took French in high school, went over with Gary Cummings, who was.

Doing the, uh, the advance prep for it. And so I spent two weeks kind of preparing for the team to come over. Still not knowing if I was gonna drive, you know, that was given the, I think about an hour’s warning. I, I, I live in State College, Pennsylvania. I got [00:03:00] a phone call that said, okay, we have a flight for you out of Newark.

In, in about six hours and it’s about four hours away. So I, I had to throw my stuff in a bag and hightail it for the airport, you know, and it was still just like the hope that maybe third seat wouldn’t be filled. It eventually was filled, a gentleman that had some backing from a Japanese television station.

So then I spent the week of race week being a tire buster, just taking the tires back and forth, but still as an American in 1994. You know, Lamont. Like right now there’s quite a bit of transfer between the US and Lamont. You know, there’s like a lot of teams, a lot of cars make the trip pretty easily.

Back then, it was much more rare. There wasn’t that much, uh, representation of Americans at Lamont. It had always been a dream of mine to be at Lamont, preferably to race, but just to be there. So this was quite possibly my one chance to ever get there. Having said all that, how wonderful it was to be there, I would not do it again as a crew member, because that, that was, that was a long, long day.

Crew Chief Eric: So up until that point, had you raced in Europe yet?

Butch Leitzinger: I had not. The only thing that I’d done, not in Europe, but in Japan [00:04:00] a few times, there was an invitation some of the teams had from a Japanese group to bring the GT cars over and, and we raced at Fuji twice and at auto. Once. Yeah, so this was my first time racing in Europe as well.

Crew Chief Eric: So the first time you go to LA by, you’re there as crew, let’s just say, hoping that they need a driver to fill in and you’re anxious and you got your helmet ready and all that. What was your first impression of LeMans, even as a worker bee or as a spectator? What did you think of it compared to the tracks you had been running in the States?

Butch Leitzinger: It was really impressive. I had never seen that level of facility before. You know, this was. Right after they had built the main complex, the old pit complex, quite famous, but also quite famous for, you know, not being modern standards. But, uh, yeah, so it was truly impressive seeing that level at a, at a road course, you know, ’cause in the states at the time, in 1994, like Watkins Glen, and trying to think of other tracks that we have in, in the states, you know, most of them hadn’t been updated from 1970s, you know, so it, it was impressive to see just even that level of facility at the time.[00:05:00]

And then once getting to the circuit itself, it was really impressive, you know, in my two weeks I was there before the race, being able to drive on the course itself and trying to imagine when there weren’t, you know, Lori’s going back and forth on the road with groceries and things that, that, you know, there cars going 200 and whatever miles an hour on it.

It was kind of the culmination of reading magazines for 20 years at that point.

Crew Chief Eric: So earlier that year, like you said, you won the Daytona 24 hours in 1994. How did you put the deal together with Payos and who helped you along the way?

Butch Leitzinger: I benefited a lot from relationships that I had. I driven with James Weaver and Andy Wallace at Dyson Raising from 1995, and we got along really well.

We were very compatible as code drivers and we had quite a bit of success. Actually. We won Daytona 24 hours together, beginning of 97 and Don Payos. In, in 1997, I decided that he wanted to go to LeMansn and he did it, you know, in a typically Don Penos way of, didn’t do it by half. And he went in, he had Adrian Renard build him a car, and he had David Price run [00:06:00] the team for him at LeMansn.

Both James and Andy had very good relationships with David. Andy had driven the McLaren F1 with price’s team, so they were like really good mates. So when it came time to get a, a third driver for Lamont, you know, they just kind of poked him and said, you know, why don’t you take a look at Butch? And, and he said, who’s that?

And he, he refused to call me Butch from the moment I met him, he said. But now, and if you know, pricey, there was quite a few other words that were thrown in there, but he just, uh, you are buzz, buzz light, you. So from then on, he, he just called me Buzz. But yeah, so I was able to just kind of get dragged in through my friends.

Crew Chief Eric: So you get to LeMans at that moment, were you comparing and contrasting Daytona to LeMans? Were you making those? Comparisons or was it just on a totally different level?

Butch Leitzinger: It was a totally different level. This was where I benefited hugely with James and Andy being my teammates. And not only that, they convinced Pricey to hire me, but before any of us went on the track, we went around the track and they gave me tips the entire way around.

A lot of things to remember and also really one of the things they did was put into me. [00:07:00] How dangerous this place is, the speeds that the cars are going, there’s often enormous accidents. And you know, one, actually one of the greatest tips that they gave me was because the straits are so long that it’s a little bit easy to kind of lose concentration.

You know, you start looking at the gauges and you know, okay, like you start making notes like, oh, remember to tell them that when I come in. And the tire pressures of this. And then miss your breaking marker because you’ve been going down the street for the last 20 seconds or, or whatever it was opposed to most normal racetracks where it’s just constantly turn, turn, turn.

It’s a different rhythm to it there. But yeah, so it was a big help having them to really bring me up to speed on the seriousness of the track. And then in spite of being there, you know, you’re, you’re there for the Wednesday, Thursday, you know, with quite a bit of practice time, but most of that goes away pretty quickly, you know?

And then actually we had pre-qualifying then, but. Every lap of pre-qualifying was taking up with Andy Wallace driving because we didn’t have very much speed. We got in by the skin of our teeth, actually both for pre-qualifying and qualifying itself because that year they, they invited to [00:08:00] the race more people than were going to start.

So I think it was two cars we’re going to go through all qualifying and then not be able to race. And we were almost that car just ’cause the car wasn’t what it would eventually become. We, we were struggling a lot with power and with a lot of reliability problems with the car. But yeah, so all pre-qualifying was taken up with Andy driving, so I never drove in pre-qualifying.

For the race weekend, if I remember right, I got a few laps in a night practice that was pretty eye-opening in every kind of way. You know, I I, I went out at night. It’s not like Daytona where everything’s lit up, you know, even, you know, the lights were fairly decent, but you’re very quickly driving past your headlights at 200 miles an hour.

And I remember somebody blew an engine, so there’s oil all over the track, so they had local yellows. And a bit of a shock to me coming from the US but the way they would handle the yellows was there’d be a coursework, you know, there, there were people like spreading oil dry out on the track and then a coursework just standing on the road on the racetrack with a little reflective light to catch your headlights.

That was quite a shock to me. I. Like in, in, in the States, it would probably be a red flag. You [00:09:00] know, everyone in the pits, well, we take care of this stuff. That wasn’t the mechanism there. So I kind of had to get a little more aware of the difference in attitude, I suppose, between the US and Europe. And then I did the warmup before the race, so like, you know, maybe six or seven laps before the race itself, which, which is a fairly common thing.

And keep in mind, six or seven laps is still quite a bit of miles. You know, you, you don’t have that as much repetition to really be able to extract a great lap time out of the car just because you don’t have the experience yet.

Crew Chief Eric: You brought us into 97 and you were no stranger to endurance racing by this point, and you were still sort of talking about the comparing and contrasting of Daytona and Lamont’s here.

Daytona, like you said, a lot of turns, a lot of turns. You’ll do 200 miles an hour, but you’ll do it for a brief period of time and then you gotta come deep into turn one and just lose all your speed and kind of start the whole process over again, as we know. But the physical demands of Lamont, not only the mental demands of that concentration of running at night and changes in weather conditions.

’cause that’s inevitably what happens at Lamont because it’s. So big. After being there in [00:10:00] 94 and then 97 and and continuing your attempts, how did you have to physically prepare for something as big as LeMans compared to the races you were doing? Stateside.

Butch Leitzinger: LeMans doesn’t beat you up as much as Daytona, but it’s very different mentally.

Daytona. The real issue, at least in the day, is that, you know, you might have 70 cars on the track at the start of the race. The feeling was literally like a, like one of those video games where those cars just kind of meandering all around, you know, and, and you’re meant to like be like, be able to slice through all these little jamer cars, yet you’re, you’re just constantly evading cars and slicing through traffic.

So I. At Daytona, your lap time might vary by five seconds a lap easily. We hopefully avoided a few crashes and things like that. And you come around, an experienced crew chief would just look at that and say, well, I must have had a, you know, a few, a few things happen that lap, but like that wouldn’t be a cause of alarm or anything at lamont because there were only at, at the time, I’d race things ’cause 48 cars over eight miles of track.

So every lap is like almost qualifying, you know, [00:11:00] you don’t really have much traffic. One things about Lamont is that because the laps are so long, the team managers don’t have a whole lot else to do, except for like, look at the, at their notebook and look at what lap time you just turned. And so, you know, they, they stare at that for four minutes or, you know, three minutes, 50, whatever it was.

And as they come. Butch is a a little bit slow today. Like that last lap was two seconds slower than the lap before. You know, I, I think you might be losing it just from, uh, being able to keep your job, you know, or get a job for next year. You really have to kind of impress them every lap and, you know, really kind of have the car standing on its nose at, at Daytona.

If you made it around for the lap. It was a good lap. At Lamont, you really had to be with a good lap time, so that that was the biggest change in mental how to go into the race. At Daytona, you really had to take care of the car and make sure that you didn’t have any body work damage or anything just from touching other cars.

And at Lamont there weren’t that many opportunities to.

Crew Chief Eric: So in 97 you ran the Penos GTR one, which is in the same realm of cars, let’s say the [00:12:00] Corvettes and the Vipers and things like that that we saw here. Stateside and A LMS, which the ESP ASPIRAnte GTR one is one of the more memorable cars from that era, by far.

I mean, it’s instantly recognizable. The next time you come to LeMans in 99, you come back with. The infamous Payos, LMP Roadster, and you’re partnered with David Braham and Eric Bernard. Obviously, Don Payos wants to keep you on staff. Is that how the story goes? How did you come back to run with Payos for a second time?

Butch Leitzinger: You know, in nine seven, we didn’t have much success really. We had actually, we had quite a few problems then in, in 98. Don expanded the team quite a bit and, and had a lot of really high talent drivers for the whole year. They didn’t need someone to come in just for the, the one race, uh, at Lamont, but for 99 they actually had, had switched and Tony Dow would run the program in 98.

Then he let Tony Dow go and Tony Fox came in and, and ran the team, and it was kind of run a little bit smaller. They didn’t have kind of a cast of thousand drivers. It was, went back to, they had. Two drivers per car for the year, [00:13:00] and they needed a third for the endurance races for Lamont. And fortunately, at 99 I won again with Dyson.

You know, that looked kind of good on the cv and so talked to Don and, and he was agreeable to bring me in for the third seat

Crew Chief Eric: and then the next year. 2000 you’ve returned to LeMans this time. Totally different team. Mario Andretti basically takes your seat at Payos. They run the same car the next year in 2000.

But you’re back with Cadillac running with Andy Wallace again. So how did the switch happen? You jumped from Payos to Cadillac. How did that work out?

Butch Leitzinger: It was run by Bill Riley, the Cadillac program. I’d been driving the Riley Scott Ford in the States with Rob Dyson for quite a few years by that point. And we had a lot of success and I, and I knew Bill pretty well.

At the end of 99, I didn’t really have a full-time drive for the next year because Rob Dyson realized that the Riley’s time was getting pretty old and he was looking at getting something else, but he wasn’t really sure that he was going to, and so he was on the fence of doing anything. And so I started talking to Bill Riley and Cadillac.

Yeah, so that came [00:14:00] about and, and because Andy was there too, that, you know, I, I felt very good about that and I had a lot of respect for Bill. The program itself didn’t go that well. I mean, it really comes down to the, the engines didn’t make much power. They had a directive from Cadillac that the car had to go 200 miles an hour on, on Miles San, and it did.

They reached that goal. I, I think, where it was like right at 200 miles an hour and we were, I think, the second fastest car in the speed traps. But we were also like 13th and 14th fastest on the, on the actual lap times. You know, the car just didn’t make much down for us in order to meet that goal. Our quartering speed was pretty poor.

Reliability wasn’t great either. We ran Daytona and Seabring before. Lamont had a lot of problems, a lot of gearbox problems. They had to actually re-engineer the back of the car and used a different gearbox. From what we started with, the tires weren’t really the right tires to be using. You know, at Lamont, if you’re not on Michelin, it’s, it’s almost a waste of time.

I worked with some really great people for that, but it was, you know, a lot of great people bashing their heads against the wall because we just weren’t fast enough.

Crew Chief Eric: So what I’m hearing is you were really missing the payos at that point.

Butch Leitzinger: Yeah, the Enos [00:15:00] was good. You know, the open top Pantos in 99 was a brand new car.

I’m gonna forget the designer’s name, but basically cut the top off the car, but obviously did a lot of other engineering on the car as well. It actually, it really was a missile. I mean it, it was a really good fast car. Robert Yates did the engines and they made a ton of power. It was a really good car.

It was very odd driving both the original Panos and the open top car. The seating position was very far back, almost like over the rear axle. The actual feel from the car there. There’s a lot of movement. When, when you’re in a normal prototype, you’re just kind of behind the front wheels and you’re kind of at the pendulum point between the front rear, so you don’t get that much moving.

And especially in ya when the car starts to slide, your butt might move an inch or two inches in, in relation to the, the front of the car, and you kind of can scale like how much of a slide you’re at. But with sitting so far back, number one, like, like over any bumps. There was quite a bit of movement. All the rear movement of the car, you were kind of on top of the, the axle and then the normal [00:16:00] slide your butt would actually be moving like, you know, maybe a foot compared to the front axle.

So like it took a long time to really trust could go as far as what it felt like, like going incredibly sideways with the car. But it was actually the same amount, but you were so much farther back, it was changing your perspective.

Crew Chief Eric: So at this point you’re becoming a household name at LeMans, and 94 is the tire guy and the 97 9 9 2000.

Now we’ve reached 2001 and you switch teams again and you end up at Bentley. So how did that play out?

Butch Leitzinger: And that again was through, uh, James and Andy. James had done a lot of the testing for Bentley with Richard Lloyd’s program, and both James and Andy had driven the Audi RHC. In 1999 when I, when I was in the payos, and again, it was a situation where they needed a third driver.

James was very good about pointing out that Bentley’s biggest market was the United States. You should have this guy on. And, and I certainly tried to work that angle as much as I could too. Yeah. And, and so I, I was able to convince them to gimme a ride for it. Unfortunately, James ended up not doing the race with us because of some disagreements that he [00:17:00] had.

It was really unfortunate ’cause James and Andy and I got along so well. It, it would’ve been great to share the car with him, but it was a very high stakes program. ’cause Bentley put a lot of, you know, resources into it, but only one race. You know, it’s, it’s not like. You can have a bad race, but you know, maybe have a few good races elsewhere in the year and at the end of the year can say, well, you know, at least we had some success with this.

Everything was just piled on for Lamont and that was it.

Crew Chief Eric: That sounds like a French manufacturer. That only shows up once a year.

Butch Leitzinger: Yes, yes. No, it, uh, it’s kind of the same idea as well because Bentley, I think the reason. They were interested in the first place was just the history that Bentley had at Lamont.

It didn’t really make as much sense to the board, I’m sure to win a race at Elkhart Lake as opposed to at Lamont. You know, Lamont was really the only thing that they were interested in.

Crew Chief Eric: Definitely an iconic win for Bentley for them to come back and all that. But what’s interesting, couple threads we need to pull on here because.

Many may not know. And you touched upon something really important, which is the Audi R eight C, is that at this [00:18:00] point, Volkswagen Audi group had purchased Bentley, and so you’ve got all this German backing and engineering, you know, controlling as a small boutique British manufacturer that has racing pedigree.

That goes back to the beginning of cars. The R eight C was a previous generation prototype that was, I hate to say, a complete failure. It was their closed cockpit version of the original R eight, always in the shadows of the BMWV 12 and the Mercedes GTR and the Porsche nine 11 GT one, and all those kinds of cars.

And it never really made a name for itself until the next generation car came out. So I think it’s funny that they sort of went back and pulled the REC out of mothballs and said. We’re gonna change some body panels, but basic physics and core of it. It’s the same car. We’ll paint it green and we’ll call it the speed eight.

Did you feel some of that working with Bentley, that it was like there was this shadow of Porsche and Audi looming in the background?

Butch Leitzinger: Oh, for sure. There was no mistaking that we were a part of the Volkswagen group, but it still was. Kind of a bunch of British people working under [00:19:00] the Volkswagen umbrella.

Crew Chief Eric: Garas, right?

Butch Leitzinger: Yeah, a group. RTN was the people who built the car. Peter Ellery was a designer, both of the RHC and the Bentley. But it, but it, it was from 99 with the RHC to 2001 when we had the Bentley. It was a complete redesign ’cause obviously. As you said, I hate to say failure, but it was, it was certainly not a success.

They had a a lot of trouble, you know, my friends were driving the car, so I was paying attention to it and I, I saw it was in the pits a lot when it was even running. I know they even had like doors come flying off, you know, it was just one of those things where, you know, it was a, it was another one year program only for LeMans and I, and I know they had very little testing.

You know, they, they tried to do testing when we were at Paul Ricard and they spent very little time actually on track. You know, I think that they learned. A lot of what not to do with the, the first car. And Peter was able to design a, a really nicely balanced and also very pretty car with the Bentley, with the, the exp

Crew Chief Eric: the Bentley was a prototype and Audi was also there with the R eight Roadster, right?

The R eight R at the same time. And so people were like, well, [00:20:00] Bentley won, but Audi won. They’re book print. Wait, so there’s more than one class, but it wasn’t like today where it’s LMP one GTP now and LMP two, and there used to be P three and all these kinds of things. So you were in LMP 900 and then the Audi R eight was in LP one, but you were still fighting for an overall win because the cars were that close, right?

Butch Leitzinger: Yeah. They had different classes, categories. And they each had a different trophy. We were really the only ones in the LMP 900. We finished third. Overall, I got a trophy that says first place on it from Lamont, but the reason we were there was to win overall, you know, so Bentley was very happy with that first year result.

You know, had kind of told us that, you know, anything in the top 10, like really finishing the race was the most important thing. ’cause it was really a three year program finishing the race. Top 10 would be good. Top five would be great, was kind of like what we were built up to. So to get on the podium was pretty huge.

But in our minds, we placed third because [00:21:00] the reason we were there was to compete against the Audis, you know, the, the, the organizers had done their best to try to equalize what a time would be between the two different cars. We had a smaller tire, but a little bit better aerodynamics, a little bit bigger restrictor.

In their view, you know, we should be pretty close. And we were pretty close. So like it actually did a pretty good job with that. But yeah, so, uh, we placed there, we actually had had quite a few problems in the race. 2001 was the year that it rained cats and dogs for quite a bit of it. And one of the, uh, air intakes for the shifting mechanism took on a lot of water and failed on both the cars on our team car.

That was Guy Smith, Martin Brundle and, and Stef Orelli. It failed enough. It was stuck in six. And they weren’t able to make it back without burning out the clutch with me. It happened a few times and I kept carrying on. You could kind of trick it a little bit with grabbing the clutch and shifting at the same time.

You could take some load off of it and it would still shift, but eventually it did stick, but it stuck in fourth gear, so I was able to make it back to the pits. And then we did a swap on it, but, and I think the swap probably took. I [00:22:00] wanna say like 40 minutes or, you know, or may, maybe not that long, but it might’ve been like a 20 minute stop.

So we lost a lot of time with that.

Crew Chief Eric: You didn’t have the Audi advantage of un bolting the whole rear end and putting a new one on within the context of a lap and then going back out.

Butch Leitzinger: No. No. And, and we did not. And that was really disappointing. And in fact, with the problems that we had, we dropped back quite a bit, but we were coming back and, and other cars were having problems and we’re getting, you know, up the leaderboard pretty quickly.

At one point I heard. The lab speaker. Oh, the transmission problems for the Audi? Yes. Right. Okay. Like there’s, there’s one down and then, you know, a couple minutes later that’s back on the track. Yeah. So that really kind of took some of the air out as well.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, it blew everybody’s mind. We all saw it live.

We’re like, what are they, did they just do what I think they did?

Butch Leitzinger: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That was, uh, pretty disappointing. If, if they weren’t out of the race altogether, they’re gonna be down for a while. In the rain. I know, I remember at least one of them when I was like walking to do one of my stints. I looked up at the tv, one of the cars was in the gravel, so I thought, okay, well at least it’s gonna be, you [00:23:00] know, a little bit before they can take ’em out.

But the bloody marshals were super, uh, en enthused at that point, and, and they, they got the car out. Probably only lost like 30 seconds. With that, we didn’t have, uh, as much luck as, as we needed to try to get back onto equal footing.

Crew Chief Eric: So when you look back at this point to your previous runs at LeMans, you’re driving this, you know, we’re put air quotes around British, but you know, German, DNA to prototype car.

Was it a leap in a bound different, despite all its problems that it had? Did you enjoy driving some of the previous cars more, or was the Bentley at that point, like that was the car? Bentley

Butch Leitzinger: was probably my favorite of all the cars that I drove there. Not, not just because of the success, but it was a really nicely balanced car.

It did everything very well. There weren’t really any bad habits. Just comparing to the other cars, like the Panos Roadster, number one was pretty slow, but also extremely hot. Extremely loud. I think most of my hearing exited between that year and then 99 also with the Panos ’cause. ’cause the cars were ex excruciatingly loud, you know?

And in, in fact, in 97 we [00:24:00] drivers James and Andy and I, we single stinted. And the main reason was just because of the noise was so bad, it felt like you were in a war zone or something. It was just like, it was, it was almost hard to, to concentrate. It was so loud. And then with the open top, Penos. This was definitely, you know, my fault, trying to be, you know, kind of a, an easygoing teammate.

I didn’t really get the cockpit to my liking, and I was stuck up a little bit in the Airstream and we, we tried to do some things with the windscreen to make it a little bit better, but that the other drivers didn’t like it. So basically I had to put a pad on my head because my head was in the Airstream and, and on straits, it would just get pinned back.

So I had to have a pad on it so I could just like at least rest it there. But if I started to look left or right, it would take my head like that, you know, and, and try to rip it off. So I just had to keep my head dead straight and just use my eyes whenever I was going left or right, which wasn’t ideal.

But the car was very good. It was, it was a little bit more brute force as opposed to, uh, at a time kind of on its own. You really had to drag it around the track, which David Bradham especially was extremely good at. And then the [00:25:00] Cadillac just didn’t really have the pace that we needed and also didn’t have the downforce.

So yeah, it just was never really that satisfying. But, so the Bentley was definitely of, of all those cars, the the best of them all.

Crew Chief Eric: So 2002 is where it gets interesting because you’ve returned to Lamont yet again with Bentley, and it’s the same team, and the same car, and the same drivers, and nearly the same result.

But in the states, you double down and you’re running TransAm, which is nothing like. The Bentley at the same time as campaigning this card, other racing that you’re doing. Tell us a little bit more about this 2002 attempt. What was the goal going into it? Was it We did third last time We battled it out.

You’re suddenly on the podium now you wanna do it again. What was the ambition of the Bentley team going in for a second year?

Butch Leitzinger: We were almost the victim of our own success. In 2001, things went a lot better than it was. It was expected to, you know, they kind of had their chart of expectations and you know, with ramping up with a win for the third year.

But we had done well enough that they thought, well, do we really [00:26:00] even need to do the second year? Because they wanted a complete redesign of the car. There wasn’t enough time to do top to bottom redesign of the car. And it wasn’t really until, yeah, I think it was at Daytona test in January that I finally got word that, okay, we’re going.

To Lamont, you know, which is only six months away from that. Yeah. So I, I went into 2002 with, well, actually really with Harley any work. ’cause I, this was another point where, where Rob Dyson decided that, that, you know, he wasn’t sure that he was gonna do a full season at that time it was, I guess Grand Dam or U-S-R-R-C, I can’t remember what, what, what it was.

But anyway, so he couldn’t really commit to a full program. Bentley going into the year seemed about 50 50, whether they’re going to be doing it, so I, I saw where Tom Glowy in the TransAm series had an opening for a driver, so I called him to see if he was available. Fortunately that worked out, and also he was agreeable to letting me go and test in France.

And nothing fortunately collided on the schedule. So I was able to do a full commitment on both. But yeah, so when Bentley finally decided to do the program, it was with a [00:27:00] mild update on the car. Uh, they, they really even said this to us was, it was really just as a way to kind of keep the team together and kind of keep learning the next year, which was meant to be the year that they won.

And it was known at this time even that we were always a part of Volkswagen, you know, in the Audi group. So there was always some give and take. You know, we were running an Audi engine. In fact, our first test in 2001 was at a track called MOS in Czech Republic, and it went really well, and Audi was testing at the same time and we were actually matching their times.

You know, we, we left that test thinking, wow, we’ve really got something serious here. Then we never went as fast again. And I won’t explain too much what I mean by that, but you might be able to kind of draw,

Crew Chief Eric: we’ll call it balance of performance and put air quotes around that.

Butch Leitzinger: The car never quite seemed to have the same snap that it did at that first test either.

So the, the idea was, and you know, and the way they carried it out as well was for the third year. The Volkswagen kind of emphasis would go from Audi to Bentley, you [00:28:00] know, and that’s why there were no factory Audis run. The YO team came and ran one of the Bentleys and they basically brought quite a bit of the Audi drivers over as well to run the cars just ’cause it was, they became the primary program

Crew Chief Eric: that foreshadows the 2003 season.

So before we talk about your return to Lamont in 2003, you were there to see it unfold, but you weren’t part of. The Bentley roster in 2003, and there’s still arguments to this day. It even sits sideways sometimes with me when I think about it. The phrase is that Audi sort of gifted Bentley the win in 2003.

What were your thoughts about Bentley’s third and final in their program as you knew they were gonna do three years? You know. Okay. So they clinched it in that third year, but was it really theirs? Let’s sort of settle the debate, I suppose.

Butch Leitzinger: The Volkswagen group definitely. You know, the favored mark for that year was Bentley for sure.

But having said that, the car that Peter Ellery penned for that year was a brilliant car. It was a beautiful car, just like, you know, being outside the program at that point, but watching it, it looked [00:29:00] really impressive. And they went to Michelin tires, which was an improvement. Yeah. And then the competition, you know, it, it went all to private tier Audis.

I’m not sure if I remember right, but I think maybe the balance of performance had been shifted a bit as well, where the Audis got a little bit of a haircut on their restrictor as well, so there was definitely a favored sun there. They also executed really well, you know, and, and by having Ghost Run one car and Richard Lloyd’s team run the other car.

There was still competition between the two. It wasn’t even like two cars just going around in formation for the entire race. You know, you, you had rivalries. British group over here and the German group over here. So there were definitely both sides really trying to push their own side through. You know, I, I don’t think they, they weren’t necessarily gifted anything, but there was definitely most favorable situation of the three years that they had.

Crew Chief Eric: Do you feel like you missed out not being one of the drivers selected, or was there a reason to go to Ferrari instead?

Butch Leitzinger: Well, no, I went to Ferrari just because. I didn’t have anything else, you know, that I also was very happy to get a ride with the GT team, but I would’ve loved, and I, you know, I, [00:30:00] I pleaded my case as much as I could, but they were pretty set that they wanted a more or less British car guy.

And David, and, well, no, actually David was in the other car, but it was obvious that they were gonna be bringing some of the Audi drivers over as well. And, you know, I, I can’t really blame them ’cause they were fantastic drivers. And if this is the one year that you have to win LeMansn. I can certainly see their argument that you want to have people that have won Lamont before, so I didn’t take it too hard, but Got it.

Would’ve been great.

Crew Chief Eric: And we’ve heard from other legends that have been on the show, whether it was, you know, David Murray or it was Adrian Fernandez that have made the transition from l and p down to the production classes versus somebody like Andy Pilgrim who’s super comfortable, you know, behind the wheel of a Corvette versus going the other way.

What I’ve heard as a kind of a consensus from those drivers that it wasn’t like it was a step down, it was different. And we talked about how much time they spent being maybe more situationally aware, driving in their mirrors. It’s just a whole different atmosphere because of the speed differential. So when you step down [00:31:00] from LM one, let’s.

Say down into the production classes with the Ferrari, did you have the same experience where suddenly you’re like, man, I’m not used to all these cars ganging up on me. And like you said, you’re one of the, the Jamer cars, right? You know, out on track. Was it like that for you?

Butch Leitzinger: Not really. I grew up doing GT racings.

I’d spent quite a bit of time in that role before I went to prototypes, so it wasn’t completely foreign to me. But having said that, driving high horsepower cars, high downforce cars can also maybe make you a little bit. Lazy, exploiting like everything that they have and, you know, maybe not using all momentum that you have because you’ve got 700 horsepower to dig you out of the turn.

Now all of a sudden when you’ve got 400 horsepower little tires and, and no down force, it becomes much more critical to be really tidy with everything. And so, like that was probably the biggest challenge was, you know, being inch perfect everywhere and not kind of like trying to drag a time out of it, but kind of like really like letting the car, uh, do what it wants.

Crew Chief Eric: Had you driven a Ferrari before this point? And the reason I bring it up is to compare it [00:32:00] to coming off of a TransAm season in a Corvette. What was that like?

Butch Leitzinger: Yeah, there was like nothing similar between the two. It, that was the only time I drove a Ferrari, even since I think actually, but it was very different.

The setup on the car was very soft as opposed to what I was maybe more used to with prototypes. It took a lot of getting used to. Yeah, and I, and I honestly, I wasn’t the fastest driver on the team either, because I, I kind of coming into it a little bit cold like that. But even so, we were actually, we were, we were doing really well.

There’s a problem with the Porsches that year. I think they had a fuel problem or something like that, or maybe a fuel pump problem. We found ourselves leading into the night at some point, a way that we, that we were leading. But then we, we had an engine blow. Someone came when I was sleeping in the, in the, you know, little cubicle inform me that engine was blown up.

So we, we did only lasted probably less than 10 hours in that one. But it was, it was, it was good to go back there and have a perspective from the gt ’cause all the others were being in the top class. So, yeah, it, it was. An interesting way to do it.

Crew Chief Eric: Six attempts at LeMans, tons of challenges, weather conditions, changing teams.

[00:33:00] So many things that you’ve been probably thinking about in preparation for this. And we like to ask the legends that come on the show, when you take all that into consideration, when you look at it now, maybe with rose colored glasses in some respects. Your Lamont’s journey is longer than a lot of other drivers.

You know, some people, it’s one and done, you know, and then you’ve got others that have done it, you know, a dozen times and so on. But when you look back over those six attempts, what do you think Lamont’s taught you? Did it make you a better driver when you went into your other series?

Butch Leitzinger: I think so, yeah.

Well, I suppose the biggest thing is just being able to kind of. Handle the pressure of such a big event, especially on the Bentley side where, you know, there was an enormous amount of resources that were put behind this one team. There was only one race, you know, so the stress and, and the pressure get builds up every day, every day, you know, leading up to the race.

And then the actual weekend itself, it gets pretty crazy, you know, all of the PR people freaking out, you know, just as much as everyone’s feeling the pressure and kind of showing it. So I, I think one of the biggest things is just being able to [00:34:00] absorb that much pressure and go out and, you know, and, and do what you’re, you’re supposed to do.

And then the other part, like we talked about earlier, was just because at Lamont you don’t have traffic so much to deal with. There’s a much higher emphasis on lap times. Throughout all 24 hours as opposed to survival, having to shift the whole attitude from just having a car together to race the last few hours.

Where at? At Lamont, you’re really from the beginning of the race, just going as hard as you can and just hoping and, and assuming that the car is going to put up with it, and if not, as the car’s fault, the driver at Lamont isn’t meant to really take care of the car so much as to just extract every bit of speed out of it.

Crew Chief Eric: So even before the first time you went to LeMans as the tire guy in 1994, you mentioned that you had always wanted to race at LeMans. And I’ve interviewed plenty of other up and coming drivers that say the same thing. LeMans is one of the crown jewels, part of the triple crown of Motorsport for that matter.

And they wanted race at LeMans and they haven’t been able to get there yet. Having been there six [00:35:00] times yourself, what advice would you give based on all your experiences to these up and coming drivers that wanna go to LeMans

Butch Leitzinger: first would be I. Do it. You know, like what, whatever you can, like, put a lot of effort into defining it, whatever path you can do to, to get there.

Whether that means having success in prototype or GT racing, you know, like in in the, in IMSA here or in, you know, in the European series. And find out who’s going. Like the way I got the Ferrari drive was just looking at the entry list and seeing which cars didn’t have a third driver. And then starting to make phone calls, I’m sure it’s not quite as, as simple as that anymore.

I think deals are done, I think much earlier maybe than, than they used to be. This was probably, I wanna say maybe in March or so, maybe April, even when, when I made the deal for the Ferrari, so it was quite late. Whereas now it seems like all the teams, when when the entries announced. Four or five months ahead of time, like they’ve already got all their drivers set up.

But the biggest thing with racing is really relationships. You know, as I said, how, how I got into it with having a relationship with James and Andy and then [00:36:00] David Price, and just kind of knowing people so that whenever your name does come up, it can click and it can say, oh, okay, well yeah, actually that makes sense.

As opposed to whenever they have to say, you know, who is that? That doesn’t help. Whatever you can do to get your name out there, whatever success you can get, I think helps in being chosen for a drive at Lamont because everyone is very selective because it is, I mean, a huge event, but also a huge expense for whatever team is doing it.

I don’t imagine that it’s changed a lot, but I, I know that, like Rob Dyson used to say that when he was looking at possibly entering them on the budget for doing. The one race was the same as doing an entire year, and no one’s going to make just kind of an offhand choice. Every choice is going to be very thought out, so you know, you need to make your case as strong as you possibly can to get the opportunity

Crew Chief Eric: watching Rolex watching LeMans or even the 24 hours of the Berg ring.

It’s a lot to swallow for some people. There’s some diehards, like in the A-C-O-U-S-A, we try to stay up as long as we can to watch the race and watch you guys compete. You got a lot of folks out there that are coming into [00:37:00] Motorsport by way of things like Drive to Survive and Formula One and other channels and disciplines of Motorsport.

So if somebody asked you, Butch, I heard, should you raced at Lamont? You know, I don’t know if I can stomach watching this type of racing. What would you say to them to get them excited to watch something like the 24?

Butch Leitzinger: You know, I’ve been to Lamont a couple times since with Michelin, where Michelin rewards some of their best dealers with a, a trip to France and with their spouse and, and they’ve taken the, the event and no one ever comes away from that.

Disappointed. It’s amazing. There’s, there’s nothing like seeing cars go that speed at night. I mean, just like visually the, the sensory overload as the cars burst through the darkness and come screaming past you and just all of your senses are just so completely attuned to, you know, and being assaulted really as the car goes by you.

It’s something very special. And if you ever get any chance to go to Lamont to visit Lamont, definitely take it. If you can do it with a package, it’s even better, you know, if it’s some kind of group or you can get tours and get, get behind the scenes, it’s so much better. [00:38:00] But yeah, it, it’s an event. You know, it’s, it’s like, you know, I’ve been to like the Preakness horse race and like Indy 500.

Even just standing there, you know, in the grandstands or in the infield of the Preakness, the buzz of the people. There’s like electricity in the air. You really feel like you’re at an event. You know, it’s not just like going to a sporting event. It’s going to, it’s really significant event where I think what they have like 200,000 people are there, you know, watching it.

You really feel like you’re a part of something. Anyone who goes there will not come back Disappointed.

Crew Chief Eric: I’m glad you opened the door to talk about being part of something as we wrap up here. So, if you could transport Butch from the past to the current season, you know, the last couple years of cars, is there anything you would drive that’s out there on the track now?

Butch Leitzinger: I wouldn’t drive it very well, probably. I definitely try to maybe not let anyone know it was me, ’cause I’d probably embarrassed myself. But I am very interested though in, in the modern prototypes and the hybrid systems and, and just. Everything that goes into it. And honestly, like, you know, I, I try to watch some of the racing on tv and I’ve never really seen very good [00:39:00] explanations on what are the drivers doing, what are the teams telling ’em to do?

Like how much is automatic, but how are they balancing the, like all these different systems. I’m very curious on the technical side, how all that works together and how much the driver is actually doing with it. You know, I have seen the cars though, and they’re incredibly impressive. With the hybrid system and the, the ice engines, they absolutely just explode off the line.

Coming out of a, a slow turn, the acceleration is just mind blowing. Yeah, that, that would be probably the thing that I would like the most is just to be able to feel the acceleration that the modern cars have

Crew Chief Eric: this year, next year, and next couple seasons are gonna be a big to-do because Aston Martin is back.

Ford has announced that they’re coming back to L-M-P-G-T-P. Do you think Bentley’s gonna make a return in the future? What are your thoughts on that?

Butch Leitzinger: Obviously they don’t have any inside knowledge, but I do know that they looked at LMP two, can’t remember how many years ago, but I wanna say like maybe six years ago, five years ago, before Covid anyway.

And at the time it seemed kind of odd to me, but I think they probably knew at the time that basically the prototypes were kind of going towards LMP two kind of size and then [00:40:00] with with the hybrids and all that. So I wouldn’t put it past them. I know the Volkswagen board is keen to keep Bentley. Known as a performance brand.

That was the reason that we went in the first place was that when Volkswagen purchased Bentley at the time, they morphed into like, it’s kind of Rolls Royce, but not really. They had a hard time kind of saying what they really stood for, I think. And Volkswagen Group came in and, and said, we need to reestablish what Bentley is.

And you know, I think it worked really well. I think when you see a Bentley actually has some basis for the performance behind it, you know, like it actually has history, you know, so, and it’s not only ancient history, it’s also. Modern history. So yeah, I, I wouldn’t be surprised if, you know, every few years, maybe every 10 years or something like that, they decide that they need to kind of freshen that up and go back.

I hope they do ’cause it is great. One of the coolest things when I was with Bentley is we did some factory visits and it was just great to go to crew, these old brick buildings. I. And where they built spitfire engines during the war and, but they actually to see like the way that they’re assembling these cars, like seeing the wood be cut for the dashes [00:41:00] and, and the leather selected.

It was cool to see cars still made by people’s hands. If the Volkswagen group can justify it. I’m sure that there’s still people at Bentley that want to go back to Lamont.

Crew Chief Eric: This year’s also a big year for Lamont because it’s going to be the 12th running of the classic. It’s been a while since the classic.

So if you got an invite to go run one of your previous Lamont’s entries, would you do it?

Butch Leitzinger: Oh, absolutely, yes. I’m doing some of that now on stateside where a gentleman named Juan Gonzalez has actually one of the Cadillac more modern is 2017 Cadillacs that he and I drive over here. We, we just did the Sebring Classic.

It’s a great way just to go out and have some fun behind the wheel and no, no pressure just to enjoy reliving some glory days. No, absolutely. If there’s any chance to get back to them all, I’ll definitely take it.

Crew Chief Eric: I’m glad to see that you’re still out there racing butch, and I think you need to update your business card.

Just say Butch inger to LeMans and beyond.

Butch Leitzinger: Sounds good.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, as we wrap this out, I wanna pass the torch to our A CO Ambassador Mai Lee for some closing thoughts.

May Lee (ACO USA): Thanks a lot, Butch, for your [00:42:00] time here and sharing your wisdom and your stories. It’s been very enlightening and very enjoyable, and thanks again to Eric for the excellent hosting for the event.

Thanks to all the a CO members who’ve dialed in. Have a great rest of your evening.

Crew Chief Eric: Thank

Butch Leitzinger: you very much

Crew Chief Eric: and on behalf of everyone here and those listening at home, thank you Butch for sharing your stories with us. We took a deep dive into the incredible journey of Butch Litzinger and his six attempts at conquering the 24 hours of LeMans from his near victory with Bentley in 2001, to the challenges and triumphs that defined his career.

Butch’s story is one of perseverance, passion and resilience in the face of adversity. A special thanks to Butch for sharing his experience with us and giving us a closer look at what it truly takes to race at Lamont’s. His podium finish in 2001 will forever be remembered as one of the most remarkable moments in endurance racing.

We hope you enjoyed this presentation and look forward to more evening with a legend throughout the season. And with that Butch, I can’t thank you enough for coming on the show, sharing your stories with us. And I have to say, it feels really odd to say this, but I grew up watching [00:43:00] you race and it’s been an absolute honor to sit down and listen to you and talk about your stories.

So thank you for sharing.

Butch Leitzinger: It was very kind of you. I appreciate that, Eric. I had a great time. Uh uh, thanks. I’m happy to do it at any time and keep turning laps. Right on.

Crew Chief Eric: This episode has been brought to you by the Automobile Club of the West and the A-C-O-U-S-A from the awe-inspiring speed demons that have graced the track to the courageous drivers who have pushed the limits of endurance. The 24 hours of the LeMans is an automotive spectacle like no other For over a century, the 24 hours LeMans has urged manufacturers to innovate for the benefit of future motorists.

It’s a celebration of the relentless pursuit of speed and excellence in the world of motorsports. To learn more about or to become a member of the A-C-O-U-S-A look no further than www do LeMansn org, click on English in the upper right corner and then click [00:44:00] on the ACO members tab for club offers. Once you’ve become a member, you can follow all the action on the Facebook group, A-C-O-U-S-A Members Club, and become part of the Legend with Future Evening with the legend meetups.

This episode has been brought to you by Grand Touring Motorsports as part of our Motoring Podcast network. For more episodes like this, tune in each week for more exciting and educational content from organizations like The Exotic Car Marketplace, the Motoring Historian, break Fix, and many others. If you’d like to support Grand Touring Motor Sports and the Motoring Podcast Network, sign up for one of our many sponsorship tiers at www.patreon.com/gt Motorsports.

Please note that the content, opinions and materials presented and expressed in this episode are those of its creator, and this episode has been published with their consent. If you have any inquiries about this program, please [00:45:00] contact the creators of this episode via email or social media as mentioned in the episode.

Highlights

Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.

00:00 Meet Butch Leitzinger: Racing Career Highlights
01:50 Butch’s First Encounter with Le Mans
03:53 Challenges and Experiences at Le Mans
06:37 Comparing Daytona and Le Mans
11:53 Racing with Panoz: The Journey Continues
13:13 Switching Teams: From Panoz to Cadillac
16:19 Bentley Era: High Stakes and Iconic Wins
22:12 Transmission Troubles and Disappointments
23:14 Comparing the Bentley to Other Cars
25:10 The 2002 Bentley Campaign
28:14 Bentley’s 2003 Victory and Controversy
30:25 Transitioning to Ferrari and GT Racing
32:53 Lessons from LeMans; Advice for Aspiring LeMans Racers
38:33 Modern Prototypes and Future Prospects
41:51 Closing Thoughts and Acknowledgements

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All of our BEHIND THE SCENES (BTS) Break/Fix episodes are raw and unedited, and expressly shared with the permission and consent of our guests.

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Evening With A Legend (EWAL)

We hope you enjoyed this presentation and look forward to more Evening With A Legend throughout this season. Sign up for the next EWAL TODAY!

Evening With A Legend is a series of presentations exclusive to Legends of the famous 24 Hours of Le Mans giving us an opportunity to bring a piece of Le Mans to you. By sharing stories and highlights of the big event, you get a chance to become part of the Legend of Le Mans with guests from different eras of over 100 years of racing.

What makes Butch’s story compelling isn’t just his success – it’s his humility. He never chased the spotlight, never courted controversy. Instead, he let his results speak. Multiple wins at Daytona, Sebring, and countless podiums across IMSA and ALMS are testaments to a career built on substance over style.

During the session, Leitzinger reflects on the changing landscape of racing, the camaraderie of the paddock, and the quiet joys of driving. His insights are thoughtful, tinged with nostalgia but never bitter. He speaks not as a retired hero, but as a man who simply loved the craft.

2002 Le Mans 24 Hour Race, Le Mans, France. Bentley Pitstop. World Copyright Jeff Bloxham/LAT Photographic

Butch Leitzinger may not be a household name, but within racing circles, he’s revered. His story reminds us that greatness doesn’t always roar – it often whispers. And in those whispers, we find the soul of motorsport: dedication, resilience, and a deep respect for the machine.

ACO USA

To learn more about or to become a member of the ACO USA, look no further than www.lemans.org, Click on English in the upper right corner and then click on the ACO members tab for Club Offers. Once you become a Member you can follow all the action on the Facebook group ACOUSAMembersClub; and become part of the Legend with future Evening With A Legend meet ups.

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Screen to Speed: Alessia Dallafontana

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September 22, 2025

Alessia Dallafontana is carving her path—one lap at a time. From her first electric kart to podium finishes in Mexico and a bold move to Spain, Alessia’s story is a testament to passion, resilience, and the power of dreaming big.

Photo courtesy Alessia Dellafontana Instagram @alessia.dallafontana

For Alessia, racing wasn’t just a hobby – it was a revelation. “Instead of love at first sight, it was love at first drive,” she recalls. A spontaneous family outing to a karting track after watching Formula 1 ignited something deep within her. The adrenaline, the butterflies, the thrill – it all felt like home. “I’ve tried many sports,” she says, “but nothing felt like karting. The smile under my helmet says it all.”

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Racing can be dangerous, and Alessia’s family knew that. But their support never wavered. “They’ve always been there,” she says, “making sure I’m doing what I love.” That emotional safety net gave her the courage to chase podiums and push through the tough transitions – from electric karts to gasoline-powered machines.

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Switching from electric to professional combustion karts wasn’t easy. The sound, the feel, the speed – it was a whole new world. “At first, it was tough,” Alessia admits. “But with time, training, and commitment, I adapted. Now I feel confident in this new way of driving.”

Her journey reflects the broader evolution of motorsport, where electric and hybrid technologies are reshaping the future. Alessia’s early experience with EVs positions her perfectly for this shift.

Highlights

Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.

00:00 Meet Alessia Dallafontana
01:01 Alessia’s Early Racing Journey
03:35 Family Support and Challenges
04:50 Transition to Professional Racing
08:19 Life in Spain and Racing Academy
11:15 Adapting to New Challenges
16:54 Future Goals and Inspirations
20:24 Balancing Life and Racing
27:35 Advice for Aspiring Female Racers
30:33 Closing Remarks and Acknowledgements

Transcript

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] Welcome to Screen to Speed, powered by Init eSports. In this podcast, we dive into the journeys of remarkable individuals making waves in sim racing and bridging the virtual with the real. From the thrill of digital circuits to the roar of real life racetracks, we explore the passion, dedication, and innovation that drives the world of motor sports.

We’ll hear from athletes, creators, and pioneers sharing their stories, insights, and the powerful ways sim racing is connecting communities and creating pathways into motor sports. So buckle up screen to speed starts now.

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: Welcome, everyone. Annie talks. Happy to see everybody here. Uh, today we got Alessia Della Fontana with us, uh, welcoming this hour.

Alessia Dallafontana: Thanks for having me. [00:01:00]

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: Yeah. So let’s start. I know that you’ve been in, uh, electric carting, uh, all your way. Start right away.

Alessia Dallafontana: Yeah, I did start it in electric racing. And I think that the thing that, you know, hooked me was obviously, um, the speed, you know, that shut off adrenaline, but I think also that constant feeling, you know, of butterflies in your stomach.

Mm-hmm. You know, it. It’s, it’s a nice feeling, you know, sometimes it’s, you know, related with, with nervousness and all that stuff, but I don’t know, for me, it’s like a reminder that I’m doing the thing that I love and that I’m really, um, into it and, you know. Making everything possible to do it right.

Mm-hmm. I don’t know. It’s like that reminder that I’m doing what I love and that I’m doing it [00:02:00] right.

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: That’s awesome. So that was more like fun for you, right? When was like you, uh, decided that that’s your dream to.

Alessia Dallafontana: So it’s funny, it was, um, a weekend of Formula One race and I was watching it with my family and after that we decided, um, to go to a cartoon track, you know, just to have some fun.

Mm-hmm. Um, but the thing is I really loved it. Um, I say like, instead of a love at first side, it was like, love at first drive. I don’t know. I, I enjoyed it so much that I asked my dad if it was, if it would be crazy to, to try it as it’s as a sport. Um, I mean, I’ve always been like. A very sportive person.

Mm-hmm. You know, trying many disciplines at school level competitions, but you know, always there, um, searching new sports. [00:03:00] Um, but yeah, now that I look back, um, nothing felt how Hearting feels like. I don’t know. Um, it’s a feeling I can’t really express with words, but I think that the smile underneath my helmet says, you know?

Mm-hmm. And it’s, yeah.

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: Nice. So you, you just, uh, felt like. Hey, this, this is, uh, uh, like my job, which I want to do and I want to sing Driver. Yeah. And actually the formal one inspired you. Uh, yeah. Think in that way. That’s awesome. And yeah, you mentioned that, uh, you went on with your family. Uh, can you, how family react?

Uh, like, you know, that’s dangerous sports, of course. And, uh, maybe they worry about you. Yeah,

Alessia Dallafontana: yeah. So yeah, obviously they’re, sometimes it gets scary, you know, it’s, it’s. It’s a tough sport. Yeah. And sometimes it can be really dangerous, but I think that, um, I don’t know, they’re always been there [00:04:00] supporting me and making sure I am doing the things I love and achieving all my dreams.

So yeah, I think they. Play like a crucial role in this journey because, well, for me, um, I don’t know. Family is, it’s really important and, you know, having their support, um, keeps me motivated, you know? Mm-hmm. And it just, yeah, the reminder that. Yeah, as well. I’m doing the things I love, the people I love support me and yeah, I, I’m really grateful with them for, for being by my side in this journey.

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: It’s really nice that, that’s real few more tough times on the racing track and to adapting to the cars. Uh, can you about started in cars and then you moved to professional cars? Uh, yes. In Mexico, you, uh, earned P two. And how do the podiums. [00:05:00]

Alessia Dallafontana: Well, obviously they felt amazing. I mean, one of, uh, every driver’s dream is to be on the podium and Yeah.

You know, it was like my first dream. It’s becoming a reality and mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s an amazing feeling, but for me it was also like that boost of confidence. I mean, it made me realize that I belong in this world and I felt proud of myself because, because, um, those result, those results were, uh, the product of my hard work during my first months of my.

Of my current journey

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: also. Tell me about your view started with electric cars and driving cart with, uh, with engine. Yeah. Uh, how does it feel? Was it different? Uh, you know, we got a lot of EV cars, uh, nowadays on the roads. Yeah. Uh, what do you prefer from your side?

Alessia Dallafontana: I mean, obviously the, I felt a [00:06:00] huge change, you know, because, um, the electric guard, well, at first.

They, they don’t have the same, you know, the same sound, you know, it’s not the same. Mm-hmm. The same sound. Also the feeling changes, the driving changes, you know, because it’s, it’s a different track, a different engine and yeah. One runs with full battery and the other one has electrical parts and also aing with gasoline and all this, this stuff.

So. Yeah, it was, it was a huge change because, well, also the speed, you know? Mm-hmm. Um, the change of speed is really, really, it impacts you, so. Yeah, I did felt it like a, a big change. And at the beginning it was tough for me, you know, because I, I was used to a way of driving with the electrical cards.

Mm-hmm. And when changing to the professional cards, well I, I needed to [00:07:00] adapt to these new, um, way of driving. So, yeah, at the beginning it was tough, but with the time and training and. You know, compromise it. It changed, you know? And now, and now I feel more. You know, more, more confident mm-hmm. In this new other way of driving.

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: Yeah. You know, definitely I started from, uh, ing, like I started in professional ing right away, but I had some endurance races and rent cars. Uh, definitely, uh, because professional cars. They’re lighter. Um, yeah. Yeah. And, uh, you know, accelerate in a really fast way. So yeah, it’s, it’s really cool that you jump into this because, uh, I think nothing with Scar was, uh, especially if you ever going to try them.

Yeah. They’re really fun. Yeah. Yeah,

Alessia Dallafontana: yeah. Yeah. I’m looking forward for, uh, trying Yeah. The, the shift during the season. So, [00:08:00] yeah, we’ll see, we’ll see that big change.

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: Yeah. But you know, also physically they’re really hard. Uh, so then I raise an open wheelers and I can say that open viewers a little bit easier than driving in, uh, the, the shifter cart.

Yeah,

Alessia Dallafontana: I can imagine.

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: Yeah, they’re really hard to drive. Um, so you moved Spain actually to join, uh, car championships here? Yeah. Uh, what actually decided.

Alessia Dallafontana: So I found a sports academy. Mm-hmm. And we decided this change because, um, what the academy offered. So in Mexico, I couldn’t always balance school with carding.

You know, I trained on track as much as I could, and I kept a basic gym routine. Mm-hmm. But now that I’m in the academy, I can attend to school, uh, train and track, train with a physical trainer, uh, [00:09:00] have sessions with, um, I don’t know, nutritionist, psychologist, and physiotherapist. Mm-hmm. When it’s needed and all within a schedule that allows me to do everything.

Uh, yeah, I mean, I miss Mexico a lot, but Spain has been like a, a great opportunity to keep growing as an athlete.

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: Uh, why don’t you think that you, uh, actually try racing here or you really, uh, like European, uh, motor sport? Yeah.

Alessia Dallafontana: Well, I mean, I think that, well since little, I, I’ve always wanted to, to live in Europe, you know?

Mm-hmm. It’s, it. There are places that I, I really like, and I don’t know, it was more of, I found an academy in Spain. Mm-hmm. And, um, yeah, I, it was more like, oh, I found this opportunity and I’m taking it. Mm-hmm. So. [00:10:00] It’s not like I was looking for many options and then I choose one. No, it was more like I saw the opportunity and, um, well, obviously after talking to my family and all this stuff, I, we, we, we made that decision, you know?

Mm-hmm. And well, it, it was also like a personal thing because my parents were looking forward to, to, to move to Spain. Mm-hmm. So. Although I’m in Barcelona and they’re in Madrid, you know, having family closer and yeah, they keep, you know, achieving their dreams, you know, their goals, moving to Spain and start a new life here.

And obviously being as much as, um, close as much as they can to me. So we’re. Together. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, it was more of like, oh, we have the opportunity, we take it and well, it, it also, um, turned [00:11:00] out that it was like a family goal to move to Spain. Mm-hmm.

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: That’s really nice that your goals kind of, uh, met and, uh, you got, yeah.

Uh, only one way, like to Spain and, uh, yes. Here and develop. Cool. Um, yeah. What’s the biggest, ch, biggest, uh, difference between racing? What,

Alessia Dallafontana: so, in Mexico, the, the passion is huge and the atmosphere is very supportive. While in Spain, the structure is more demanding and competitive mm-hmm. With bigger greeds and stronger rivals.

But at the end, both exes have. Being important. You know, I mean, Mexico gave me my first steps and you know, that first confidence and Spain pushes me to keep evolving.

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: So actually that big, uh, I know that, so in, in car, nice way, like all the stuff, um, where that Spain is more like, uh, motorcycle, uh, con uh, yes.

But on the other side, I [00:12:00] think also got not only one card circuit. Right. Um, so. Now you can mean the Valencia champ. Tell me more about this. What the hardest part of,

Alessia Dallafontana: so I think that the hardest part has been, you know, adapting to the intensity and consistency required, I mean. The level in Spain is very high, so you have to be at your best in, in every single session.

So I think, uh, that part of adapting, you know, because also Mexico and Spain, although we have the same language, they’re. They have different cultures. So it’s, I mean, I am, I’m, I’m 18 years now, but 17 years of my life, I, I, I lived in Mexico and yeah, I was pretty used to a way of living there. Um, and now moving to Spain, you know, it’s a new whole, um, adapting process.

Process. And. Probably, you know, [00:13:00] that part of adapting has been, uh, quite tough. But with the time, it’s, it’s, it’s easier now.

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: Uh, so you like adapting to life and together adapting to the championship? Yeah. And uh, cart and everything like, uh, together in one moment actually. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Uh, pretty much. So you moved to Spain like, uh,

Alessia Dallafontana: yeah.

It was a year ago. Yeah. Mm-hmm. In September last year it was.

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: Okay. So still got a lot of time, mission, and uh, yeah. And definitely you go to, um. So what’s, uh, what’s the one moment you’re the most proud or find this, uh, academy?

Alessia Dallafontana: So, I mean, I, I, I don’t think I have like a specific moment. It’s more like through the whole year.

Mm-hmm. And it’s, um, you know, I’m really proud of my progress throughout the season, you know, my [00:14:00] individual evolution. You know, at the beginning it wasn’t, it wasn’t, um, what did you say? It wasn’t easy. Um, I mean, that part, I needed to adapt to different things and obviously the first impact is really high.

But, you know, with the time and, um, the people around me has, has made this progress progress, um, easier. Mm-hmm. And yeah. Um, looking back now and to all those moments, I am, I am really proud of, of that progress and yeah, always, um, keep head up and, you know, keep this progress. Evolving, you know,

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: it’s nice. So enjoy the moment, the people.

Yeah. Uh, who are with you. It’s actually really nice to have. Uh, so now I’m in some racing and then we got all these, so I’m really happy that in Spain with ing, uh, because Thank you. You know, ING can be sometimes, uh, yeah. Because you know, young guys, they’re really hot. [00:15:00] They, they just want to win all races so some spices can happen.

So yeah, it’s really cool that you adapt, uh, in a nice way to support. Um, so what plans do you have, uh, this year and, yeah.

Alessia Dallafontana: So for this year, the plan was, uh, competing at the Valentine championship and trying a test and like, you know, a testing session from, um, the Spanish championship. Mm-hmm. And I actually had the test, um, last weekend and in two weeks I have the last competition of the championship.

So for. This year, you know, 2025, um, you know, it’s finishing the season with that last race and, you know, um, for the next season it’s, you know, giving that step to the Spanish championship. Mm-hmm. You know, I agree. Uh, a bigger greed, um, more. More competition, you [00:16:00] know, and yeah, pretty much that, you know, giving that, that step forward.

Mm-hmm. And keep open in carting. So yeah. I’m, look, I’m looking forward to, to the Spanish championship.

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: Uh, what class are you?

Alessia Dallafontana: It is, uh, in carting and it’s X 30 senior.

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: So this is like, uh, an adult class. Yeah. Because I know that, uh, you know, when I was in ING can get into adult class 10 years old. Yes. So now you can feel like this.

Yeah. Yes. Alright. Yeah. Yeah. The,

Alessia Dallafontana: I think this, this category has like, uh, from 15 years to, I don’t know, probably 50, 60. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think you can, yeah. Yeah, you can definitely. I think there’s not like a limit on. Mm-hmm. About, you know? Mm-hmm.

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: Yeah. All right. And you mentioned that you’re inspired by F1.

What do you want? Like, would you like to open or maybe would like to, let’s just talk like, [00:17:00] uh, that’s your dream or something. Uh, or maybe you can, yeah. Take, uh, like both the opportunity.

Alessia Dallafontana: Yeah. So as you mentioned, you know, I feel very connected to their mission of giving visibility mm-hmm. And opportunities to, to women in motorsport.

And I mean, obviously seeing girls competing at such high levels, um, proves that it’s possible, you know, and it motivates me to, to keep working hard and I do that. Well, I hope that one day I can also inspire younger drivers as these drivers, um, inspire me. But yes, I think that probably my main goal. It’s, um, you know, formula raising.

I know it’s the, it’s, it’s the thing that I’ve been watching all these years and I really enjoy, and I can feel it through the tv, you know, and I’m, I’m, I’m really excited. Uh, I mean, I’m always [00:18:00] open to new categories, you know, and it will be nice either to try an endurance or a gt, you know? Mm-hmm. Just to, you know, have all the options and, you know, just to clarify in my mind, you know, and notice that there are different options mm-hmm.

From where I could continue. But yeah, I think that my main goal is from your racing.

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: Of course, it, uh, depends on the budget which you’re going to have. Yeah. Because yeah, formal. So yeah, it’s really cool that you like, okay, let’s take this opportunity and like you can jump to GT car anytime or into the formal.

It’s really nice. Um, you also mentioned that you. Like formal E Tell me more about, uh, how do you solve racing? Like, uh, are we going to have only, or you think that, uh, in,

Alessia Dallafontana: yeah, so I mean, I think that the future of electric racing is very promising. You know, Motorsport is evolving, you know, categories like F1 want to go to zero.

They have the zero project [00:19:00] and. Yeah, young drivers like me will, will have the chance to grow alongside this change. Um, obviously it’s not just about performance, but also about sustainability and innovation and yeah, I would really love to be part of this, of this transition. Um, yeah, I mean, I think, I mean the, the mission is it’s, you know, really innovative, but.

For example, formula One, I think they will achieve their zero mission, but I think that other categories will stay with the normal engine, with gasoline and the, you know, that war of the engine. Mm-hmm. But yeah, I think they will start to play with that mix of electrical part and then gym part.

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: So like, uh, hybrids?

Yes. Like a P Yes. Class and lemon. Yes. Maybe we got also hybrids, the formal one, also the hybrid. Uh, yeah, they got the system so. I [00:20:00] think, you know, when, uh, we’re talking about, uh, hybrids, like on the road hybrid, uh, because like it’s more effective. You not connected to the charger all the time for racing Play more.

Yeah. Uh, from braking, in my opinion. Uh, only ev because ev cars, they heavier than hybrid. That’s a factor is really crucial in racing for sure.

Alessia Dallafontana: Yes.

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: Uh, you’re also finishing the high school and academy, so how you balance in your life? Is it hard for you to study, exercise it, the racing driver at the same time?

Alessia Dallafontana: Yes. So obviously the academy has been like a, a huge help on this part of balancing school and and sport. Yeah, but also like the school part has been very supportive. You know, if. I need to be out for the weekend, you know, uh, from Thursday, let’s say Thursday and Friday, I miss school. So, [00:21:00] um, I don’t know if I miss a, a lesson outta class or if I miss a test.

Um, the school helps me, you know, they, they, they give me, you know, this extra week to maybe study for the test and then, um, making it, or if I. In the case I lose, um, I don’t know, a lesson. Uh, the teacher, it’s, it’s there for helping me. You know, if I don’t know, for example, I ask for, um, my friends for help, and if I don’t really understand it or I’m not like fully into it, I can go to a teacher and mm-hmm she will help.

Because they’re really supportive in this, in this part, you know? Mm-hmm.

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: It’s really nice. So you kind of like, uh, can miss some lessons and then like go to and work on the topic and then Yeah. Do test and it’s really nice. Um, you also got sports, uh, psychology. Um, from my side, I see that Central Hills.

Part of our life for sure. It’s a [00:22:00] big part of the sport. What excite you about the university?

Alessia Dallafontana: Yeah, yeah, so I mean, I’m really inspired by my, you know, my own experience. I mean, as you say, as you mentioned, sorry, our head is crucial and you know, at all times we need to be really focused and. That may sound easy, but applying it, it can be complicated.

Mm-hmm. You know, the mind can play, play some tricks that if you don’t know how to control them, it can play on the wrong side for yourself. So, for example, at the first, at first, I, I didn’t have a psychologist and from time to time it was tough, you know, to get out of my own thoughts. Mm-hmm. But. I mean, I obviously had, uh, my family there supporting me and, you know, trying to help, but it’s not the same, you know.

So when I arrived to the academy, I started [00:23:00] having sessions twice a month. Mm-hmm. And during race weekends. And that really helped me, you know, to be more confident, to stay concentrated. You know, I learned to deal with all these mm-hmm. Intrusive thoughts and also these feelings and yeah, simply to clear my mind to, to clear my mind.

And yeah, I think that with a clear mind, performance is better. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, I, I appreciate all this help so much that now I truly understand how important our mind is. And I mean, eh, personally, I’ve always been like a very sensitive person. Mm-hmm. And I’ve always liked helping others. So while watching, I don’t know, interviews from drivers, I noticed that there are many drivers that are dealing with these struggles and I don’t know, maybe, um.[00:24:00]

There’s not enough help to, to these kind of situations. So I don’t know, these kind of things makes me put myself like on their shoes. Mm-hmm. And, you know, to really understand them. And yeah, my goal is that one day I would, um, you know, like to help these, uh, or other drivers, you know mm-hmm. With sports psychology, because, I mean, it’s.

Very, it’s, it’s at very, it’s very, um, a dedicated, um, subject and it needs to be treated well, you know?

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: Yeah, absolutely agree with you. It’s,

Alessia Dallafontana: yeah. Um, it’s very important and I would really, I would really help like to help others.

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: It’s really nice that it would like, uh, because you know, you’re talking about other sports, I think they had.

Cycle like long time, like lot longer than in racing for sure, because in racing, uh, you know, people rather rely [00:25:00] on them themselves, uh, than on this. But, uh, right now I think everybody on this part, we got our minds and we have to work with an everything things. There’s a lot of calm down before the race do after the race.

Yeah. It’s really nice that you’re interested actually. Yeah. Racing. Um, do you have any before the race? Calm down to,

Alessia Dallafontana: so, um, uh, I don’t think I have any ritual. You know, I’ve always heard other drivers saying they put first the right glove and then the left one, or first one shoe, and then the other one, I don’t really think I, I have this type of rituals, you know, I just go for it.

The first one is, mm-hmm. You know, I, I really don’t mind which one goes first, but, um, you know, before a race, I, I really like, you know, just to. Stay calm, you know, avoid stress, be with myself, maybe listen to some music, you know, just to disconnect from everything and everyone. Mm-hmm. [00:26:00] Um, this year I’ve been trying to get used to, to, um, you know, stretch.

Mm-hmm. Before every race. Because at the cart you get like many, many stress, you know, physical stress. Yeah. Maybe from a turn or this kind of stuff. So, um, yeah, I really like to stretch just to make sure I won’t injure myself. And I also like to, um, we have these like lights and play with mm-hmm. Uh, so like,

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: uh, how do you say it?

Play with reaction? Yeah.

Alessia Dallafontana: Yes.

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: Reaction test, something like,

Alessia Dallafontana: yes. Just to, um, you know, also train, um, your mind. Mm-hmm. You know, to. You know, get warm, you know? Mm-hmm. And yeah. Uh, when I’m already in the cart, you know, before getting out of track, you know, just to breathe and constantly remind that, you know, because sometimes we’re really focused on what we are doing and we need to be [00:27:00] concentrated in many stuff, you know, the turn or maybe the drive in front of us or behind of us, or maybe, uh, alongside us or.

You know, paying attention at many things that sometimes we forget to breathe and to be relaxed, and that’s when, uh, mistakes arrive. But yeah, you know, just to constantly remind myself to, to be calm, to breathe, and. While staying focused.

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: So you just said think we got a lot of, uh, calm down, uh, our mind because when you’re less stressed, you are more focused.

Cool. And so can you give advice to girls who would like to, to car center jump into Formula Driver alongside with, with guys? So what advice give to them?

Alessia Dallafontana: So first of all, and I think that it’s the most important thing, it’s don’t let your dreams leap away. You know, I think, um, that dreams are very important and that you always need [00:28:00] to, to catch them.

Hmm. And yeah, I mean, I think that a good first step is to go to the nearest carting track and, you know, ask for advice. You know, maybe talk to local drivers or maybe, um. Go to the local teams, you know, each one of them will have different, uh, things to offer. Mm-hmm. And after discussing with your family, and you can make a decision, you know, with the, the, the best decision for yourself.

And yeah. But I think that always keeping in mind that there is always a way in, you know, and if the door doesn’t open, there is always a window. So don’t give up because there, there is always a way in, you know?

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: Yeah. Here’s a lot of opportune. Round out, not joining, uh, open wheelers, ut cars with some racing, which is moments.

Uh, so yeah, a lot of different options. Track and inspire people, people [00:29:00] as you help them as well. Uh,

Alessia Dallafontana: yeah. And I also think that, you know, being grateful with the people who support you, you know? Mm-hmm. Because at the end, it’s a big family, you know? Um, your family is there, your friends are there. Obviously your team is there, but I also, um, would like to add that this, the, the support of sponsors is really important, you know, and I mean, car is very demanding at, at all levels and, you know, well, I’m always looking for new sponsors.

I would like myself. Um, to thank and mention these two sponsors that been helping me throughout this year. Mm. Eh, we group that is a last Mile logistics company and WBA group. A leader in digital transformation. They’re based in Spain, but they’re operating worldwide. Worldwide. And [00:30:00] I mean, they help companies grow and push boundaries, which is like the same spirit I carry with me in sports.

So, yeah, I think that one of, um, the biggest, uh, advice I would give is to always be grateful because there is a huge family from behind that are supporting you and. Yeah. I think that without them, this wouldn’t be possible. So yeah, always be great with this opportunity.

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: Yeah, for sure. Uh, you’re right. And also can tell, viewers can find you, like follow your career, going to see you in formal one and, uh, would like to see your way, your journey.

Alessia Dallafontana: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, in social media, I am with the same name, with these. Fontana. Mm-hmm. Pretty much in every social media I have the same name, so, yeah. Okay. So [00:31:00]

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: just, uh, buy the naked and find, uh, yeah, pretty girl. Please follow it through. Thank you. Yeah. Once again, thank you so much. You’re really positive.

Uh, I like your wives. Uh, wish you luck in your racing career. And yeah. Thank you. Hopefully we’re going to see you in formal one.

Alessia Dallafontana: Hopefully I’ll be waiting for you. Yeah, no, but thank you for having me. Yeah, it’s, it’s a great opportunity and I’m, I’m really thankful with you guys for it.

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: Yeah. Once for,

Alessia Dallafontana: for having the chance, you know, to, to talk with you.

Lyubov Ozeretskovskaya: Yeah. Thank you so much, uh, for your time.

Alessia Dallafontana: See you.

Crew Chief Brad: Innate eSports focuses on SIM racing events in digital tournaments. They bring eSports content to fans and sponsorship opportunities to brands while maximizing audience reach across multiple sports industries and [00:32:00] platforms. eSports is a woman-led company where diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility is in their DNA and their platform aims to combat bullying and cheating to help make the eSports world as safe and fair as possible.

To learn more, be sure to log onto www.initesports.gg or follow them on social media at init eSports. Join their discord, check out their YouTube channel, or follow their live content via switch.

Crew Chief Eric: This episode has been brought to you by Grand Touring Motorsports as part of our Motoring Podcast network.

For more episodes like this, tune in each week for more exciting and educational content from organizations like The Exotic Car Marketplace, the Motoring Historian, break Fix, and many others. If you’d like to support Grand Touring Motor Sports and the Motoring Podcast Network, sign up for one of our many sponsorship tiers at www.patreon.com/gt Motorsports.

Please note that the content, opinions and materials presented and expressed in this episode are those of its creator, and this episode has been [00:33:00] published with their consent. If you have any inquiries about this program, please contact the creators of this episode via email or social media as mentioned in the episode.

A Leap to Spain: Racing, School, and Self-Discovery

At just 18, Alessia moved from Mexico to Spain to join a sports academy that balances racing with education and wellness. “In Mexico, it was hard to juggle school and karting,” she explains. “Here, I train on track, work with a physical trainer, and even have access to a psychologist and nutritionist—all while attending school.” The move wasn’t just professional – it was personal. Her family relocated to Madrid, making the transition a shared dream.

Alessia speaks candidly about the mental challenges of racing. “Our minds can play tricks,” she says. “At first, I didn’t have a psychologist, and it was hard to get out of my own thoughts.” Now, with regular sessions, she’s learned to manage stress, stay focused, and breathe through the pressure.

Her experience has inspired a new goal: to one day help other drivers as a sports psychologist. “Performance improves with a clear mind,” she says. “I want to be part of that support system.”

Advice for Aspiring Female Racers

While some drivers have quirky pre-race rituals, Alessia’s approach is grounded in mindfulness. She stretches, plays reaction games, and listens to music to center herself. “Sometimes we forget to breathe,” she says. “Staying calm helps avoid mistakes.”

Alessia’s message to girls dreaming of motorsport is clear: “Don’t let your dreams slip away. If the door doesn’t open, there’s always a window.” She encourages young women to visit local karting tracks, talk to teams, and explore all the pathways into racing- from open wheelers to GT cars to sim racing. Her story is a reminder that motorsport isn’t just about speed—it’s about support, strategy, and soul.

More Screen to Speed…

Dive into the journeys of remarkable individuals making waves in sim racing and bridging the virtual with the real. From the thrill of digital circuits to the roar of real-life racetracks, they explore the passion, dedication, and innovation that drives the world of motorsports. They hear from athletes, creators, and pioneers sharing their stories, insights, and the powerful ways sim racing is connecting communities and creating pathways into motorsports.

INIT eSports focuses on sim racing events and digital tournaments. They bring eSports content to fans and sponsorship opportunities to brands, while maximizing audience reach across multiple sports, industries, and platforms. INIT eSports is a woman-led company where Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility is in their DNA, and their platform aims to combat bullying and cheating to help make the eSports world as safe and fair as possible. To learn more, be sure to logon to www.initesports.gg today or follow them on social media @initesports, join their discord, check out their YouTube Channel, or follow their live content via Twitch.

At INIT eSports, founder and CEO Stefy Bau doesn’t just settle for the ordinary. She creates extraordinary experiences by producing thrilling online competitions and real-life events that transcend the boundaries of the eSports universe. And she’s here with us on Break/Fix to share her story, and help you understand why you need to get more involved in the world of eSports.

Tune in everywhere you stream, download or listen!

Copyright INIT eSports. This podcast is now produced as part of the Motoring Podcast Network and can be found everywhere you stream, download or listen!

Reimagining the Mid-Engine Revolution: A Technical What-If of Beating the Mercedes-Benz W196

History of Motorsports

IMRRC

September 16, 2025

Reimagining the Mid-Engine Revolution: A Technical What-If of Beating the Mercedes-Benz W196

In the annals of motorsport history, few machines evoke the engineering prowess and post-war resurgence of Mercedes-Benz like the W196. But what if the trajectory of Formula One had bent differently? What if a coalition of Italian and Austrian engineers had mounted a credible challenge to Stuttgart’s Silver Arrows in the early 1950s – ushering in the mid-engine revolution years ahead of its time?

Continuing where he left off last year, Dr. Karl Heinz-Mertins, a mechanical engineer and mechatronics expert with decades of cross-disciplinary experience, invites us into an alternate history. His speculative analysis, grounded in real-world technical feasibility, imagines a scenario where a fictional Italian conglomerate – Unione Automobili (UA) – emerges as a counterforce to Mercedes-Benz, leveraging mid-engine design, aeronautical principles, and a bold engineering philosophy.

Tune in everywhere you stream, download or listen!

The Historical Context: Mercedes Reawakens

By 1951, Mercedes-Benz had reemerged from the ashes of WWII, unveiling the luxurious 300 series and signaling a return to racing. Their early foray into motorsport with pre-war Silver Arrows in Argentina proved underwhelming, as two-liter Ferraris outpaced their aging three-liter machines. This embarrassment catalyzed a more methodical approach: the development of the 300SL sports car and, eventually, the W196 Formula One car.

Mercedes’ engineering culture – defined by rigorous subsystem testing, conservative innovation, and component-level optimization – set a high bar. Their evolution strategy favored incremental gains over radical departures, a philosophy that would shape the W196’s front-engine layout and fuel-injected powertrain.

Spotlight

Dr. Karl-Heinz Mertins (“K-H”) holds degrees in mechanical engineering and a doctorate in mechatronics/ag engineering from the Technical University Berlin, Germany. In more than 35 years of engineering and business experience in Europe and the US, he focused on product innovation and new business incubation, applying cross-disciplinary methods with cross-cultural considerations. His work included experimental work on intelligent mobile equipment and wind energy systems in multinational corporations and start-ups. His enthusiasm for F1 goes back to the 1961 season.

Synopsis

This episode of The Logbook, delves into an alternative history of motorsports, exploring how an imaginary Italian automobile group could have rivaled Mercedes-Benz’s W196 in the 1954 Grand Prix season. Led by engineers like Robert Eberan von Eberhorst, the team focuses on a mid-engine layout, leveraging aerodynamics and innovative engineering techniques. The narrative includes a probabilistic SWOT analysis and historical insights on post-WWII automotive development, emphasizing the importance of strategic differentiation to outperform Mercedes. Dr. Karl-Heinz Mertins, with his extensive engineering background, presents both real and hypothetical scenarios, highlighting key technological advancements and the speculative potential of an Italian conglomerate challenging the dominant Silver Arrows.

Follow along using the video version of the Slide Deck from this Presentation

Transcript

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] Break Fix’s History of Motorsports Series is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argo Singer family.

Crew Chief Eric: How to beat the Mercedes-Benz W 1 96. An alternative history accelerates the Mid-engine Revolution by Carl Heinz Mertons. The new two and a half liter formula of 1954 raised the bar for engineering excellence and cost of entry to the pinnacle of motor racing. With Mercedes-Benz, leaving the shadows of World War II and becoming an accepted participant in motor racing, again, the Grand Prix community had to anticipate a full out effort of a new generation of Silver arrows.

Indeed, new standards were set with a series of W one ninety six variants born out of vast corporate resources supported by components suppliers like Continental Bosch, and so. In this story, the imaginary Italian UNE automobile previously formed of National Legacy Manufacturers [00:01:00] other than Fiat takes on the role of Auto Union Ag of the 1930s as an antagonist of Mercedes-Benz and Promoter of the Midian layout, a probabilistic SWAT analysis reveals what it would take to beat the mighty opponent for s Stuttgart.

This is the start for a motley crew of Australian and Italian engineers led by Robert Ein Hors to create a victorious challenger. The prescribed engine configuration is a compact V six and homage to the launch of brand breaking with Italian traditions. Emphasis is put on chassis development where innovations and tires breaks, and aerodynamics will provide decisive competitive advantages.

Dr. Carl Hinz. Mertons holds degrees in mechanical engineering and a doctorate in mechatronics and engineering from the technical University of Berlin, Germany. In more than 35 years of engineering and business experience in Europe and the us, Carl has focused on product innovation and new business incubation, applying cross-disciplinary methods with cross-cultural considerations.

His work included experimental work on intelligent mobile equipment and wind energy systems in [00:02:00] multinational corporations and startups. His enthusiasm for F1 goes back to the 1961 season.

Karl-Heinz Mertins: Like many people in racing, I’m bending the rules a little bit here, speaking to a society of historians. I will talk a little bit about the real history, but then we are often to an alternative history and give a picture of what could have been instead of what was.

So, uh, the question is how to beat Mercedes-Benz at the time when it wasn’t quite clear. That they would enter the um, 2.5 liter formula one race season in 1954. And so the model designation of W 1 96 wasn’t known yet. So it’s kind of blanked out here in the title. Let me give you a timeline of where this all starts, and then I will talk a little bit about what happened here on the left side before we get to [00:03:00] 51 in 51.

And all this is somewhat relevant to the story that I will tell in, uh, 51 Mercedes got back out of the destruction phase into the reconstruction and started building cars again. But not just any car. They started unveiling the, uh, 300 W 180 6 as an internal code, and it was a challenge to Rolls Royce to Packard, if you want.

So they wanted to really reestablish the company as a provider of luxurious cars and, and set the standard. Shortly thereafter in this presentation happened at the, uh, Frankfurt Automobile Show in April. Shortly thereafter, the board approved that the company should go back to racing and there was a green light given for.

A sports car project. First, the 300 SL to ease into [00:04:00] motor sports again after World War ii. Now, what happened before, other was of course, the World War II and before it ended, there were plans, particularly in the us the Morgenthal plan that foresaw that, uh, Germany should really be brought back to the Middle Ages and should have no.

Industrial capabilities anymore. The facilities that had survived the World War should be dismantled or destroyed, and, uh, it should be an agrarian society that, that would go forward and not be a threat to mankind going forward. Well, that plan, fortunately, didn’t come to pass. Instead, there was of course, an activity, some of that on the table, and some of it was under the table.

There were of course some of the, uh, Mercedes engineers that formed informal networks, and they were thinking about plans of what could they do and how could they survive, and at some [00:05:00] point go back to the former glories again. That happened and that led to things like the Unimark, of course, a utility vehicle, kind of an agricultural tractor, and of course that kind of responded to the Morgan for plan.

Of focusing on agriculture and not on things like racing or luxury cars. That machine, uh, was very successful. It was developed. It was very little means and, uh, with external help and the binger brothers chipped in and there were other. People that had allocations of sheet metal out for milk cans and and so forth.

And they all contributed because at the time, in 45 when the war was lost, Germany was under military rule and the area around Stuttgart was about the American. Administration then, and so material were scars and had to be applied for and to be a good reason as to why you wanted some material and you couldn’t ask for material for race cars, for example.[00:06:00]

Wouldn’t have been a good proposition. Moves on from there. Pretty quickly, the Arkansas plan gets replaced by the Marshall Plan. Money flows into Europe and the reconstruction is pretty fast and furious. So there were some activities already at the beginning of 51. A couple of the, uh, pre-war one 60 fours.

We’re brought to, uh, Argentina to run in one Cyrus at a couple of races. And the idea was, well, we were so successful with those pre-war silver arrows, we could probably just dust them off and use them again in, uh, this new age. It turned out they were not that successful, was the, uh, moving force behind all this.

He had a, a delegation going to Argentina with these cars engineer responsible for those who, how was not in the delegation. So things were probably not perfectly set up, [00:07:00] but those cars, three liter mercedeses were beaten by two liter Ferraris. And it was kind of a shameful event from a Mercedes perspective because the DNA of the company was indeed.

You make the best cars you can make and when you go racing, you go for the win. You’re not settling for second places. They had to rethink the solar operation and scale back a little bit. Go back to building a sports car and focus only once the dust settled and it became clear how Formula One would be organized in the future, that there would be indeed a new one.

A formula that would give preference to naturally aspirated engines, and it would start in 1954. It became clear. Now, that was the new goal for Mercedes, but in the interim, they were working on a race car that they could build out of this luxury car. Kind of a clumsy way to do it, but nevertheless, it turned out to be [00:08:00] quite successful around the same time, at the end of 1951.

Alfa Romeo, who had had two very successful years with the LF Fetas, decided that that wouldn’t be a long term proposition going forward with those cars. They were at the end of their development potential, and you couldn’t increase the uh uh, compression ratios and the supercharger pressures and so on, and you couldn’t deal with the fuel consumption that increased exponentially.

So the abandoned racing. Completely. Now if, if you are a competitor in this Grand Prix racing scene and you think about, well, I have to compete with Mercedes again, they’re not doing things half baked. You have to have the financial strengths. And you have to have the intellectual strength to build a true competitor, a good car that can indeed meet and beat Mercedes-Benz.

It takes something. So here [00:09:00] is where I, we are off into La la land if you want. So during 1952, where could a group come about that would make a challenge for Mercedes, not in France? I think, you know, the CTA arsenal was. Rolling disaster and would not have yielded a real competitor in England. BRM was a, uh, bureaucratic mess, and it wasn’t really going anywhere fast, and it was also too much looking backwards to the 1930s technology wise.

So I could see that scenario in Italy. If you reconstruct something like the ion that had been very successful in Germany and had provided this competitive product to Mercedes in form of the, uh, mid-engine silver arrows that were initially designed by failure net Porsche and. Engineering office and then, uh, Nan Ho in particular [00:10:00] insourced more and more of that activity.

So I suggest something like this, and. Bil should, uh, happen in northern Italy and it would be where, you know, out in Germany was pretty much mandated by the banks that they had to support the capital in Italy, the IRI, the state holding. To which Alpha Romeo already belonged, would be a good vehicle to provide some serious competition to fiat, which totally dominated the uh, Italian auto scene volume wise and value wise, something needed to be done because frankly, I think people with some foresight knew that companies like ER and Alpha Mayo.

By themselves couldn’t survive long term. Hindsight tells us that they didn’t, but we’re back in 1951 ish, two ish. This could have happened. We could have had a conglomerate of different, uh, brands that would cover different segments [00:11:00] in the marketplace. They could even have an, um, a foreign branch in France.

ARD would be a, a good candidate. In those days, you couldn’t trade easily across country boundaries. So Fiat had sim. In France, we would have ARD and uh, we would have a luxury segment where Luncher would play a big role. Ista Fch would also be integrated, the name rights would be acquired, and you would establish the luxury and the top end of the range.

With that brand, there would be an entry also, in terms of a tubial. Vehicles and the scooter, a pretty rugged scooter from is O was available. So we have already the low cost entry brand is O auto vehicle that makes this ISTA and they also made the scooter. So we cover that. And also in addition, goes back to last year’s presentation.

We also have a branch that [00:12:00] deals with ag tractors ’cause that helps. Uh, developed the metso join region in Italy, and that’s, uh, one of the motivators why. IRI will support the sole effort. This sole effort needs also to be joined by Pelli, which has an interest in promoting their tires. And altogether, this could be a competitor or could be the financial resource, intellectual resource to provide a real competitor to Mercedes.

So we have a few individuals here that will constitute the core team. But the head would be Robert Horst, who had ample experience in mid-engine cars at Ion before the war. After the war. He was involved in the Alia 360, which also was designed and outsourced and relocated team of Porsche engineering.

Fer. Porsche was incarcerated at the time in France, but his son and some of the old [00:13:00] team members were working there. I put here Kois as kind of the project manager in place as the right hand of Iran. Horst, who was certainly the intellectual mastermind, but not necessarily involved in all the nitty gritty.

So Nico is, will take care of that. He has, um, experience at the Alfreda program and we bring in. Different generations. I think from my own professional experience, I think it’s always very helpful when you have multiple generations on a team, not just an inbred group, so to speak, of gray beards. You need some of them, but you don’t want to have the.

Whole team of them. So we recruit and those are real people. Of course, as you know, Kalo Kitty and Choto Sini, both are already at Alpha Romeo. It makes sense to rely on them a lot for chassis and for development and test and so on. They’re enthused and they come very importantly [00:14:00] from the University of Pisa.

So they have at least in, in. Case and degree in aeronautical engineering, and we’ll see later on that taking license from or learning from aeronautical designs and skills and technologies makes a lot of sense when you want to build a world beat a race car. On the engine side, we lean more on the ER personnel.

There is of course Francesco Lio, who pretty much developed the V six engine at Luncher. The principles, at least the angle of 60 degrees. It goes back to him. He analyzed the dynamics of various V angles and when you look at the history of Blanche and you know, they experimented with everything from 11 degrees.

Downwards or upwards and 60 degrees is obviously the ideal, but there’s also a solution with 120 degrees later on. Dillo found [00:15:00] that already in the 1940s, so he is obviously a member of the team. Then, uh, the kina is maybe a more practical engine designer who can detail. An engine war, and he has shown that already as, as a long term launcher engineer, I couldn’t get any biographic information on him.

Maybe that’s where some librarians can help me in the future. And then of course, this fellow here. We’ll learn more about him. Jose Mika, who retired in 1950 from the Porsche engineering team. We’ll rehire him as a consultant because he’s a specialist in aerodynamics, and we understand aerodynamics will play a big role if we want to beat Mercedes.

And it’s also important to work very closely with the tire manufacturer. So we want to have somebody. I’m not particular about the name from Pelli, from the tire partner because suspension, layout and design [00:16:00] will have to be very closely coordinated with the tire capabilities. And so you want to have the tire people on your side.

It’s one of the lessons also from the Solar Arrow pre-World War II, where Mercedes worked very closely with Continental and that was very helpful to them. Porsche and uh, ot. We’re not quite as engaged with Continental, and it was to their detriment sometimes. So the first task of this newly formed team was before you start designing anything, you know, go by this ancient wisdom here.

If you know you’re enemy and you know yourself. You need not fear the result of a hundred battles. So find out as much as possible about Mercedes. Where are they going? What can you expect from them? Rather than focusing just on your own thoughts and say, we know best how to build the best race car.

Anticipate what your enemy or your competitor will do, and then not copy them. The goal is not to copy them. You cannot [00:17:00] out Mercedes. Mercedes, you know, if you try. It’s a losing battle. You have to do something. You have to look for unfair quote unquote advantages, and you have to do something different.

For example, mid-engine layout as opposed to what is most likely mercedes’s solution, the front engine. And then as mentioned before, aeronautics holds. A lot of nuggets of wisdom and a lot of technology pieces you want to adopt. So you won’t send out people like Ka Kitty to snoop around what’s going on in aeronautics and at the universities that still teach that there wasn’t too much actual building and designing going on after World War.

’cause of restrictions by the Allied forces. So what can you expect reasonably from Mercedes-Benz? Well, we know the company wanted and did indeed, uh, recover from the ashes. There was a lot of rebuilding going on because Mercedes had a very loyal workforce and a lot of people that had [00:18:00] survived World War II went back to remove some of the rubbles and to secure some of the machinery and repaired and to improve on it.

Uh, it’s pretty obvious that AU and Auer will stay engaged. Auer already in his sixties, you can imagine, tend to relive the old days, the glory days of thirties, and that’s why he pushed for, you know, this early engagement in Buenos iris in 51 because you thought, Hey, we have the goods still here, and why don’t we just refresh a little bit when we.

Uh, had been successful with, I think Rudolph, by his nature, was more interested in a clean sheet design and be more in the times then rather than looking backward. What you know about Mercedes is they are very methodical in their development. They’re not just going from the drawing board quickly to the foundry.

And to the machine shop and then assemble and go to the racetrack. That’s not their way of doing things. [00:19:00] They will work on components, test the components to death, assemble the components to subsystems test again in the lab, the systems and subsystems to death. When that all works out, then they have a car, and then they will also test it first on a lab with a rolling surface.

And before they ever hit the tracks, they will know a lot about the vehicle and its capabilities, and then they will go out to the track finally. And then there’s only small modific. Necessary some tuneups. And this leads to a situation, this is one of my rocking horses here that I like to think about and talk about, and that’s the evolution strategy as it applies to, uh, technical systems and developments.

The speed of progress. You can say it depends on the mutation size. How much do you change you? You start typically with some known platform, state of the art, and if you do very little, there’s [00:20:00] practically no progress. If you move on, you get onto a pretty steep curve of rapid progress. And, and there’s certain window within you can operate.

If you’re too low here with two small steps of improvement, you’re not accomplishing much. If you’re going overboard, you end up here, you end up in a alia situation or in, um, a Monaco TRS comes to mind in a freeboard design of a, uh, grand Prix car, which was basically a, an airplane without wings. You know, the, there was a, uh, a radial engine at the front.

It was. Hanging over the front exel and mass distribution was something like 70% front and 30% rear, which is a recipe for disaster. Of course, you don’t have to be a specialist in engineering to see that. So that was a design that fell somewhere into this part of the, uh, evolution window. Clearly overshot.

You want to avoid that. Mercedes was more in this conservative pioneering mode. [00:21:00] Some people have characterized the company as. Conservative pioneers, they’re going for progress. One example would be that we learn in real history later on, you know, they go from carburate to fuel injection and it’s an incremental improvement, but it’s one that’s solid and it brings some progress.

It’s very measurable, but they wouldn’t go completely to a rotary engine or something right off the bat. There will be a tight budget. Don’t expect any state subsidies or payments. Directly or indirectly, because Germany didn’t have much surplus to throw around. They had hardly been able to cover the basics.

But there would be technical inputs, of course, from suppliers that Mercedes had a tradition working with like Porsche Continental and then the fuel supplier. It was important too because the fuel in those days was free. Formula didn’t prescribe commercially available gasoline. You could brew your own mix, [00:22:00] which they certainly did.

And then there was of course the engineering force within the corporation. You could always ring up a colleague or meet over lunch and get some inputs and so on. So there was quite a bit of intellectual property and capability there. Now Mercedes obviously lost the uh, local nemes. Out on Yon, there was no chance that out on Yon would get back racing.

They hardly survived and they were cut into two pieces. One in East Germany and one in West Germany, or one in the Soviet zone. The other one in the American Zone. Uh, so there was no chance for that. So when they did something, it, it would have to have some benefit for their serious production side of the business.

And so it’s very likely, very probable that they would stick to the front engine because all their commercial. Products would be front engine taken a little dive via Edmund MLA in the 1920s. The, um, say this or [00:23:00] the Bens our age var, but that didn’t last very long. And so very unlikely that they would make a jump that would to them look like going.

Potentially, uh, down the drain, they would probably hang onto the swing AXLs or pendulum AXLs because that was also their bread and butter product. Now, one would expect that they would modify this thing a little bit because we know swing AXLs and we’ll get to that in a moment, are not the ca meow for Good Road ho.

So a case in point for all this, looking more toward what they have and what they want to commercialize is the uh, W 1 94 project. This 300 SL first generation, that’s an excellent model to study. If this case for this question that we have in front of us here, you see this? AU on the 300 representative car and very luxurious and expensive and a dream car.

You know, for most Germans, it was totally an Tanium, and yet [00:24:00] it showed, you know, we’re back again and that would be the basis for this sports car that would go race. So they had an engine and they had to live with this engine because unlike Italians, they didn’t jump right into making five different engines.

Very quickly, they stuck with the block and with what they had to work with rather than tooling up very quickly. I’m amazed, and some people have written with amazement and with appreciation that, for example, designed 25 engines in five years, which was nuts for a small company like that. Mercedes had this one engine.

Which was already an overhead camshaft engine. So a good start, but it was heavy, a boat anchor if you want. So it had to be augmented with other designs that were within the realm of possibility. And one was obviously aerodynamics. And that brings me to this image here, because in 1939 when the, uh, Italians, when they thought they were smart in prescribing, [00:25:00] that the uh, grand Prix of Tripoli was for water tourette.

Cars instead of regular concrete cars. They thought, well now our feas will have a good chance to win this race. Mercedes, at that time when they still had the pockets designed, the purpose built W 1 65 and sent to cars to Tripoli and, and ended up one two. But during qualification, they had to learn the better lesson that a four cylinder Maserati with a streamlined.

Body work got the pole position. It was faster than the Mercedes cars. Unexpected in a way because the engine was clearly inferior. So I think they must have gotten a bit of a lesson there that, hey, we have to look at the, uh, drag reduction and, and so on. Also, again, to, um, study subsystems and obviously roof came up with the, uh, space frame.

Concept, a very light frame to offset the high weight of the engine, but it was an unknown quantity and not many people [00:26:00] have had built these types of delicate space frames. So they built a very quick mule car to test this concept early on before they ever went too far down the pike and designed this final 300 sl.

Super light, but they did. And then to reduce the drag coefficient and to reduce the uh, frontal area, they angled or tilted the engine at about 55 degrees from horizontal to simply reduce the hood height and thereby increase there speed. And here you can see Charles Faru and Alfred Auer looking into the engine bay of that final product at the mall.

So continued lessons to be learned from this. First of all, you learn Mercedes. They don’t go full four out and design everything from scratch. On the other hand, they’re willing to stretch the envelope, you know, to design solutions. Again, somewhat dictated of course by the space for want to have a deep [00:27:00] door sill and threshold.

They came up with the first iteration of the. Following doors that just reached down to the lower edge of the window, and you had to kind of wiggle yourself into the driver’s. When it first got to the Elia in 52 with this scar, the, uh, inspectors were a little bit. Leery to accept that as doors and, and so it was a test for the subsequent LA Mall array, and I think they got into the lia was this type of door, quote unquote, later on for lamo.

They changed it to the tall wing doors as we know them today. And that was in reaction to and knowing that they would. Meet less leniency with the French authorities and with the Italian authorities. Of course, in those years we’re talking 1952, they also experimented with something that was a little bit out of the ordinary and a little bit advanced or too advanced for Mercedes.

One could say this [00:28:00] aerodynamic brake system. Some people will argue that was mostly shown during the time trials to confuse irritate competitors. It was never meant to be really used in racing. This was a little flimsy and it was taken down before the race began. But we also learned from this development that Mercedes was willing to accept imperfection.

For example, when you look at the engine compartment, it has no ventilation. There is no way to get the air out in an ordinary or in a very optimized way where you help reduce overall drag. They fix that later on by having some openings, yet the side, but not in this first generation of the, uh, 300 ssl. So that was one, and then they stuck to this somewhat questionable.

Pendulum rear suspension. Nevertheless, they were victorious in LA Mall and then particular at the car Pan Americana, which was quite an achievement for something that was built from bits and pieces [00:29:00] that were originally meant for a luxurious car. Working. On the other hand, what learned from there for the on automobile team is we prefer chassis over engine power battalions.

Typically, were interested in, for Ferrari in particular, the race car was a big engine, very powerful, and the rest was just a means to move forward. Chassis was never really his. Preference in those days, at least in this case, our team will think differently and will work with Pelli closely to introduce the radial tires, which Pelli had developed at that time.

Not for racing, but for passenger car applications. Uh, sports car applications, Chira. Let’s see, 67, and we add on a competition on version of that tire. We’ll use it for our dream car. Yeah, of course. That also means the driving style has to be adapted to that. It’s not totally easy from people [00:30:00] who grew up with cross supplied tires.

They have some difficulties and that will require also very methodical testing. Let’s look at other components that are important. The chassis frame itself is very important ’cause you want to have a very stiff chassis, and the flexibility has to be in the suspension system and not like letter frames or the frame itself was the spring system for most parts.

We have some lessons to learn from Alia, for example, but this Porsche design very strangely has this space frame, but it doesn’t make use of triangulation. You don’t see that any of these, uh, square gaps are broken up with some triangulation. Very strange. I’m not sure. What their motive was ’cause they were not under weight restrictions.

Really, to me that seems like a half-baked solution, knowing the quality of the engineers that were involved. Alpha Romeo with [00:31:00] the feta, particularly when they ran to the end of its usefulness and modified it to the uh, 1 59, which had the rear axle had also. At least some specimens had this additional framework here.

So you see the original letter frame, oval profile here, and then you can see they already made some augmentation added basically, and upper gird and did, uh, the reinforcement between the two girders quite well, but there was only a partial solution because it didn’t have any lateral connection really.

But it was better than nothing. What makes more sense is a true 3D space frame, as you can see in some of the airplanes of the time. That’s where one of our references to aviation comes in the space frame of a Boeing Stamen plane, which was a training plane. For the most part, it gives us a good idea of spatial triangulation of the frame.

Then, [00:32:00] of course, we can even go further. But this is one bridge too far. I would argue for race car designers, you could use the geodesic fuselage of British airplanes were successful in World War II and were very immune against partial destruction. They could take a lot of damage and could still go back to the base.

You see some spinal framework here that is then cla it by aluminum or fabric. Whatever the material of choice was. This is a little bit too much for race car. It’s also not as easily scaled down from the airplane size to the car size, so this is a more likely and more successful solution. This could be foreshadowing of Mono Cox structures, but again, that’s one or two bridges too far for the time.

Keep in mind, race car designers are also people and they work and concern themselves about their daily lives and their continuation of their careers. If they go too [00:33:00] far away, it goes back to that evolution function. If they veer out too far from the known. They risk that they have a big failure, and having a big failure with something that’s a traditional design is tolerable.

You can always say, well, everybody else did something like that. If you risk and stick out your neck too much with something that’s totally unique. And it fails everybody and their brother will say, well, you shouldn’t have done that. Right? Could be a career modifying event, but we’re talking about wheels and suspensions.

Let’s start with wheels. First state of the art were wire wheels, and particularly Bani was one of the favorite suppliers for that, but that was also a fairly flexible wheel, and it needed tuning and adjusting and maintenance. Cooper early on after World War ii. Changed over to cast electron wheels, and part of the reason was that it was easier to get aluminum mag magnesium in England after [00:34:00] World War II than steel still was rationed and a lot of aluminum was found from war efforts and equipment.

So that was one thing. And it was also good for Cooper spare part business. It was a an OEM wheel that couldn’t easily be replaced as something else. But more importantly, in the US Heli, brandand had introduced already and proven the, uh, magnesium cast wheels machined then to fit, and that won the 1952 in the 500, and it became commonplace.

So I’m wondering why people in Europe didn’t look at those. Developments and said, Hmm, there is an advantage here. We save some unsprung weight and we get a more rigid product. That is obviously proven on high speed oils. And then let’s look at suspension systems quickly. ER had already introduced with the first generation of the aurel, a semi trailing [00:35:00] independent rear suspension, uh, which you can see it.

Top view of here would be the a coil spring and the attachment points to the chassis, and it’s the drive shaft the wheel. So this would be a start, we think for. Uh, development for an optimized rear wheel suspension, independent suspension. For a race car, it has its pros and cons as well, but you can play a lot with the different angles and orientations of components.

You can do that in 3D and get some reductions in tow, in and in Canberra. Change with the, uh, spring deflection. So there’s probably something to be found. Now we assume that a Mercedes must stick with the pendulum axles, maybe in this format, but it, it’s the one that gives you the highest roll center, and that’s not very popular really for race cars.

You can really get to the point where you check up the one wheel and it leads to [00:36:00] instabilities. You have pretty steep kember angle changes. It’s not the best thing for a race car, so we assume that it as well modify that you try to make the, uh, pendulum lengths as long as possible. So you could do something that goes underneath, uh, could even to the opposite side, and you could crisscross the links there.

So I would expect they’re putting myself into it. 1952 that it would work on some of this stuff. And what we see here is an interesting car from New Zealand and it dovetails quite well with people that came back from World War ii, had aircraft experience where aircraft mechanics, a couple of folks in New Zealand built their own car.

They had studied and read about the Aon. Mid-engine configuration and they said we can build that too, and we can go to the scrap yard or to the, um, auction places where you can buy cheaply. The surplus [00:37:00] from the army and from the air Force, and that’s what they did. So they built their own interesting car and it had a very low pivot swing axle arrangement, which is shown here in a, in a picture of the renovated or restored version of this car here.

This is, looks almost like it’s over restored, but it’s interesting. You see very long arms of this swing axle. They almost merged to, to a single axis of rotation down here, very low. And they also pilfered some Lio struts from airplanes and used them as spring and damper. Very innovative and very interesting.

Car. Not too much is known about this. RA four vineyard, which worked with a four cylinder standard Vanguard engine, slightly supercharged, and it had 2088. C. So it was a formula Lire car and didn’t qualify for a Grand Prix, but it was pretty much [00:38:00] only raised in New Zealand, but it has been restored in England and it will come to a couple of events in Florida.

One is uh, Moda Miami and the other is Amelia. So you will see if you get there, you will see the sky in real life. And can see more than from these pictures, but an interesting way that tinkerers worked on something that made a lot of sense and they had a lot of fun with it. One of the mechanics was then the driver, and he managed to participate at Lady Wig Ram Trophy runs for several years was modest success.

Brakes of course are important for the race car. What can you do there? Obviously, ventilated drum brakes were the industry standard fin processes were often used to bond strongly and have a low thermal resistance between the iron liners and the aluminum body. With fins, different shapes of fins. [00:39:00] But by 1952, disc brakes became already a possibility for race cars.

And again, that’s a technology that comes from airplanes. Yeah. During World War ii, a lot of airplanes, British American used already a form of. Disc brakes and there were several manufacturers. Dunlop was one of them. Dunlop worked with Jaguar on, on sports cars and growing with BRM and got that to science already.

And then, uh, Tony Derval, who had already started his own activities with the thin wall specials that I want also to have the latest technology in brakes. And he worked with Goodyear and got some disc brake systems there. But we can assume that that technology was off limits for Mercedes. I cannot imagine that any of these companies, particularly Dunlop, that helped Jaguar, would also help Mercedes to beat the snot of Jaguar.

I think that was off limits, and I think Mercedes understood that. And so they were. [00:40:00] Working with these aerodynamic breaks that we saw already, this roof mounted effort. And there’s also a, uh, patent that was issued to Auto Neon in 1941. Fortunately, that image didn’t make it, but it’s a German patent that was issued, and that shows an aerodynamic break, basically a wing that you can flip up with.

Server power from the engine and assist in braking, probably tailored to those records trips that people made on the auto barn, but it could be used in Grand Prix racing as well. There was nothing. That would prohibit that Anyway, that would be one way to get around the, this great embargo that I would think was prevalent.

The other thing is driver position is one thing, particularly with the front engine car, the typical bomber seat, you know where you sit pretty upright, like in an arm chair or the chairs you’re sitting on, the driver. Sits very upright and provides quite [00:41:00] an obstacle to the aerodynamic profile. And fortunately, this picture came across here and that is in, uh, what is called Zenger.

He erased this thing that was. Based on the Volkswagen 64 or Porsche 64 project, got one. You know, he was an Austrian, so he was close to the Austrian Porsche office at the time. So he got one of these, uh, 60 fours, which they were intended for the, uh, Berlin, Rome long distance arrays. That never happened, if I recall that correctly.

So he got that and you have to consider and had a, a pretty severe motorcycle accident. So his right arm was not useful to him and he needed to be able to lean on the steering wheel when he changed gears. So he had a shifter on left hand side. And he leaned forward on the steering wheel to shift gears.

So it was a bit of an aberration. He needed that kind of seating position. But you can see [00:42:00] here it’s unfortunate. It’s, uh, not the optimum solution when you have a rear engine or mid engine. In our case. On the other hand, what we learned from aeronautics, and particularly from glider planes or sail planes, there was a development going on at the, uh, polytechnic in terrain in, uh, 1953 in particular, there was a new Chro d Olo Avela that was founded, and it was kind of an operation in the corner of a lab first.

But the, uh, team there wanted to change the whole composition of sail planes. ’cause in sail planes, they have no engine. Obviously you need to have a very low frontal profile. You need to have very low drag coefficient. And what they introduced was a leaned backwards position of the pilot. It’s almost a position like you find in or found then in the, uh, say the low grand Prix cars, particularly the [00:43:00] monocoque versions, you know, and they could also beef that up with, uh, some scientific investigations.

I have the source given here that there are optimum angles for body parts. And they’re not 90 degrees. And so the upright sitting position is not necessarily the best, particularly if you don’t have to have high steering forces to work with, which was one of the reasons why people set so upright or why NASCAR drivers also hang on close to the steering wheel, at least the past.

But in the case of a front, well of a, um, car with mid-engine, there’s not much load on the front ax. Excellence of the steering effort, it’s much lower. So you can get by with this more relaxed. Leaned back sitting position and it’s now a standard practice of course in sail planes. But in 53 that was something that was, was pretty new, in fact it was unheard of.

And people were wondering, can the pilots do that? And they had some test flights and they felt, Hey, this is great actually. And so, [00:44:00] uh, we sent of course Kalo Kitty around different universities. Naturally he has to go to, to and to Milan and understand what’s going on there. And so he comes across this and the innovator and the young man who wants to make his place in the history comes across this and says, Hey, why don’t we experiment with that and reduce the frontal area of foreign Grand Prix.

And that goes on with, with engines also quickly talking about different engine choices. It seems quite reasonable for the two and a half liter formula, first of all, that it shows the, uh, naturally aspirated one and the, uh, supercharged version that was allowed at 750 cc. The penalty for supercharging was just too high.

So you look at the 2.5 liter engine and you ask yourself, how many cylinders do you really need? You need 16 cylinders or 24 or or four, maybe six is a good compromise. Very likely [00:45:00] because you can see Jaguar was very successful. Was there six cylinders? Mercedes had just proven, uh, with the, uh, 1 94 project that, hey.

We can win the races and championships with six cylinder engines. And of course, they had slammed it at Mercedes, their engine. That was brought to an even more dramatic fact in the Cummins Diesels special of 1952 that participated in the Indy 500, and there was Freddie Cummins desire to prove that diesel engines could be very successful in any application, including race cars.

So you built this special. Car with the Watson chassis, elongated and modified in many ways, but he chose to tilt the engine practically by 90 degrees. So the crankshaft is about here, and this is the cylinder head. Now this was, uh, overhead valve engine, as I understand it was turbocharged and it was, was tilted for minimum front area.

So you could think Mercedes should think [00:46:00] about those lines as well. In our case here for mobility, we say, well, Landa is really our flagship brand and it relies on V six engines to a great extent. Why don’t we also make our racing engine just like, say that D 20 V six lunch here that they had already at a 60 degree cylinder angle.

Makes good sense. It’s a short engine. It allows more space for the reclined driver position. So let’s do that. But maybe we should change the angle as. The Vergilio had proposed you can do that 220 degrees to make a shallower engine. So I put in this image here, which to be honest is not from the time we’re talking about this, uh, a more recent South African aircraft engine, and it’s a 120.

Degree V six cylinder engine, just to show you what the, the form factor would look like. I think that would give a pretty optimal [00:47:00] configuration for a, uh, mid engine configuration that minimizes the frontal area and the, uh, a drag coefficient. That’s it. So we assume that Mercedes will do this and, and use an inline six system, which we can’t know at the time that that was the wrong assumption.

Uh, I can live with that. And fuel injection is almost inevitable. And the, um, question is, can you even go as far as direct injection into the combustion chamber, or do you allow for an indirect injection ahead of the, uh. Inlet valves. Mercedes obviously had some experience in the, uh, DB 601 aircraft engine of World War II with direct injection, and we know that Schonberg, who was the engineer involved, was parked at the time, still at a small company.

Mm-hmm. Called Good Broad until he got through his deification process and then could join Mercedes again. [00:48:00] Very likely that he would push for an adaptation of this kind of injection. On the other hand, Italy had quite a lot to offer in terms of indirect uh, injection. Fellow Avi Fudo had patented the application in in 1937, a solution for.

A very smart electrical injection. Very much like most cars that we drive today have their injection system and no electronics obviously. ’cause that wasn’t invented yet, but the basic makings were already there. And this thing raised in the, uh, Elia of, uh, 1940. There was an alpha Romeo, two and a half liter six C equipped with this type of injection system.

And it ran on a mix of palm oil. I understand. And some other non-conventional fuel component. ’cause that was when Italy was in this archy. Mode and couldn’t import a lot of [00:49:00] mineral oil. And so it was a, a theme that fit into the landscape and it, it demonstrated and also in a gera motorbike, as I understand that the system worked quite well.

It got forgotten for quite some time, but you could see electromagnetic injection valves here, actuated and timed by a distributor system. Very much like your time, the ignition. So it was not a continuous injection. Like say the Hillborn system in the US would’ve been. So that’s basically what we decide, or we leave it to the engineering team.

Do they want to go with a speaker direct injection that they also have at their disposal within for Mayo, or when they go with something like this indirect injection. So then we say our, our special source will be the emphasis on aerodynamics and we want to create downforce. And we saw this picture of the TAD yesterday that was explained to us.

You can see the fellow who was behind it was a, uh, who was behind [00:50:00] the patent that you see figures from here. And you can see that he not only had side wings, but he also had an elevated wing with end caps and all the makings of a modern aerodynamic concept. So we put all this together into a final product and we think we can beat Mercedes.

On a good day, not always, but on a good day.

Thank you, Carl. I think we have some questions.

Don Capps: My thing that strikes me always when you have these discussions, why wasn’t this sort of analysis carried out then? It’s very capable. Everything’s there. Mm-hmm. So why was the contemporary thinking not along these lines? Because it’s, I know it is just retroactively.

Yeah. But all that was available then.

Karl-Heinz Mertins: Yeah. And I limit myself particularly to the availability of technology bits and pieces. [00:51:00] In hindsight, it’s very easy to throw in electronics, for example, which wasn’t available then. But a good answer of that is. I think I mentioned it briefly, people want to survive in their organizations, right?

And for example, if you’re in it, at least in the time when computers first came up, if you specified IBM computers, you were home free. It didn’t matter that they were not as functional performance wise. They may have had bad service whatsoever, but it was IBM. And so if you were issuing the purchase order for IBM computers.

You survived easily, even if things fell by the wayside, if you would’ve specified some more exotic, more powerful computer and it would’ve given you difficulties. Everybody points at you and says, you, why did you do that? You know, how could you do that? So it’s always safer to stay with the incumbent solutions, and it takes [00:52:00] risk.

It takes the right personalities to venture out a little bit. And with this. Evolution window, you have to be really careful not to go too far out and and fail. So I think there’s more incentive for playing it safe than being too daring. And there’s a herd mentality. So if everybody uses Webber Carburetors in rating, why should I do something different?

Right? But if you want to beat the other guy, as I mentioned, you cannot out Mercedes. Mercedes, don’t even try it. You have to do something different and you have to take the risk and to be willing to risk. I think Iran Horst had demonstrated it throughout his career that he was willing to do that. Thank you, Carl.

Thank you.

IMRRC/SAH Promo: This episode is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research [00:53:00] Center. Its charter is to collect, share, and preserve the history of motor sports. Spanning Continents, eras, and race series. The Center’s collection embodies the speed, drama and camaraderie of amateur and professional motor racing throughout the world.

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Highlights

Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.

00:00 The Challenge of Beating Mercedes-Benz
03:01 Mercedes-Benz’s Post-War Comeback; The 300 SL and the Marshall Plan
08:59 The Shift to Mid-Engine Layout
12:28 The Italian Engineering Dream Team
18:45 Mercedes-Benz’s Methodical Development
26:43 Lessons from the 300 SL
29:04 Chassis Design, Radial Tires, Space Frame and Aviation Influence
33:26 Innovative Suspension Systems
38:39 Brakes and Aerodynamic Innovations
40:43 Driver Position and Engine Choices
47:20 Fuel Injection and Aerodynamics
50:29 Concluding Thoughts and Acknowledgements

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Enter UNE Automobili: A Fictional Challenger with Real Engineering

Karl’s imagined Unione Automobili draws inspiration from Auto Union’s pre-war mid-engine designs and Italy’s fragmented post-war automotive landscape. The proposed conglomerate includes storied marques like Lancia, Alfa Romeo, and Iso, unified under an Italian-state holding company. The goal: to create a technically superior, mid-engine Formula One car capable of challenging Mercedes on merit.

Engineering the Advantage: Chassis, Suspension, and Tires

Unione Automobili’s (UA) strategy hinges on exploiting Mercedes’ likely adherence to front-engine architecture and swing-axle rear suspension. Instead, they opts for:

Mid-engine layout for optimal weight distribution
Radial tires from Pirelli, offering superior grip and reduced rolling resistance
Space-frame chassis inspired by aviation triangulation, enhancing rigidity without weight penalties
Semi-trailing arm rear suspension, allowing fine-tuned camber and toe control

Aerodynamic downforce also takes center stage. Inspired by wartime aircraft and early patents, UA explores elevated wings with endplates and integrated airflow management—decades ahead of their mainstream adoption in F1. Drawing from glider design and sailplane ergonomics, the engineers propose a reclined driver position to reduce frontal area and aerodynamic drag. This innovation, borrowed from the Polytechnic of Turin’s 1953 sailplane experiments, anticipates the low-slung cockpits of future monocoque racers.

While Mercedes likely sticks with a heavy inline-six, UA embraces a compact 60° V6, honoring Lancia’s engineering legacy. The team even considers a 120° V6 layout for reduced engine height and improved packaging. Fuel injection – either direct or indirect – is a given, with Italian patents from the 1930s offering viable solutions.

Strategic Engineering: Know Thy Enemy

Unione Automobili’s approach is not just technical – it’s philosophical. Quoting Sun Tzu, Karl emphasizes in his lecture, the importance of understanding Mercedes’ methods to anticipate and counter them. Rather than mimic Stuttgart’s strengths, UA seeks “unfair advantages” through differentiation, they key being: mid-engine layout, advanced suspension, and aerodynamic innovation.

While this alternative history remains speculative, Karl’s is grounded in real engineering principles and historical context, and he challenges us to think critically about innovation, risk, and the evolution of motorsport technology. It’s a reminder that sometimes, the best way to win isn’t to follow the leader – but to redefine the race.

Photo courtesy Aldo Zana; Society of Automotive Historians (SAH)

This episode is sponsored in part by: The International Motor Racing Research Center (IMRRC), The Society of Automotive Historians (SAH), The Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argetsinger Family – and was recorded in front of a live studio audience.

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Michael R. Argetsinger Symposium on International Motor Racing History

The International Motor Racing Research Center (IMRRC), partnering with the Society of Automotive Historians (SAH), presents the annual Michael R. Argetsinger Symposium on International Motor Racing History. The Symposium established itself as a unique and respected scholarly forum and has gained a growing audience of students and enthusiasts. It provides an opportunity for scholars, researchers and writers to present their work related to the history of automotive competition and the cultural impact of motor racing. Papers are presented by faculty members, graduate students and independent researchers.The history of international automotive competition falls within several realms, all of which are welcomed as topics for presentations, including, but not limited to: sports history, cultural studies, public history, political history, the history of technology, sports geography and gender studies, as well as archival studies.

The symposium is named in honor of Michael R. Argetsinger (1944-2015), an award-winning motorsports author and longtime member of the Center's Governing Council. Michael's work on motorsports includes:

Walt Hansgen: His Life and the History of Post-war American Road Racing (2006)
Mark Donohue: Technical Excellence at Speed (2009)
Formula One at Watkins Glen: 20 Years of the United States Grand Prix, 1961-1980 (2011)
An American Racer: Bobby Marshman and the Indianapolis 500 (2019)

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#44 Thalin (SWE) / Bergman (SWE) – Pro class

#56 Roberts (CAN) / Courtney (USA) – Lamborghini Cup

#70 Brown (SGP) / De La Torre (USA) – Pro class

#99 Rytter (DNK) / Pretorius (ZAF) – Pro class

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Evening With A Legend (EWAL)

ACO USA

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A Leap to Spain: Racing, School, and Self-Discovery

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So why Race at all?

This episode is sponsored in part by: The International Motor Racing Research Center (IMRRC), The Society of Automotive Historians (SAH), The Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argetsinger Family – and was recorded in front of a live studio audience.

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I am, regrettably, that guy.

Just remember: It’s only hoarding if you can’t find the couch. And if you can’t find the couch, well… maybe it’s time to buy a bigger garage!

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The Historical Context: Mercedes Reawakens

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Enter UNE Automobili: A Fictional Challenger with Real Engineering

Engineering the Advantage: Chassis, Suspension, and Tires

Strategic Engineering: Know Thy Enemy

This episode is sponsored in part by: The International Motor Racing Research Center (IMRRC), The Society of Automotive Historians (SAH), The Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argetsinger Family – and was recorded in front of a live studio audience.

Other episodes you might enjoy

GTMSpreading Motorsports Enthusiasm - since 2014

GTMSpreading Motorsports Enthusiasm - since 2014

GTMSpreading Motorsports Enthusiasm - since 2014