In SoCal, blessed by good weather, there are dozens of car events each weekend. As a fine artist portraying cars of the past, I like to pick one event to go to each weekend.
Sometimes it is the cars that draw me. Other times it’s the setting and the cars. The setting this time was a Cars & Coffee held monthly at Trancas, a shopping center in Malibu, near Zuma Beach, one of the last beaches before you enter Ventura County.
It was generally newer sports car owners who attended but occasionally there was an old classic. Now winter is a hard time to shoot because the sun comes up Godawful early. I actually went even before the sun was up, which was scheduled to take place at 5:30am. It was a horrible drive from 40 miles inland–once I hit Pacific Coast Highway it was so dark and foggy it was like driving through black cotton candy,
A few cars were there when I arrived in pitch dark conditions. Then I saw the silver 550 Spyder. I didn’t know much history on the model, but will take a minute to cover it.
Porsche needed a race car to compete in the roadster class, and that’s just why the 550 Spyder was created when the production cars weren’t competitive.. They went into racing almost immediately. The third 550 prototype and first 550 to race won its first event at the Nürburgring Eifel Race in 1953.They racked up many more wins, 95 victories and 75 class wins in a long list of 370 races.
Ironically Porsche didn’t think the design up. After Porsche won some races with Gmund coupes, a local mechanic named Walter Glockler won some with his Eigenbau (homemade) specials. Porsche imitated him but made sure it was street legal so you could drive to and from the track.
A Porsche engineer, Ernst Fuhrmann, made a special engine — a flat DOHC engine, similar to engines in Formula 1. It was far more complex than the production 1500 cc engine in the 356, which after all was derived from the humble VW.
Porsche went to an outside contractor, Weidenhausen of Frankfurt , for the alloy bodies for the two cars being raced in the 1953 season. Victory first time out, but the model’s glory is forever tarnished by it being the model driven by actor James Dean, when he fatally crashed on the way to a race Dean was killed when he got bored towing the 550 Spyder he had entered in a race up in Northern California so he took it off the trailer and drove with his mechanic.
He collided with a Ford Tudor sedan along then-U.S. Route 446 near Cholame, California. The Ford, was piloted by then 23-year-old Cal Poly student Donald Turnupseed, who was turning at an intersection when the two cars hit almost head-on. Dean’s car, easily a ton lighter, was reduced to a total wreck. Dean died. His mechanic survived.
In Malibu, 70 plus years later, I was in front of a silver car that looked like Dean’s ride, the sun burning through the fog and the glossy silver of the car caught the light but the crowd was still emerging from darkness, the sun lighting their hair but their faces were still suffused in the fog. I began shooting and only caught five shots before-BAM–I realized it was no use to shoot any further–the sun was up and it was already too bright. I made a painting later based on the best shot in the fog, gratified that the car had emerged as the main player–the crowds’ faces were still fighting to emerge from the fog and darkness, only their hair had caught the sun,
I don’t know when I will have another such opportunity–a historic car, the right color, a fog-cloaked darkness rapidly disappearing like a stage curtain and a car I remember well, if only for the saddest reason. I remember the day it happened, and the subsequent special staging of a tribute to James Dean at a local theatre which I was too squeamish to attend….
EDITOR’S NOTE: This print, a 20″x 30″ on canvas, is being offered by Wallace Wyss to galleries, sports car emporiums, and museums on a consignment basis. Interested parties can reach Mr. Wyss as photojournalistpro2@gmail.com
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