About OldRacingCars.com

OldRacingCars.com (ORC) is a motor racing history website, originally launched in December 2000 and having been regularly updated with original content ever since.

Purpose

The aim of ORC is to research and document the period of motor racing from the early 1960s to the end of the 1980s. Our scope includes the main single-seater categories of the sport such as Formula 1, Tasman, Indy car and Formula 5000, as well as the second tier consisting of Formula 2, Formula 3, Formula Atlantic and its related categories, and Formula Super Vee. Other closely-related categories are included, such as the single-seater Can-Am, 2-litre sports car racing, and the American Racing Series that later became Indy Lights.

In the same way that the historical science of Palaeontology maps out different geologic eras typically delineated by mass extinctions, so motor racing has distinct periods delineated by significant changes in technology that had a similar impact. The move from front-engined to rear-engined cars at the start of the 1960s in F1 - and a few years later in Indy car - marks the beginning of ORC's area of interest, and the arrival of carbon fibre construction methods spelling the closure of the garagiste era marks the end. As front-engined cars ran alongside rear-engined, and as aluminium sheet or honeycomb aluminium construction methods survived for a while alongside carbon fibre, there can be no absolute cutoff dates that work for all categories, but we are guided by the dates of 1 January 1964 and 31 December 1989. The pre-Tasman races in Australasia are too important to Tasman history to ignore, but at the other end, there is no current intention to cover Formula 3000.

Editors

Editor: Allen Brown

Starting in October 1978, Allen has kept close track of every one of 3-litre Formula 1 cars built in the 1966-1985 period, plus most Tasman cars and many of the cars built for the 1½-litre Formula 1 of the early 1960s. Allen's extensive unpublished files include continuous ownership histories for the majority of these cars. Since 1999, he has extended his research to cover F5000, Can-Am and Indy/USAC.

Drivers Editor: Richard Jenkins

Richard joined OldRacingCars.com in 2002, and the first version of his 'Where Are They Now?' was published in November that year. It initially covered 'just' 866 World Championship drivers and without any photographs, but has been developed over 18 years to cover nearly 3,000 individuals across six categories, and includes nearly 2,500 photographs. His first book, 'Richie Ginther: Motor Racing's Free Thinker', was published in 2020 to great acclaim, winning the RAC Motoring Book of the Year Award.

Junior Formula Editor: Chris Townsend

Like Richard, Chris joined OldRacingCars.com in 2002, initially contributing F5000 results and histories and later opening up a new front of research with the Formula Atlantic section in 2003. Chris's interests have expanded to cover Formula 3, Formula Super Vee, Formula C and Formula Ford. With Allen, Chris is working on the Formula 2 and Formula B areas of the site. Chris is Professor of the history of avant-garde film at the University of London at Royal Holloway, and brings a professional historian's rigour to our work.

Photographers

USA: Richard Deming

Richard started professional racing and historical photography in 1974 and has covered Indy car, IMSA, F5000, USAC stock cars and IROC, at tracks such as The Indianapolis Motor Speedway, MIS, Road America, Mid-Ohio and Grattan Speedway. Later in his career he has covered all types of historic racing events and concours events and has now been a professional photographer for 48 years. He is also associated with the Gilmore Car Museum as well as a classic and collectable vehicle appraiser.

In memory

Editor-at-large: David McKinney

Author and journalist David McKinney, who died in February 2014, was a principal contributor to ORC's history of Formula 1 from 1946 to 1953 but was also an expert across a wide range of motor racing subjects, most notably on the Maserati 250F and on motor racing in his native New Zealand. He wrote books on Can-Am and on the Maserati 250F, was editor and publisher of New Zealand Motoring News before moving to England in 1985, after which he wrote for a variety of magazines worldwide and was editor of the award-winning Complete History of Grand Prix Motor Racing. As he showed with his book on the 250Fs, he was one of the pioneers of recording histories of individual racing cars and his meticulous files were generously shared with many of ORC's other researchers. He was also a personal friend and his loss is sorely felt.