While our editors traverse the country to find the best content for those magazines, we find other oddities related to the old-car hobby that we really had no place for - until now. With this blog, we're giving you a behind-the-scenes look at what we see and what we do during the course of putting out some of the finest automotive magazines you'll ever read.
Race results for the 1971 Nurburgring 1000 km are readily available on the internet. Ronnie Peterson and Tim Schenken won in a Ferrari 312 PB; another Ferrari 312 PB driven by Jacky Ickx and Clay Regazzoni crashed out after 16 laps; and finding filmed coverage (auf Deutsch) of Nurburgring races from that era is not difficult.
This week's video is a little different, though. To begin with, the Swedish-produced film uses no narration or dialog, just the ambient sounds of rapping exhaust, the plink of rain, and the passing conversations of drivers and mechanics, all with almost no musical accompaniment. There's no narrative. We don't follow any one racer's efforts at Nurburgring. In fact, the racing action itself just serves as a backdrop to everything else taking place on, off and around the track: the farmer hoeing his fields just beside leaping mid-engine race cars, the police officers directing traffic, the race fans barbecuing beside their tents. Nothing's going on here, but at the same time everything is. The video's a fascinating encapsulation of a time, a place, and a culture, and is worth a half hour of anybody's day.
