History Tom Cobbs: Pikes Peak, 1960 Part 4

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Tom Cobbs: Pikes Peak, 1960 Part 4

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I should mention, this is the D-Type I spoke of:



A few from other sources:





The car ran in hill climbs, on road courses, and even drag raced. True rich kid hot rod financed by Bill’s parents.

 

Man....i'd be fun to locate all these cars, fascinating.
Bitchin' pics.

 

The Pegasus and Porsche story… man, it’s a rabbit hole. I won’t drag the whole damn forum through it since it veers off-topic, but the amount of misinformation floating around is wild. Take this for instance - plenty of books swear up and down that James Dean’s ’55 356 was the first Porsche to wear the Mobil Pegasus logo. Total bullshit.



By ’53, plenty of 550s were already carrying Pegasus Oil decals across Europe. Mobil/Pegasus had struck up a contingency deal with Porsche almost from day one. Factory teams, independents, didn’t matter... slap the decal on, win your class, and they cut you a check. They even handed out a brand book dictating where the sticker went and which way the winged horse faced. Corporate control meets grassroots speed. Brilliant marketing, and it stuck. Everyone ran it.

And here’s another wrinkle... the #62 RSK in these shots was owned by Mike Collins. Not exactly a headline name then, and hardly one now. But here’s where it gets personal: I once owned, drove, and ultimately wrecked a 912 that Mike himself had converted into a 911R back in the late ‘60s.

 

I believe this to be Charlie Royal's home built sports car. About all the information I can find on it is that it was hand laid fiberglass, Buick Powered, and did not start the race in 1960 due to a safety issue.

 

I couldn't find a thing on this one... His car number wasn't registered for the race and it did not compete. But it almost looks like a Bocar?

 

Verified. Bocar. If you are interested, more details can be found here:

https://www.jalopyjournal.com/?p=53583

 

They are Rudge wheels for sure. Not sure why they would run em? I assume it was quite a bit of work to modify the hubs to work and the result is a very tucked tire, but maybe they wanted the knock-offs for quick rubber experimentation? I dunno...

That Corvette is really, really cool though.

One of the reasons Tom’s photography gets under my skin is because he didn’t waste film on the obvious crap everyone else was pointing their lenses at. He zeroed in on the oddball details that lit his brain on fire - Corvettes rolling on Rudge wheels, homemade fiberglass contraptions, strange Porsches lurking in the pits. The kind of offbeat stuff most people walked right past. Truth is, I would’ve been staring at that same weird shit right alongside him.

 

The #46 250 Testa Rossa... I believe that car is now owned by Ralph Lauren. Worth somewhere around $40 million.

But look at that lineup... Big V12s, Gigantic V8s... all that power... And they were all smoked by the tiny flat four in this thing:

 

I write every goddamn day, not out of joy but out of compulsion... like a junkie clawing at the veins for one last hit of something that never comes. Thirty years of this lunacy and I still haven’t found peace... only the gnawing misery of trying to drag some crooked, burning emotion out of my skull and beat it into words another human being might recognize. It never works. It can’t. The whole business is impossible. But I keep coming back, strapping myself into the chair like a condemned man, because the alternative is silence and silence is worse.

It’s not noble. It’s not holy. It’s a goddamn curse. And the cruelest trick of all is knowing I’ll never stop... and because of this head space, I often wonder why anyone would read this shit.

 

That’s the thing people miss about Porsche... At their core, they share a lot with early hot rods. The first production Porsche didn’t roll out until 1950, and even then, they weren’t cranking them out in real numbers until the late ’50s or early '60s. In the grand timeline of the car world, they were still crawling around in diapers.

And Ferdinand Porsche? He wasn’t chasing Ford’s empire, hell-bent on building millions of stamped-out tin cans. He wasn’t trying to be Ferrari either, peddling jewelry for the ultra-rich. His mission was simpler.... strip away the excess and build something better by making it less. Emphasize the result with race wins.

Great proof of this is the Porsche Sport Purpose Manual. Porsche literally handed their customers a hot rod bible... aftermarket part numbers for upgrades, suspension geometry tweaks, carb jetting tricks, all laid out like a blueprint for rebellion.

Can you imagine Ford publishing a manual on how to tear into their cars, change parts, and make them faster? Using shit that they themselves did not sell or make a dime from?

It really is crazy when you think about it and these manuals are really cool. If you are interested in checking one out, you can download some later versions here:

https://early911nzdownloads.yolasite.com/sports-purposes-manuals.php