I was only seven years old when this went down. I wish I could have attended but my dad was handling a Texaco gas station at the time and a broken marriage so going to a Trans Am race would have been far off of his radar screen at the time. If only I could go back in time as an adult to see one of these races with all the greats there and the great cars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21Rc8AhuBSY
Thankfully the advent of the motion picture camera kinda helps, right?
I was old enough to see this race, but didn't go. Would you trade being 21 in 1970 for being 14 years older now?
shelbydoug: "When you watched the race in person, my thought was find a place that was the safest you could find because it was inevitable that there was going to be a major accident and as a spectator you didn't want to be involved in that."
Is this how you felt then? I know at the races I did attend back then, that was the furthest from my mind. Looked for the spot where those kind of events were more likely to happen. You were probably more mature.
Well on the T/A races, yes. It was so flat out that it was like a demolition derby in the sense that you expected something to happen at any second and usually it did.
If you look at a track like Lime Rock, there are a couple of places high up that you felt safer on and could see more of the track. Often though a wipe out would happen on the other side of the track where you couldn't see it and often couldn't hear it either.
Some driver would just loose control in a turn trying to take it to hard and run off the track with no big impact sounds.
Bridgehampton on LI was like that too. There cars would run into the sand dunes.
The really big tracks like Charlotte, Daytonna or Pocono have big stands that you didn't want to be in with the sun. Many converted to aluminum and they were like being on a stove.
It was the nature of the Trans Am races to me more then any others. There you related to the cars because they "looked" like the ones you could buy. There was a small issue with them then because guys, not being sexist here since very few girls were buyers, would buy one and think they were trans am racers on the street trying to shift at 7,500 rpm.
It was a different era. I have difficulty relating to even the GT cars now since so many don't look like what you can buy as a street car because of the allowed "ground effects" added.
I've even lost interest in Formula 1. Those are now like electric slot cars controlled by a computer with telemetry and the driver is seemingly just an added decoration.