Latest / BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show / Bonneville, Bikes, and the Battle for Legacy: A Conversation with Jon Summers

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Bonneville, Bikes, and the Battle for Legacy: A Conversation with Jon Summers · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

• 0:00
  Brake fix podcast is all about capturing the living history of
• 0:04
  people from all over the auto sphere.
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  From wrench turners and racers to artists, authors, designers,
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  and everything in between.
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  Our goal is to inspire a new generation of petrol heads that wonder.
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  How did they get that job or become that person?
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  The road to success is paved by all of us because everyone has a story.
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  Our guest is an independent automotive historian.
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  He loves cars, bikes, and all things motoring.
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  He's a blogger, presenter, podcaster, and doubles as a teaching assistant and
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  guest lecturer at Stanford University.
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  Jonathan Summers is a lifelong car and motorcycle enthusiast.
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  His most recent works have focused on alternative histories in motor
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  racing, delving into not just what happened, but how those stories
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  were preserved, and by whom.
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  And why, and he's here to share his road to success story and a
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  little bit of knowledge with you on this episode of break fix.
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  And with that, Jonathan, welcome to BreakFix.
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  Thanks very much, Eric.
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  When you position me up like that, I sound pretty impressive, even to myself.
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  Like all good BreakFix stories, there's a superhero origin.
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  So tell us the who, what, when, and where of Jonathan Summers, the
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  little lad who became a petrolhead.
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  I should position myself really by saying that I'm an Englishman who
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  lives in California, and I've been here about 20 years now, so the
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  accent hasn't faded, but a lot of the lifestyle and stuff has changed.
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  My family weren't into cars at all.
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  I always was, from Hot Wheels.
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  And that kind of thing, if I think about the BBC in suburban England,
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  syndicated the Dukes of Hazzard when I was 11 or 12 and learned about the
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  Cold War, it was clear who was right.
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  The jumping orange Dodge Charger, one side had Mustangs and Camaros and the
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  other had half the market Fiat's with race suspension and less horsepower.
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  Like it was obvious.
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  I always like cars.
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  Pivotal times.
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  I remember when my first girlfriend dumped me thinking, well, who am
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  I, you know, crisis of identity.
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  And part of that answer was cars and motoring.
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  I miss the.
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  com boom really, but I was a tech salesman for a lot of my twenties in England.
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  This was the era where they would give you a gas card and a company car.
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  How was that Ford Cortina?
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  Ah, you know, it's funny you say that.
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  So it was Cortinas, but I missed Cortinas, but my first Three
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  count them one, two, three.
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  My first three cars were Ford Cortinas that were by then very, very cheap and
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  very, very rusty, but the correlation between what I could fix, what was
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  fast and what was cheap, that led me to Cortinas and, uh, Over the years,
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  I've had tons of cheap fast forward.
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  So yeah, so it was the sales rep stuff and that was the company car.
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  And, you know, so when I was selling tech products, I was doing 50, 60, 000
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  miles a year in somebody else's car.
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  So I sort of reached 30 and was like, gosh, still single, got the
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  fast car, got the fast motorcycle, what am I going to do now?
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  I sold everything.
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  I went and lived in Rome.
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  Total change of life.
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  Do I need the cars?
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  Do I need the motorcycles?
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  Do I need this whole lifestyle?
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  And I decided that whilst I didn't need really the whole lifestyle and all of
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  that, I did love the cars and bikes.
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  So when I washed up in California, which is the same 18 years ago
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  now, I applied myself to doing some tech sales stuff enough to satisfy
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  my then girlfriend, now wife.
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  And have collected cars and motorcycles and vintage books and
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  not very much else since that time.
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  The first time you were on Break Fix was part of your presentation that you
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  gave with the IMRRC Symposium last year.
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  And the cover art that was given for your bio and that we used for the episode
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  shows you with a motorcycle at what looks to be the Bonneville Salt Flats.
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  You've done some racing in your time, but let's talk about this bike.
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  Passion for bikes.
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  And how did you end up doing some land speed work?
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  I realized I was a good but not great salesperson.
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  I was always a round person in a square hole so I could generate the
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  funds to do the 150 mile an hour car, but not really more than that.
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  In my mid twenties I decided I'd learn to ride a bike, so I came to
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  bikes quite late, always with an intention of doing sports bikes.
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  'cause sports bikes were the thing.
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  Then in, in Europe in particularly, I bought my first bike in 2002.
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  It was a Suzuki.
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  GSXR that was the beginning of a really special relationship with the brand.
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  Love that bike at home.
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  When I came to California, didn't have the bike didn't really have meaningful income.
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  Suzuki were running a competition.
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  It was 20 years, 2005 of the Suzuki GSXR.
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  There was an essay competition.
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  If you Google now my name and Suzuki GSXR, you'll find the entry
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  that I wrote for the competition.
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  The prize of the competition was a.
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  2005 Suzuki GSX R 750, and I won the bike, which was awesome.
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  I'd only just gotten engaged.
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  So out home in England, I'd read about Bonneville.
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  So a friend and I went out to what was then an event called the BUB Speed Trials.
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  So it ran just before proper Bonneville speed week.
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  And it was motorcycles.
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  It was some cars as well, but it was motorcycles.
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  And the year that we went, it was windy.
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  In fact, I remember seeing a streamliner car get turned over at 300 miles an hour.
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  And we were a long way away.
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  And I remember seeing the gap between the surface of the salt and the car
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  is it rolled, but this is the insane thing about Bonneville is they will
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  close the track to cars, but you can still run on bikes and be, you'd be
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  at this class, run what you brung.
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  So I had this brand new straight from the Suzuki dealership.
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  GSXR that I hadn't even paid the tax on, and my friend had a supermoto,
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  which is the last thing you want.
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  It was great for commuting in LA, but it's the last thing that you
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  wanted for, you know, thrashing.
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  that.
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  Because of this accident, they closed the salt.
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  We did something that I don't think you should do, which is like set off,
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  like blast it off across the salt.
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  I did one of those things that you never think you'll ever do, which is I
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  not only shut my eyes at 125 miles an hour on a motorcycle, I shut my eyes
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  for the count of 10 at that speed.
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  Because out of Bonneville there is no impression of speed whatsoever,
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  because there's no other objects around.
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  So you can tell you're doing 125 miles an hour, the bike's doing that,
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  there's the wind and all of that, but there's none of the experience
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  that I felt comfortable doing that.
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  The other thing that I remember about Bonneville, and a sort of metaphor that
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  I've tried to carry with me through life, is that The problem that you have
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  is traction on the salt, so the air resistance gets so great that the bike
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  will wheel spin at 170, 180 miles an hour.
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  Now until you've experienced the back of the bike moving around like you're
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  on a dirt bike coming out of a turn.
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  But you're like hunched over the tank of a sports bike, you know, until you've
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  experienced that it is something that you like, yeah, that's my other takeaway from
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  that particular Bonneville experience.
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  And we did that for a little bit.
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  And then he was like, let me take pictures.
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  And that photograph that I've used as a profile picture was taken right there.
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  And then, so the picture's great.
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  So it's really old colleague at the university of Virginia who said to me, Ah,
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  Summers, you're still using that picture when I was using it at a conference.
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  And I was like, you know, yeah, I am.
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  This was the time when everyone had like given up on privacy and everyone's
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  LinkedIn profile was their actual face.
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  And I was still resisting that idea of that, even though at
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  the time I was doing TV work.
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  So I had had professional headshots taken and that kind of thing.
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  Anyway, long and short.
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  When my feet were held to the fire by a colleague mocking me over the
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  professional headshots, I was like, I'm going to stick with that picture forever.
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  So that picture has been my sort of calling card for 15 years now.
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  It begs the question, do you still have the Suzuki?
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  Yeah.
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  It's sitting about 15 feet away from where I'm sitting at the moment.
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  That's awesome.
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  Yeah.
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  From that, I developed a sort of special relationship with Suzuki GSXRs.
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  I have about half a dozen of different years and models and
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  academics will tell you that collectors it's about connoisseurship.
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  And connoisseurship is about appreciating the difference
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  between this model and that model.
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  And I never thought I would get like that with SportsBase because I came to
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  them as just being a like, let's go fast.
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  Aged 50, 50 is different from 20.
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  Looking at them now, I just love the nuance.
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  And I sit in the garage and look at them.
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  It's absurd.
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  So during the symposium, I've heard you banter back and forth
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  with some of the other presenters.
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  And even your presentation from last year was focused on
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  changes in media with football.
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  Formula One.
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  You obviously have a passion for racing and motorsport in general, but I wonder,
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  does that also extend to the FIM, to Supermoto to a MA, things like that.
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  Are you as invested in the motorcycle disciplines of
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  motorsport as you are with the cars?
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  Traditionally?
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  I always say to people, try and be broad with my love of cars
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  and bikes, but obviously over the years there are particular silos
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  that I've sort of fallen into.
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  I had an interest in MotoGP for probably about a decade from when I started
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  riding about 2002 through until about 2012, that kind of period, I stopped
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  following contemporary motorsport when I had the opportunity to do historic
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  research in a thorough kind of way.
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  And that was in 2012.
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  So that's when I stopped following Formula One in a very religious kind of way.
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  Most races that I'll take time out to watch now would be Le
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  Mans and the Isle of Man TT.
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  Partly because they're one offs and they don't represent this huge
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  time commitment at the weekend.
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  You know, my son's 10 and I was very involved in the
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  early years of him growing up.
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  So I made a decision at that time that, you know, I wasn't going to go and judge
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  and host as many car shows as I used to.
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  And I, I wasn't going to spend every Sunday afternoon through the
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  summer watching a Formula One race and then throw my beer can at the
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  TV because Lewis Hamilton had lost.
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  I suppose that's a roundabout way of saying that I'm not that
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  invested, but at the same time, have I been to Laguna Seca in the last
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  decade and watched some AMA racing?
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  Yes, for sure.
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  You know, did I make a point of getting my motorcycle serviced at
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  the same dealership where the guy that was winning the races was?
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  And I bring it up because we've had many other motorcyclists on the
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  show in the past and it comes up oftentimes where we talk about the
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  goat in the form of motorcycle racing.
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  In Formula 1, it's easy.
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  You're in certain camps.
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  Are you Senna?
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  Are you Prost?
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  Are you Hunt?
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  Are you Lauda?
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  Are you Hamilton?
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  Are you Schumacher?
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  Are you Verstappen fan?
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  Like there's, as you say, these silos and they're really slices of time
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  where it's like, this is the greatest.
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  Based on, you know, there's still people going, Oh, Faggio is the best ever.
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  But in the motorcycle world, there's one name that always comes
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  up and that's Valentino Rossi.
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  The reason I'm talking about him now is he's made a transition from the two
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  wheeled world to the four wheel world.
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  So I wanted to get your take on his entrance into sports car and endurance
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  racing, since you're a fan of Lamar, he's running an LMP two car now.
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  So I wanted to get your take on his progress and where he is.
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  My time following MotoGP followed his career.
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  And really until Mark Marquez came along, there was nobody to touch him.
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  And I feel like very much like Michael Schumacher in Formula One, you know, for a
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  minute, Hacken could touch Schumacher, but only for a minute, you may or may not know
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  that Rossi was a huge fan of the little Italian fellow whose name began with L and
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  that guy had a Richard Petty of a career.
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  You know, everyone said you should retire, but you didn't because it was who
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  you were and it was how you were made.
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  And then you had some wins again, and the sponsors stayed with you
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  because it was petty, Bob Rossi, you know, and with Rossi, there was
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  still talent there right at the end.
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  And even bringing it with the young guys, I feel even later in, in his career.
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  I've got to say, I've spent a lot of time and energy reading
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  about the history of motorsport.
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  I really struggle with this whole notion of the greatest ever.
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  I did a piece for the IMRRC about Senna, because Senna was my boyhood hero.
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  The reason I stopped following Hamilton was because it became so like my teenage
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  years, where if he won, I was happy.
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  And if he didn't, I wasn't, and it's bored the whole weekend.
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  And I was like, why am I living this way?
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  So I had this special sort of feeling about Senna, but in period.
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  I recognized, and I felt that journalists recognized, that Prost
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  was the better driver, right?
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  Senna might have been faster, but Prost was more complete.
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  That was the feeling at the time.
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  When Senna was killed, he was a little bit like Dale Earnhardt.
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  People didn't like him.
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  People didn't like the guy.
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  Afterwards, everyone was so shocked by it, and then the sport made all these changes,
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  and now five or ten years have gone by, and we look back and we're like, Oh!
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  Actually, the sport is a little bit more like tiddlywinks and a little
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  less like mountain climbing now.
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  We kind of liked it when we had open cockpits in Formula One and
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  when Senna said to Hill, stay off the inside at Tamburello, and then
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  went on the inside himself anyway.
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  And when we listened to Dale Jr.
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  's podcast and we hear stories of how Dale Sr.
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  really was, they almost have the feeling of like a Roman fable, don't they?
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  Such a hard man.
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  But with this like soft inside.
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  So now all of a sudden Senna is the greatest ever because what, because
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  that movie came out 10 years ago that told the story from that perspective.
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  Alan Prost has been a pretty mellow guy about it, but let's not forget
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  three world championships versus four world championships and like Jackie
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  Stewart, when Prost retired, he'd won more races than anybody else out there.
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  I'd all the while without doing things like deliberately crashing
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  into other people along the way.
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  And I say all of this.
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  As a absolutely committed Senna fan.
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  So I think the people who decide who's great are the people who are in middle
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  age and the young'uns, the people who have, they've just watched drive
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  to survive, and I read an article in Vox or Salon or something, the girl
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  had written it was saying that gray beard Formula One fans remember when
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  Michael Schumacher won everything.
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  And I'm like, wow, I'm only 50.
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  And I remember Michael Schumacher's first drive.
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  When he qualified amazingly and then burned the clutch off the light where
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  he was driving the seven up sponsored Jordan, I think it was, wasn't it?
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  So I think greatness is based on the perspective that we're
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  looking at it from today.
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  And my conclusion with Senna was that the greatness was predicated.
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  On how the things were achieved rather than what was achieved.
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  So in other words, Prost achieved more, but because Senna did it with this sort
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  of Muhammad Ali, like flourish, and I'm not saying that therefore it's fake,
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  I'm not saying that therefore it's real, whatever Senna had, it reached out of
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  the TV, it reached through the helmet, it reached out of the Lotus Renault,
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  it reached into suburban England, and it gripped me, absolutely gripped me.
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  I lived in Italy for a bit.
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  I went up to Mila 20 years after Cent had been killed because
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  of my personal feeling for it.
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  And, and I rented an Nepr sports bike, an RSV, millet Sports Bike.
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  And when I arrived in the car bike at Mila, I parked up, got
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  off the bike and there was a guy in like a hot rod, little fear.
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  And he acknowledged my helmet.
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  'cause my helmet was a custom painted center replica, which
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  I had done in England when I was earning lots of money in.
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  Well since then, you know, you can buy replicas.
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  But when I went to the track, there was nothing there.
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  There was no ceremony.
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  There was the statue though.
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  There was nothing that 25 years later, well, I'd just become a dad.
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  I went again and there was like a big festival there.
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  And there was like a last rights given at Tamburello and, you know,
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  Gerhard Berger came and spoke.
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  Yeah.
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  In Brazil, there's this sort of.
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  Mixing him up with Jesus thing that goes on.
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  We're in Italy, right?
• 15:52
  I stayed at the same hotel where Ser fell his last night.
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  I arrived a couple of nights early and the receptionist was like,
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  would you like to see the room?
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  And I was like, if that's not too weird.
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  And she went, yeah, right.
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  We went up to the room, we are looking around, it's like a motel room.
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  She's like, people often ask, is that the actual bed?
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  I'm like, Hmm.
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  She's like, we are not sure.
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  I'm like, oh.
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  She's like, would you like to sign the guest book?
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  Um, all right.
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  It's a hotel room, but I'm signing a guest book.
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  Okay, I'll sign the guest book.
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  So I'm signing the guest book.
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  A Spanish TV crew coming.
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  Can we film you signing?
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  So I had arrived to observe this weird beatification of Senna,
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  and yet now I'm part of it.
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  Now, did I appear on Spanish TV?
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  I have no idea.
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  They were with like one of the big news stations, but they told me
• 16:41
  afterwards, they weren't sure whether they were actually going to get aired.
• 16:44
  You know, if it was a big news day, they were going to be on the
• 16:46
  cutting room floor, but if not much happened in Spain that day, you
• 16:49
  know, I was going to be reported.
• 16:51
  So I guess what I'm saying is I'm uncomfortable with this notion
• 16:53
  of the greatest of all time.
• 16:55
  It's very easy to say the greatest Formula One driver of all time, or the
• 16:58
  greatest NASCAR driver of all time, because that conveniently allows us to
• 17:02
  forget all the people who did all that crazy board track racing stuff, or that
• 17:07
  city to city races and all of that stuff in the first half of the last century.
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  I feel like the more I read and learn, the more frustrated I become
• 17:16
  with the whole question of the greatest of all time, particularly.
• 17:21
  On the motorcycles, Harold Daniel rode a Manx Norton around the Isle of Man
• 17:27
  track at an average of 95 miles an hour.
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  You or I could get on a whatever sports bike we fancy.
• 17:35
  BMW Adventure Tourer we fancy.
• 17:37
  We could probably lap the Isle of Man TT track at that kind of speed.
• 17:41
  But not on the roads in the condition that they were in in 1957.
• 17:45
  Not with The suspension, the tires, the brakes, and Bray Hill is still, you've
• 17:53
  got the most cycle on the stop and you've leaned it over and now it's going to
• 17:57
  go through the stop and you're going to get full suspension compression.
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  And Manx Norton is good for 125 miles an hour.
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  And you know, nowadays, you know, my son knows his way around Spa
• 18:07
  because he's played Gran Turismo.
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  You know, I didn't know my way around Spa until I visited it.
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  It wasn't televised.
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  Measuring greatness is very, very hard to do Rossi's place because
• 18:18
  of the duration and the volume of talent that's come along.
• 18:23
  I do feel like Rossi's place is quite hard to contest.
• 18:28
  Yeah.
• 18:28
  But how are you comparing with somebody like Stanley Woods?
• 18:31
  I have no idea.
• 18:32
  And you know, Fangio, I particularly rate Fangio because I feel that Fangio
• 18:37
  sits right in the middle of the century.
• 18:39
  His experience in South America was with those crazy thousands of mile road races,
• 18:44
  where he chewed those leaves with coca in.
• 18:47
  So it was like, he basically had like a cocaine, like high to keep himself going.
• 18:52
  He had, he had an accident where his co driver was killed and he only
• 18:56
  learned that the co driver had died when he was on the road himself.
• 19:00
  So it's on the road through the tears that he makes the decision.
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  I'm never going to stop.
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  Daniel wouldn't have wanted me to stop.
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  So now there's no fear.
• 19:09
  There's no going back after the war.
• 19:11
  When Maserati come, obviously you give your all because that first summer in
• 19:16
  Italy, he came to Europe in the summer of 1950 and of eight races, like one, six of
• 19:21
  them, you know, when you think about the.
• 19:22
  Bombshell arrival.
• 19:24
  That was why he had the reputation he did.
• 19:26
  That was why he had the seat at Alfa Romeo in 1950 and had the Formula One
• 19:32
  career, but it all came from these kinds of massive endurance road races
• 19:37
  that feel far more like rallying to us.
• 19:40
  So I feel his greatness was that he could flip from the long distance
• 19:44
  stuff to the Grand Prix stuff.
• 19:46
  Is it as hard to drive those cars as it was to drive the car Senna drove?
• 19:50
  1500 horsepower with a short wheelbase, no traction control,
• 19:54
  and two super wide tires.
• 19:56
  You know, that feels to me like a huge challenge.
• 19:59
  So arguably the greatness lies there.
• 20:01
  For my money, Senna or Rossermeyer, the fastest ever.
• 20:04
  The audience is getting a taste of what it's like to get
• 20:07
  together with John Summers.
• 20:08
  I love this.
• 20:09
  This is great.
• 20:10
  So before we transition to the next part of your story here,
• 20:14
  I want to take a pit stop.
• 20:15
  And as an Englishman, I feel obligated to ask you this question.
• 20:19
  If you're in the pub, who would you rather have a beer with?
• 20:21
  Clarkson, Hammond, or May?
• 20:23
  Clarkson, because I'd need to know whether or not he was real.
• 20:26
  I'd need to know how real he was.
• 20:27
  I feel that he's real.
• 20:29
  I've met Alan Decadene.
• 20:30
  I've met Mike Brewer.
• 20:32
  And what they do really well is convey who they really are.
• 20:35
  on the TV.
• 20:36
  I've done that kind of stuff.
• 20:37
  It's very hard to convey who you really are.
• 20:40
  A lot of what Clarkson was, was persona.
• 20:42
  So I'd want to know how much was real.
• 20:44
  I'd want to know whether he really regretted saying those things he said
• 20:48
  about Meghan Markle, for example.
• 20:50
  As a car guy, James Met is clearly the most interesting of them.
• 20:54
  And as a motorcyclist, You know, I might be interested in having a
• 20:57
  conversation with Hammond about that.
• 20:59
  But many years ago, it was right after the Wilman Clarkson duo were taken over.
• 21:05
  I had a friend of a friend who was dating, was married to, I think divorced now,
• 21:11
  but was married to a girl who was high up in the BBC and she knew Andy Wilman.
• 21:17
  They were both producers.
• 21:18
  I flew back from Italy and I was meant to meet Andy Wilman in a pub
• 21:22
  in West to discuss an internship.
• 21:25
  But potentially being involved in the creativeness long and short.
• 21:29
  It came out the months or years later that Wilma was having an affair,
• 21:33
  split up with his wife over it.
• 21:35
  There's going to be people on the internet listening to your podcast.
• 21:37
  Now, I was actually going to research that and I'm going to be found out to
• 21:41
  be talking out of my hat, but I met somebody called Michelle in a pub.
• 21:44
  It was meant to be Andy.
• 21:45
  He never showed up.
• 21:46
  The conversation with her was really odd.
• 21:48
  There was clearly something afoot.
• 21:50
  My contact afterwards was like, there's something weird about that.
• 21:53
  And then some months went by, nothing happened.
• 21:55
  And then it came out that she was having it away.
• 21:57
  So, uh, it was a boys club.
• 21:59
  It was very exciting whilst they did it early on.
• 22:01
  It fundamentally changed journalism.
• 22:04
  And when you see this next crop of who V and Boleyn and to virus, when
• 22:10
  you see these guys coming along, car track is not, is a pastiche.
• 22:13
  They're recreating really what the top gear guys did 20 years ago.
• 22:18
  When I would take my hat off to Jeremy Clarkson because before Clarkson, nobody
• 22:23
  was ready in the British press at least to talk about cars in an irreverent way.
• 22:27
  You know, everyone had to talk about fuel economy and the size of the
• 22:30
  trunk, like that wasn't how I wanted to talk about cars and Clarkson
• 22:34
  didn't talk about cars like that.
• 22:35
  No, and it's a very valid point because when Clarkson, Hammond and May got
• 22:39
  together, I always call that Top Gear 2.
• 22:41
  0 because the Top Gear before that was very much like our Motor
• 22:45
  Week hosted by John Davis, who was also on the show last season.
• 22:48
  It was that reporting on the car, to your point, the fuel economy and features
• 22:52
  of the car, and I remember Jeremy Clarkson going out and reviewing some
• 22:54
  of the most boring cars on the planet.
• 22:56
  When I'm asked this question, who would you have a beer with?
• 22:58
  I answer Tiff Needell because Tiff was more interesting at that time than Jeremy
• 23:03
  was because he was doing all the crazy drifting and the racing and those stunts.
• 23:07
  And so Jeremy sort of took the torch from Tiff.
• 23:10
  In the second generation of Top Gear.
• 23:12
  And ever since the Grand Tour is what it is, it hasn't been the same.
• 23:16
  And I bring this up, especially now because we are literally on the advent
• 23:20
  of the, the canceling of Top Gear.
• 23:22
  It's the end of an era now.
• 23:24
  Yeah, it is the end of an era.
• 23:26
  And I saw a survey saying sort of, was it ready to go?
• 23:30
  I had not watched the sort of more modern seasons with the cricketer
• 23:34
  and rugby player and so on.
• 23:36
  And also, it's quite a British thing.
• 23:38
  I am still British, but I've not lived in England for a really long time now.
• 23:42
  I almost feel like it's like I'm an American watching Monty Python
• 23:45
  for the first time as I watch it, that I just sort of, I'm not in tune
• 23:51
  with, you With what it's trying to say, that was the modern top gear.
• 23:54
  And obviously the punching of the producer, Clarkson punching that
• 23:57
  producer in Scotland, which led to leaving the BBC, something that I think
• 24:02
  Americans do well to remember with the BBC is it's government funded.
• 24:06
  It's state funded.
• 24:07
  Your taxpayers money was going towards funding this.
• 24:11
  So it may have been the BBC's biggest export.
• 24:14
  But you can't behave in this kind of way.
• 24:17
  And if you look at some of the things they did, the episodes, 10,
• 24:21
  15 years ago, our society's changed.
• 24:24
  And what was acceptable then seems misogynistic now.
• 24:28
  And I don't want to make any kind of a comment on that.
• 24:31
  I just like to exist in a world where I'm not offending people.
• 24:34
  So, you know, so has it run its course?
• 24:36
  Yes.
• 24:37
  I suppose it has.
• 24:39
  There was a moment when I was first involved with working with the
• 24:43
  university about sort of 2012, 13, 14.
• 24:48
  One of the things that's very noticeable working with the university
• 24:51
  is they're interested in your ability to communicate with people who are
• 24:55
  in lots and lots of different silos.
• 24:57
  And what I mean by that is, If I'm in the pub with some people who do BMW E30
• 25:02
  chump car racing, I'm going to have a really interesting conversation with
• 25:06
  them, even though I've never owned a BMW E30 and I marshaled one chump car
• 25:10
  race when everybody, when you mentioned you worked with cars, everybody
• 25:14
  was like, have you seen top gear?
• 25:16
  Everybody in America, at least, have you seen top gear?
• 25:19
  So what it did incredibly effectively.
• 25:22
  In Britain first and then globally was it introduced the way that we
• 25:26
  car guys like to talk about cars to people who weren't car guys.
• 25:30
  The other example I'd give off of that is when Metallica did the Black
• 25:35
  Album, you know, us traditional heavy metal fans, there was a feeling that
• 25:39
  maybe they'd sort of somehow sold out.
• 25:41
  The record was still a great record.
• 25:43
  Now with hindsight, you can perceive that they'd somehow kept their roots
• 25:48
  whilst becoming U2 at the same time.
• 25:50
  And that was really a, an awesome thing that they've managed to achieve.
• 25:53
  And Top Gear for a minute, it had that feeling of being able to do that.
• 25:58
  But I think like anything, that's the media creation.
• 26:00
  It dates, it ages, it becomes stale.
• 26:04
  It's a victim of its own sort of fashion.
• 26:07
  I mean, one of my favorite YouTubers now is a guy called Johnny Smith.
• 26:11
  He does a YouTube channel called the late break show and people know
• 26:15
  him from fifth gear and fifth gear was a straight rip off of top gear.
• 26:19
  I mean, there were four channels in Britain and when we got a fifth TV
• 26:24
  channel, which is only about 25 years ago, they were full of rip off content
• 26:28
  and fifth gear was a straight rip off of top gear and you know, and he
• 26:32
  was one of the presenters on that.
• 26:34
  And so was Tiff.
• 26:35
  Okay, but see, with Tiff, he has actual credibility because it doesn't
• 26:41
  matter how theatrical and silly the environment that you put Tiff in.
• 26:46
  The guy drove Formula One cars in the 1970s, he raced Group C cars in the 1980s.
• 26:50
  Like, respect is due.
• 26:52
  He's the real deal.
• 26:53
  So yeah, so I feel like that about him.
• 26:55
  I like that Vicky Butler Henderson.
• 26:56
  as well.
• 26:57
  And something, a thought that I've had was back 30 years ago, when I was at
• 27:02
  Leeds University, I remember a female colleague of mine saying that this whole
• 27:06
  thing about women's history, which was the big thing then, you know, women's history
• 27:10
  is everywhere if you really look for it.
• 27:12
  And I always think of this every time I encounter another like Lynn St.
• 27:16
  James or Elizabeth Ewneck.
• 27:18
  Any branch of motorsport you look at, if you look closely, you'll find a woman
• 27:23
  who thought, I'll challenge the men.
• 27:24
  I'll do it.
• 27:25
  I almost feel like there's something waiting to be written about the kind
• 27:30
  of women who've done that because it's almost like Wendell Scott.
• 27:33
  I feel like Wendell Scott has got the recognition that he deserves
• 27:37
  because when he was first inducted, into the NASCAR hall of fame.
• 27:39
  My thought about Wendell Scott was, did he really race as well as the
• 27:43
  other guys who he's in there with?
• 27:44
  He doesn't have the win record of it, but at the same time, I was hauling a
• 27:49
  track car over California and I realized that when you do motor racing in the
• 27:54
  way that NASCAR was in the fifties and the sixties, most of the time, you're
• 27:58
  not on the track in the race car, most of the time you're in the truck.
• 28:02
  toeing from one place to another in the segregated South where you can't even
• 28:06
  stop for sandwiches or get gas properly.
• 28:08
  That's when you realize the challenge that somebody like Wendell Scott
• 28:14
  had that recognition has made me feel like, well, that societal
• 28:18
  social barrier must have existed.
• 28:21
  across all kinds of motorsport for women as well.
• 28:24
  And I've only thought quite recently that would be quite an interesting topic
• 28:27
  to look at that the women's history is everywhere if you look for it.
• 28:29
  Our listeners are probably wondering where in the heck is Crew Chief
• 28:34
  Eric letting John go to off a field wandering around in the pastures.
• 28:38
  But no, the reality is As a motorsport historian, you've got such a wealth
• 28:43
  of information and it comes through in such an almost poetic way, but it's also
• 28:47
  part of the premise of your show, the motoring historian, where you get on
• 28:51
  there with a friend of yours and you talk about these different scenarios, these
• 28:55
  stories come delving back into the past.
• 28:58
  And so it's almost like an unofficial crossover at this point,
• 29:01
  people are getting a taste of what your podcast is all about.
• 29:04
  So I think this is a lot of fun, but I do want to turn this around a little bit.
• 29:07
  You mentioned a couple of times working at the university.
• 29:10
  And in the introduction, I said how you're at Stanford.
• 29:13
  And so you've sort of hinted at how you've tied your time at the
• 29:17
  university into the autosphere.
• 29:19
  So I wanted to dig a little deeper in that and let you talk about what you're doing
• 29:24
  there, how you're using that for your research, and what's going on at Stanford.
• 29:28
  I've been a teaching assistant on a class called Tales to Design Cars by.
• 29:33
  For if it runs this year again, and I think it probably, well, I think it would
• 29:37
  be the 12th year that that class has run.
• 29:39
  Officially sits in the school of mechanical engineering, but the
• 29:42
  professor who I teach the class with is a psychologist by training.
• 29:46
  The class sits in the Stanford design school.
• 29:49
  So it has all of these sort of different transdisciplinary kind of elements.
• 29:54
  To it, the way that I became involved with the university was about 10 years
• 30:00
  ago when I was at a time where I was not interested in doing technology sales
• 30:05
  anymore and interested in thinking, could I make my passion and enthusiasm for cars,
• 30:11
  something more than what it already was.
• 30:13
  I was also conscious that it's changed in the decade since then.
• 30:17
  Partly as a result of electrification and autonomy and all of that, but 10
• 30:21
  years ago, journalists talked about cars in a certain way and journalists talked
• 30:25
  about motor racing in a certain way.
• 30:27
  There were biographies published of Michael Schumacher.
• 30:30
  There were history books there, but nobody was really looking at automotive
• 30:35
  history in the way that a historian.
• 30:38
  Looks at it.
• 30:38
  Everyone was looking at it in the way of an amateur looking for a good story.
• 30:44
  So frame that in a super simplistic way.
• 30:47
  When you restore a car, you can either restore it to be original or you can
• 30:52
  restore it with all of the options that it would have been nice to
• 30:55
  have, but it didn't have originally.
• 30:56
  And when we look at a fifties car now, many of them have all the options
• 31:00
  on that they wouldn't have had.
• 31:02
  So that's a historical.
• 31:03
  Is it a historic car?
• 31:04
  Yes it is, but it's ahistorical.
• 31:06
  A lot of the history, a lot of the stuff that's written about cars has that feeling
• 31:12
  of not quite being truly historical.
• 31:15
  So for example, third best selling car in Britain all the way through
• 31:18
  the 20th century was the Hillman.
• 31:20
  There was some where it came and went.
• 31:21
  There was nothing written about Hillman for decades.
• 31:24
  I interned at the National Motor Museum.
• 31:26
  Did I want to write something about Hillman?
• 31:28
  I remember thinking, well, maybe, but the Marx generally described
• 31:31
  as dull and worthy, and I'm not a dull and worthy kind of person.
• 31:35
  So I never wrote about Hillman.
• 31:36
  Now there's a little book.
• 31:38
  I actually bought it because it's a slim book written by some noble fellow
• 31:42
  who's no doubt earning a pittance, but loving the work that he's doing writing.
• 31:47
  Whereas there are hundreds of books published about Ferrari every year.
• 31:52
  So what I'm saying is that the actual history is not getting written, and
• 31:55
  it's coffee table crap telling us with nice photographs of Charles
• 31:59
  Leclerc and, you know, some grid girls with Marlboro logos on their butt.
• 32:03
  So I felt there was an opportunity to do something that was more historical.
• 32:06
  And I approached the university at a time when people in the old car space
• 32:11
  were looking to do the same thing.
• 32:13
  The Revs Institute in Florida, Which is led by Myles Collier, Revs and
• 32:18
  Myles were looking to do something with the humanities university.
• 32:21
  They were looking to make an endowment, give a lump of money in return for
• 32:25
  cars being placed front and center in some kind of curriculum in return
• 32:29
  for the being more in most university libraries about cars than simply
• 32:33
  about Ford, that being some kind of recognition for Myles, these are the
• 32:38
  pinnacle innovation of the 20th century.
• 32:40
  And they're not looked at in that kind of way he wanted.
• 32:43
  To do something like that could have gone to his alma mater, MIT chose
• 32:47
  instead to come to Stanford because it's the humanities organization.
• 32:50
  So when I was first speaking with the university, the two sort of
• 32:54
  groups, wealthy old car guys and the academics were walking around each
• 32:59
  other, trying to figure out what a collaboration might look like.
• 33:03
  Now, one of the car guys in the room was McKeel Haggerty.
• 33:07
  And if you think about where Haggerty have gone in the last 10 years, McKeel
• 33:13
  perceived the vacuum that there was.
• 33:14
  Now, one particular key staff member died unexpectedly, right as the
• 33:20
  thing was getting off the ground.
• 33:22
  That meant that what REVs at Stanford looked like, wasn't quite
• 33:26
  what revs in Florida had expected or hoped, and it might have looked
• 33:31
  different if Cliff had survived.
• 33:33
  But as it was, the endowment lasted three years.
• 33:36
  It's span up a large number of classes, two or three of which have survived.
• 33:41
  And by that, we mean that after the endowment faded, students
• 33:44
  still signed up, there was still funding to continue the class.
• 33:47
  For me, I've continued to do it because The students have been
• 33:53
  extremely interesting, that's what's continued to engage me.
• 33:56
  And by that I mean that at first, most of the people doing the class identified as
• 34:02
  car guys, and they wanted to listen to me prattle on about the difference between
• 34:09
  the Ferrari 312 T1 and the Ferrari 312 T2.
• 34:13
  They were interested in that.
• 34:14
  A lot of the other people in the class were content with me showing some
• 34:19
  film of Ron Howard's Rush movie with, you know, hunky Chris Helmsworth.
• 34:24
  So I was able to deliver something that was engaging for car
• 34:26
  people and for non car people.
• 34:28
  But the creative element of the class was them telling their own stories.
• 34:32
  And what that evolved into is over the years, it's clear that car
• 34:36
  people tell good stories, right?
• 34:38
  We love disappearing down a rat hole of your first Porsche when you got
• 34:42
  the flat tire, you know, we love that.
• 34:44
  kind of thing.
• 34:45
  Non car people, car stories they tell tend to be much more about their lives.
• 34:49
  They're about coming of age.
• 34:51
  They're about a road trip that they took.
• 34:53
  And a lot of really important life takes place in the car.
• 34:57
  I did a thing about Mike Hawthorne years ago.
• 34:59
  He was killed in a Jaguar accident.
• 35:01
  saloon car.
• 35:02
  He not only raced the car, he used it as a road car.
• 35:05
  He died in it.
• 35:06
  He proposed in it.
• 35:07
  Do you think he had sex in it?
• 35:08
  I think he probably did, right?
• 35:10
  The whole of life was in that car, not in the house.
• 35:13
  Because for car people, the house is unimportant.
• 35:16
  What's beautiful about this is You've been a lifelong petrolhead and you
• 35:20
  have found a way to bridge the gap.
• 35:22
  And there's many of us out there listening to this still trying
• 35:25
  to figure out how to do that.
• 35:26
  So you found your place in academia, and I've heard you say before that you
• 35:30
  don't label yourself as an academic, not officially, but this is great.
• 35:34
  You're fueling the future generation, which actually is a premise that
• 35:38
  we subscribe to here at BreakFix and at Grand Touring in that we're
• 35:43
  Trying to pass on and pass the torch to the 20 something year olds.
• 35:47
  These college students, they're on the fringes.
• 35:49
  They don't know how to do what John Summers does and some of the other
• 35:53
  folks that we've had on the show.
• 35:54
  And so this is an opportunity and you're at the front line, inspiring them.
• 35:59
  In these ways with these classes, the guys that I've engaged with, the
• 36:02
  numbers are small, you know, I have 15 or 20 people and it's 10 years.
• 36:06
  So you know, it's a hundred, the class tends to attract postgrads.
• 36:10
  We have undergrads, but it tends to attract postgrads.
• 36:12
  But you know, when the students look you in the eye and say, you know,
• 36:15
  I want to be CEO of a car company.
• 36:18
  You're thinking to yourself, you've just been interning at BYD.
• 36:21
  You're about to start a job, Honda R& D, you know, you might be tomorrow's, you
• 36:25
  know, and that makes it talking a moment ago about how the class has changed.
• 36:30
  It moved far more towards people who want to tell human stories and it's
• 36:35
  moved far more towards people who are really thinking seriously about
• 36:39
  transport solutions for the future.
• 36:41
  So it's things like the girl in the class who all four of
• 36:44
  our grandparents were alive.
• 36:45
  And all of them are dependent upon meals on wheels.
• 36:48
  So for her, the car, it's not how we're thinking about cars with, you know,
• 36:53
  racing and spoilers and all of that.
• 36:54
  She's thinking about it in terms of the autonomous car being a way
• 37:00
  to deliver her family food, and if it can move them around as well.
• 37:05
  So for her, it was much more about community and society.
• 37:08
  And that made the tails to design cars, bikes.
• 37:11
  Much, much broader than just the racing thing.
• 37:13
  The reason that I talked about racing in that context is that designers
• 37:18
  will tell you when they design the Ford Mustang, they're not thinking
• 37:22
  of the six cylinder rental car that you're picking up at the airport.
• 37:25
  They're thinking of the dark horse.
• 37:27
  They're thinking of the Shelby, the designers thinking of
• 37:30
  the ultimate iteration of it.
• 37:32
  Formula one is this.
• 37:33
  Ultimate iteration of cars and motoring.
• 37:36
  And that's why this design extremity was relevant and interesting for product
• 37:41
  design and that kind of marketing students see what I get in my class.
• 37:44
  So you mentioned before that in some ways, automotive history coincides
• 37:49
  almost with revisionist history.
• 37:50
  You never really sure who's telling the right story or the real story.
• 37:54
  And it's always retrospectively is other than Cromback who journaled He did leave
• 37:59
  some things out of Colin Chapman and his machines, but he chronicled the entire
• 38:05
  struggle, the strife and the success of Lotus from the very early days, because
• 38:09
  he was very close with Colin to have something like that is very, very rare in
• 38:13
  comparison to things that are out there.
• 38:14
  So I wonder.
• 38:15
  Will there come an opportunity, are you seeing a change where automotive history
• 38:20
  will be accepted in the discipline of historical studies in universities and
• 38:26
  things, or is it still going to be left up to organizations like the SAH, who you're
• 38:31
  a member of to kind of fill that gap?
• 38:33
  I think it's up to us.
• 38:34
  I don't think there's ever going to be a time where it's going to be accepted.
• 38:38
  And I say that based on whilst Revs was at Stanford.
• 38:41
  Everything that revs did at Stanford was outside of the history department.
• 38:45
  The history department didn't really want anything to do with it.
• 38:48
  And I asked historians this, and they said it was because
• 38:51
  real history has to have agency.
• 38:53
  So in other words, you can't write the history of Ford because
• 38:57
  the car doesn't have any agency.
• 38:58
  But you can write the history of Henry Ford because the person
• 39:02
  has agency to be making history.
• 39:04
  And that's why he's about the only example of the automotive figure
• 39:06
  as Sloane's the other one that gets talked about in business school.
• 39:09
  So there was a panel in the history department with the question,
• 39:13
  did guns make the modern world?
• 39:15
  Now it's a standing joke amongst historians that only.
• 39:19
  Amongst historians, if there's four people on the panel, there'll be four different
• 39:23
  opinions about any given question.
• 39:26
  Only in history are you able to disagree with all of your colleagues
• 39:30
  and still have professional credibility.
• 39:31
  I mean, if I'm a doctor and I diagnose a heart attack and you
• 39:34
  diagnose a broken leg, one of us is right and the other one's wrong.
• 39:37
  Whereas in history, both of us have an interest in perspective and both of us
• 39:40
  can be right and we can argue our case and there's no patient dying in the process.
• 39:45
  Guns make the modern world.
• 39:46
  That's where I was going, right?
• 39:48
  Well, all four historians on the panel, they all agreed guns make modern world.
• 39:51
  Nobody disagreed amongst historians.
• 39:53
  Nobody disagreed.
• 39:54
  Everyone accepted that.
• 39:55
  Yes, guns did make modern world, but hang on a minute.
• 39:57
  A gun doesn't have agency.
• 39:58
  Does it?
• 39:59
  Oh, but you just said that it did.
• 40:02
  So what does it come down to?
• 40:03
  I think it comes down to the fact that most historians just basically don't
• 40:08
  like cars very much, you know, and as a historian, you study what you like.
• 40:13
  And my challenge, certainly at home in England, you know, where
• 40:17
  there's lots of other things that you can be studying as history, they
• 40:20
  don't even seem to be real history.
• 40:23
  In America, certainly out West, if you look down a street in California,
• 40:28
  If there's a 55 Chevy on that street, that's probably the oldest thing
• 40:32
  you can see if there's no people, whereas that's simply not the case
• 40:35
  in other places around the world.
• 40:37
  So therefore that 55 Chevy is easy to perceive that as history.
• 40:41
  If that's the oldest thing you can see, it's easy to accept that as history.
• 40:44
  So I feel like out West, it's easy to get people to see cars as history.
• 40:48
  Your question about whether or not it's going to be accepted by academics, you
• 40:54
  know, I've an archaeological colleague at Stanford who has this word quiddity, quid,
• 40:58
  it's a Latin word for what, but it's like the sort of at the essence of the thing,
• 41:03
  as everything's electrically powered.
• 41:05
  The roar of the muscle car is going to be that much more epic.
• 41:09
  The roar of the muscle car is already pretty epic in comparison
• 41:13
  to the whoosh of the Tesla.
• 41:15
  So the Tesla's faster.
• 41:16
  Well, so what, you know, it's the microwave versus the real oven.
• 41:19
  And we can look at diesel locomotives and we can look at steam engines and it's easy
• 41:24
  for us to see which is more epic, right?
• 41:26
  If we properly.
• 41:27
  convey the quiddity, the thingness, the essence of the vehicles,
• 41:32
  it's going to be an easy thing to sell to younger generations.
• 41:34
  So what do I mean?
• 41:35
  If you traipse kids around a museum and the cars don't move and they
• 41:38
  make no noise and the kids have never ridden a motorcycle, they've never
• 41:41
  skied, they've never done anything like that, they're going to die.
• 41:44
  If you can somehow translate the thrill of skiing or the excitement of the
• 41:51
  Playstation game to the static motorcycle in the museum there, and I feel like
• 41:58
  with VR we're increasingly able to do it.
• 42:02
  So what am I saying, you know, is this as simple as when you go to the
• 42:04
  museum, there's a Norton, and then there's a photograph of There's film
• 42:08
  of the Norton going down gray Hill.
• 42:09
  There's a game that you can get on and ride it and you get to
• 42:13
  feel what it was like to be.
• 42:14
  Yes.
• 42:15
  I feel like that's where we're going with it.
• 42:17
  And that's the way that we can communicate the future.
• 42:20
  And you and I bumped into each other at pebble beach.
• 42:22
  I remember talking there about the JDM cars.
• 42:25
  I'd seen at Pebble Beach and how I felt that the JDM stuff was really
• 42:30
  being accepted by collectors.
• 42:32
  And yet that has to be as a result of PlayStation and Gran Turismo.
• 42:37
  And I've noted the same with Roof Portions.
• 42:39
  I feel like when I first Noted that roof Porsches had gone up.
• 42:42
  I was expressing surprise about it.
• 42:45
  And my friend on the podcast was like, well, it's cause
• 42:48
  they were on Gran Turismo, the original Gran Turismo Porsche.
• 42:50
  I hadn't licensed the name, but roof had.
• 42:53
  So they appeared and the muscle car guys, they all dreamed of.
• 42:57
  What they wanted when they got back from Vietnam, or it was, you know,
• 43:00
  their girlfriend's brother's car or their elder sister's boyfriend's
• 43:04
  car or something like that.
• 43:05
  That was what the muscle car guys dream of.
• 43:07
  This PlayStation generation, they dream of the GTR that
• 43:10
  they specced when they were 13.
• 43:12
  That's the car that they want when they're 35 the money to do it.
• 43:16
  That's why I like the original Viper.
• 43:18
  It's the same argument, but I'm glad you brought up.
• 43:21
  Pebble beach, because one of your other hats that you wear outside
• 43:25
  of academia, volunteering, writing for the SAH and doing the podcast
• 43:29
  and all the other things is you're actually a docent at Pebble beach.
• 43:32
  And that's an interesting role to take on because it's a way to express, but
• 43:37
  also pass on knowledge as a historian.
• 43:40
  And so I want to dig a little deeper into what it entails to become a docent, what
• 43:45
  the responsibilities are for somebody that might be interested in doing that.
• 43:47
  You know, what is the prep like what's involved in being a docent.
• 43:51
  They're volunteer programs.
• 43:52
  That's the first thing to say.
• 43:54
  Pebble Beach is a volunteer program.
• 43:56
  The Peterson program is a volunteer.
• 43:58
  And I think by definition, a docent is a volunteer.
• 44:01
  You know, how did I get involved in it?
• 44:03
  When I first came to California, I love car museums and I got involved with the
• 44:08
  Blackhawk museum over in Danville and Don Williams was a big supporter of.
• 44:13
  Pebble Beach always brought cars, so there was always a
• 44:15
  relationship with Pebble Beach.
• 44:17
  I first went to Pebble Beach as a normal punter the first year I was
• 44:20
  here, and certainly I went two or three years as a guest before I had
• 44:24
  any involvement with the Concorde.
• 44:25
  A colleague at the Blackhawk Museum approached Pebble, about perhaps
• 44:31
  running a docent program at Pebble.
• 44:34
  At first, there wasn't much interest, but there was some interest because
• 44:38
  the museum was known because of Don and because at the museum, we had a program
• 44:42
  of training docents and then doing tours of people coming around the museums.
• 44:47
  And that was something that I felt comfortable doing because I'd worked
• 44:50
  as a tour guide when I worked in Rome.
• 44:51
  I was like the guy with the mic from the front of the bus.
• 44:54
  I used to show people around the Coliseum and all of that kind.
• 44:57
  When you've stood in a dusty building site and tried to get people excited about how
• 45:01
  this is the spot where the Roman Emperor Domitian was stabbed by his man boy lover.
• 45:06
  When you've done that, it's fairly easy to stand in front of something
• 45:10
  as impressive as a Maharaja Rolls Royce or a sports racing Maserati
• 45:15
  and talk about those kinds of things.
• 45:16
  So that's how I got involved in doing the docenting.
• 45:19
  My colleague, Wayne is involved in running the Ironstone Concourse up
• 45:23
  in Murphy's in the gold country.
• 45:25
  He engaged with the organizers and sort of docents or tour guides
• 45:31
  that work the La Jolla Concourse.
• 45:34
  We have some people who were from Peter Mullins museum, the
• 45:39
  Bugatti museum out in Oxnard.
• 45:42
  I was doing Hillsborough and I was doing Ironstone with Wayne, and then because
• 45:47
  that had gone successfully, and I think what had been successful about it was, it
• 45:51
  was a nice thing for sponsors to be able to offer guests that there were going
• 45:57
  to be guided tours of the show field.
• 46:00
  Because the big challenge that you have, and my archaeologist colleague at Stanford
• 46:04
  said to me, this is when we were at Pebble Beach, I need you to come with me so
• 46:07
  you can tell me what we're looking at.
• 46:08
  You know, it's not like an art gallery where they say who did what it's like.
• 46:11
  I need you to tell me what we're looking at and why it's here.
• 46:14
  It's funny.
• 46:14
  I did that with him for a year.
• 46:16
  Then he had moved from somebody who basically didn't know any type from a
• 46:20
  Bentley, he moved to somebody who could have a conversation with a collector
• 46:24
  about why they collected what they collected, even though he didn't know
• 46:28
  an Alvis TD from an Alvis TE, he could engage with that collector and understand
• 46:33
  why they were interested in that.
• 46:35
  So in terms of what sort of.
• 46:37
  Preparation we do we see the car list early, but only a little bit early and
• 46:42
  that's a big deal because if the car list gets out, there are some contestants
• 46:47
  who even on the night of the event will pull their car from the event and you
• 46:52
  will think, well, how petty is that?
• 46:54
  The reality is if the car wins Pebble, it's worth three to four million
• 46:58
  dollars more than it was before.
• 47:00
  Like, just that hard number.
• 47:01
  If you thought you were maybe going to stand a chance to win and then that
• 47:05
  other guy's bringing the car that you know is better than yours, so it's a
• 47:09
  privilege to get that car list early and to be able to read up on that.
• 47:14
  Rumor has it people also do that because if you've entered pebble,
• 47:17
  you go through the whole rigmarole that's involved in that you cannot
• 47:21
  reenter pebble for almost 10 years.
• 47:23
  Is that right?
• 47:24
  Something like that.
• 47:25
  Yeah.
• 47:25
  It makes sense to pull the car out because if you don't think
• 47:27
  you're going to win, you're not going to win for another 10 years.
• 47:30
  That's your next opportunity to show the car.
• 47:32
  Of course, if you do that business of pulling it out, everybody.
• 47:36
  On the committee knows that it's a fairly small community, really, you know, when
• 47:41
  push comes to shove, but obviously, you know, the class is in advance.
• 47:44
  So in the months in the run up, it's fun.
• 47:47
  We do reading, there's like a string, we share information.
• 47:51
  Wayne's over in Lodi and I have a warehouse with some
• 47:54
  crappy cars over there as well.
• 47:56
  You know, I'll go over and have lunch with him over in Lodi and we'll talk
• 47:59
  about what we've read and learned.
• 48:00
  And that's good fun.
• 48:02
  Then Concourse is on the Sunday, but on the Thursday morning, there's a
• 48:06
  driving event, and if you participate in the driving event, if there's a
• 48:10
  tiebreaker on the lawn on the Sunday, your participation in the drive means that
• 48:15
  your car wins, so there's an incentive.
• 48:17
  For you to participate in that event.
• 48:19
  I personally feel like that's the best opportunity to see the cars.
• 48:22
  It's certainly the best opportunity to network.
• 48:23
  I'm a terrible networker, but I always feel like if you do that event at the
• 48:27
  beginning of the top of the PTA golf course, where the cars are driving off
• 48:31
  that the cars that are going to appear on the lawn pebble, the beginning of the.
• 48:35
  Tour de France, they call it.
• 48:37
  So that's your first chance to see the car.
• 48:38
  So I'll use that to get a sense of what I really want to talk
• 48:41
  about, because it's all very well to read about what the cars are.
• 48:44
  It's only when you see them, and you see the colors, and you maybe get a
• 48:48
  sense of the owners, then it's easier to start to think about, well, what
• 48:51
  do I actually want to talk about?
• 48:52
  The last couple of years, they've given a Schofield map.
• 48:56
  That's quite critical.
• 48:57
  Because when you're planning what you talk about, you might feel to
• 49:01
  yourself, well, there's Can Am cars.
• 49:02
  I love Can Am cars.
• 49:03
  I love Can Am cars.
• 49:04
  I love Ferrari.
• 49:05
  So I'll talk about Ferrari and Can Am cars.
• 49:08
  Well, if they're right down at the far end of the lawn and you're meeting points.
• 49:12
  is right at the other end of the lawn, but you need to pick cars that you want
• 49:16
  to talk about, but you need to pick them strategically located on the field so
• 49:21
  that you're talking for a little bit, and then you're walking for a little bit,
• 49:25
  and then you're talking for a little bit, and then you're walking for a little bit.
• 49:28
  The other thing to think about with it is Everything on the lawn at
• 49:31
  Pebble is of such incredibly high caliber that you could probably
• 49:35
  stand and talk about just that car.
• 49:37
  Any car at Pebble is going to win any normal car show.
• 49:40
  So in that sense, it's not hard to find stuff to talk about.
• 49:43
  It's harder if people want to learn about one particular thing.
• 49:48
  And you know, that's not something you'd learned about because you can't
• 49:51
  be an expert on absolutely everything.
• 49:53
  The way that we try and cover that off is informally one of the other docents who
• 49:58
  I've known from the Blackhawk for years.
• 50:00
  He's at the Blackhawk.
• 50:01
  He was the go to guy for Duesenbergs and the Blackhawk traditionally had a
• 50:05
  lot of Duesenbergs and so he's great on the American interwar classics.
• 50:11
  He's pretty good on the brass era stuff as well, but has no
• 50:14
  interest in the post war stuff.
• 50:16
  But obviously it's Pebble, so he has to be able to talk about Ferrari a little bit.
• 50:19
  So we just do a exchange of which Duesenberg should I talk about?
• 50:23
  Oh, the Whittle one.
• 50:25
  How will I know that?
• 50:26
  Oh, it's the big silver one with the boat tail.
• 50:28
  Oh, all right.
• 50:28
  That's the one I'll send.
• 50:30
  And which of the Ferraris should I stand by?
• 50:32
  You know, I can do the same thing for him to cover that off.
• 50:35
  So that sounds as if You're almost giving people short shrift, you know, they've
• 50:40
  come all the way to Pebble Beach, and I'm barely going to know the difference
• 50:42
  between one Duesenberg and another one.
• 50:44
  But you have to understand, I had a group from Mercedes Benz last year.
• 50:49
  There were 20s, 30s, 40s, mostly younger people.
• 50:53
  Had never been to Pebble Beach before.
• 50:55
  Had never been to a car show before.
• 50:57
  The stuff that I was asking at the beginning, did they
• 51:00
  know the format of the deck?
• 51:02
  No, they didn't.
• 51:03
  Did they know that the judging had taken place in the morning?
• 51:05
  Did they know that in order to win the overall event, in order to be best in
• 51:09
  show, you have to win your class first.
• 51:11
  When they've won their class, they're going to drive up to the front and
• 51:14
  you're going to be able to see the top three and then they're going
• 51:16
  to be announced and drive over.
• 51:18
  If you've been to a Concorde before, all of that's pretty obvious, you
• 51:21
  know, it's soccer and there's two teams of 11 people and you know, they've
• 51:25
  got to kick the ball in the net.
• 51:27
  But, If you've not been there before, and as my colleague at Sanford says,
• 51:30
  it's not written down, you need somebody to tell you that stuff.
• 51:33
  So by the time I've told them all that, am I going to stand even
• 51:37
  longer in front of this Mercedes SSK that I've just been in for?
• 51:40
  No, I'm not.
• 51:41
  I'm going to walk and we're not going to learn about that.
• 51:44
  Mercedes SSK, something that I find works well, even with people who know
• 51:50
  who are experts is if you talk about things like the headlights sitting free,
• 51:55
  but post war being integrated into the fenders, you know, that's something
• 52:00
  that a lot of car guys haven't thought of it in those kinds of terms before
• 52:03
  and recognize that that's a great way to introduce non car people into it.
• 52:08
  And of course.
• 52:08
  When you're at Pebble Beach, you're not really talking about six cylinders
• 52:13
  and 12 liters and 140 horsepower.
• 52:16
  Really what you're talking about is, does that color combo go?
• 52:20
  Well, it is a Concours d'Elegance, right?
• 52:23
  So you are looking at.
• 52:24
  The proportions of the car, how artistically pleasing is it?
• 52:29
  And for me, the great satisfaction in actually going to the event is that
• 52:33
  what the cars look like in pictures and what they actually look like on the
• 52:37
  lawn there in front of you is different.
• 52:39
  And I really enjoy.
• 52:40
  Going and doing that.
• 52:41
  And I really enjoy sharing my passion with other people.
• 52:44
  And what I should say is as so often in the world of cars, people will say
• 52:48
  to you, Oh, you know, you're such an expert, you're an encyclopedia and you
• 52:51
  always feel like, no, you're not because you always know somebody within the
• 52:55
  space who knows far, far more than you.
• 52:57
  I did this tour for this Mercedes group, and I was able to.
• 53:00
  At one point standard in one place where we were looking at Mercedes Vanderbilt
• 53:04
  cup cars, Mercedes limousines, and Mercedes sports racing like Le Mans,
• 53:11
  all from more than a hundred years ago.
• 53:13
  I could see how inspired these Mercedes designers who the
• 53:18
  company had flown over to do.
• 53:19
  I could see how inspired and excited they were by what they were
• 53:22
  looking at by their own companies.
• 53:24
  Heritage and that's exciting.
• 53:25
  That's a cool thing to be part of talking about tales to design by.
• 53:29
  I mean, that's exactly what you're doing there at pebble.
• 53:31
  You're telling the stories of the cars so much as the aesthetics and their history,
• 53:35
  and in some cases, the spec and all of that, but it all really comes full circle
• 53:39
  and it suits your personality too, and you can really let your passion shine and.
• 53:44
  It leads into the big question.
• 53:46
  You teach, you write, you research, you're doing a podcast with some
• 53:51
  rumors that you'll be contributing to the halls here at grand touring
• 53:55
  motorsports and things like that.
• 53:56
  But what's next for John Summers?
• 53:58
  What's your next project?
• 53:58
  You're writing a book.
• 53:59
  What's going on?
• 54:00
  You've stumped me because I've actually spent all day sitting here, looking at
• 54:03
  all these non functional motorcycles, been thinking to myself, I need to
• 54:06
  get these wretched things fixed.
• 54:08
  So the only thing I can think of on my mind is getting these motorcycles
• 54:11
  that I've got working properly.
• 54:13
  I want to evolve the pod format.
• 54:15
  The pod at the moment is very rambling, and I'm going to try and focus what I
• 54:20
  do to make it less rambling and make the nuggets of information easier to find.
• 54:24
  And yes, if there's some scope here on Breakfix for that, that would be awesome.
• 54:28
  I feel like the pod represents a different way of storytelling we
• 54:32
  were talking about a little bit.
• 54:33
  I want to continue with the learning and teaching about cars.
• 54:39
  You know, something we've not talked about really, but I do really try and
• 54:42
  prioritize my family over the history and the writing and their history and
• 54:47
  the writing fits around these things.
• 54:48
  So I want to continue to do that.
• 54:50
  I'm happy with that stat ranking of the family first and the history next.
• 54:55
  And then my own cars and bikes floating around after that for the IMRRC.
• 55:00
  I've been thinking this last year, I really tried to go back to basics
• 55:04
  and talk about sprint car history.
• 55:06
  And we decided automotive historians was given a big stack of magazines
• 55:10
  and I sort of looked through it and tried to package up some thoughts.
• 55:14
  And then that was the presentation that I did last time.
• 55:16
  I am struck by this idea that we tend to think about the race and
• 55:20
  the racing driver and the car.
• 55:22
  Yet, I always feel like there's the race and the racing driver and the car
• 55:26
  and also the journalist, the reporter, the person who's telling the story,
• 55:31
  who's recording it for whatever reason.
• 55:33
  We talked earlier about Senna and about my ideas about how perspective changes.
• 55:39
  You know, one of the changing perspectives that I've been very struck
• 55:42
  by, and I feel it's a little bit, I'd say, sort of understudied, not
• 55:45
  that any of these areas are properly studied, but Group B rally cars.
• 55:50
  I was there when it happened, and I think it's as a result of the 25 year rule.
• 55:54
  Now, all of a sudden, they're everywhere.
• 55:57
  If I had said Lancia Delta S4, To American car guys in the year 2010, nobody would
• 56:04
  have known what you were talking about.
• 56:06
  Audi Quattro, we knew that.
• 56:08
  Whereas I was at RM, Pebble Week, the ones that were at the Portola.
• 56:13
  They had one of those Citroën.
• 56:15
  BX turbo thing.
• 56:18
  The 4TE.
• 56:19
  See, you even know the model name, right?
• 56:21
  In period, I watched everything on TV and I took every magazine that I could.
• 56:26
  This was in the 1980s.
• 56:28
  And all I knew about that car was a line drawing in one
• 56:33
  auto sport that I picked up.
• 56:35
  Because the whole, like, the whole thing crashed and burned before that
• 56:38
  car was even Properly developed.
• 56:40
  It was like the Metro 6R4.
• 56:42
  It just never properly came up.
• 56:43
  Metro 6R4, my friend that I do the podcast with, he does tech sales.
• 56:48
  He went with a value added reseller partner of his.
• 56:50
  The partner's lad came along as well.
• 56:52
  And they were like, are we going to see a 6R4?
• 56:54
  We want to see a 6R4.
• 56:56
  I'm like, where did that come from?
• 56:57
  I mean.
• 56:58
  So, I want to look closely at Group B history and really try and
• 57:03
  examine where that hype came from.
• 57:05
  I read Ari Vartanen's biography.
• 57:08
  That is one of the most remarkable, I, a lot of motoring biographies are kind of
• 57:11
  boring, they kind of formulate in a way.
• 57:13
  Always wanted to be a racing driver.
• 57:14
  Saw my first race, climbed up the fence.
• 57:16
  You know, that's sort of NASCAR drivers, particularly.
• 57:19
  I can't think of a NASCAR driver who didn't decide he wanted to be a racer
• 57:22
  after he looked through the fence without paying kind of thing, which is
• 57:25
  probably true, right, for NASCAR drivers.
• 57:27
  I don't want to be, uh, but the fact is that racing drivers are not writers.
• 57:31
  Therefore, their books are written by journalists.
• 57:33
  Therefore, they're often pretty boring and formulaic, not Harry Vartan.
• 57:38
  That really is a book that I would recommend.
• 57:41
  So I feel like I've enough original sources to go back
• 57:44
  and look closely at group B.
• 57:47
  And I think for the IMRRC next year, if they accept my submission,
• 57:51
  of course, I'm going to try and do something about the history of.
• 57:55
  Group B.
• 57:55
  And there's a lot of things that I want to unpick.
• 57:59
  So for example, the Delta S4 doesn't look anything like the normal Lancia Delta.
• 58:04
  So why was it even allowed?
• 58:05
  Maybe because the Peugeot 205 T16 was allowed, but you know, Ferrari
• 58:10
  was always allowed to bend the rules with how many homologation exams.
• 58:13
  I feel like there was that kind of thing going on there, but I want to
• 58:17
  look at that a little bit more closely.
• 58:18
  I suppose the particular thing that I am thinking about, and I do need to
• 58:21
  read more about this, is Ari Vartanen was mentored by Hannu Mikkola, and
• 58:27
  you may remember, both of them are blondes, or Mikkola was, was a blonde.
• 58:31
  And they were from the northern bit of Finland.
• 58:34
  Whereas my guy, Markku Ahlen, the actual guy who coined the maximum
• 58:39
  attack phrase, I just love Markku Ahlen.
• 58:43
  Ahlen And Toivonen, they came from Helsinki, I can't remember which one of
• 58:49
  them, their dad was like an ice racer.
• 58:51
  So this was like oval racing, a little bit like dirt track racing in America, but
• 58:55
  it's cold there, so they do it on there.
• 58:57
  Although I presume I'm not an expert on that kind of sport.
• 59:00
  So I feel as if, and I'm not sure about this, and I need to do more thinking, but
• 59:04
  I feel that there's a sort of division between these like southern Finns and
• 59:09
  northern Finns and the Northern Finns.
• 59:11
  Remember, these are the ones who did repulse the Russians
• 59:14
  in the second world war.
• 59:15
  And I suppose I'm just fascinated by this culture of people where the roads
• 59:19
  are all these like dirt roads for miles and miles, and you need to be able to
• 59:22
  drive the car like the Dukes of Hazzard.
• 59:23
  You have to be able to control the car in a slot before you get a driving
• 59:27
  license, at least according to the top gear watched all those years ago,
• 59:30
  just to reference top gear there.
• 59:33
  I feel like there's more to dig into with these Flying Fin.
• 59:37
  It all ties to this idea of how the story's told, because if you go
• 59:41
  onto YouTube and you look at early rallying in the early eighties, a
• 59:45
  lot of the programs are British.
• 59:47
  It's clear that the BBC loved just couldn't get enough of this
• 59:53
  psychotic driving juxtaposed with.
• 59:57
  These laconic, perfectly spoken Scandinavians, how will you be
• 1:00:02
  driving Marco maximum attack?
• 1:00:05
  My mechanic is fantastic.
• 1:00:08
  So the ones with him when he was with Lance, if you watch how he communicates
• 1:00:12
  with the Italians, it's like he's half Finnish and half Italian communicates
• 1:00:16
  with the Italians in the Italian.
• 1:00:18
  That's so bad, but I can understand it.
• 1:00:20
  I love those.
• 1:00:21
  But also enter, even at the time, the elder Statesman, you had stick Bloomfist.
• 1:00:25
  And then you get in from the other side, Balter Rural coming
• 1:00:29
  over from Opal to join Audi.
• 1:00:31
  And then the mystery woman, the queen of group B, the queen of rally.
• 1:00:35
  If you ask my opinion, Michel Mouton and Fabrizio Pons all woman team running for
• 1:00:41
  Audi and upstart in this arena, because Lancia had already set the standard.
• 1:00:46
  Many, many years prior, you're like, wait, what?
• 1:00:48
  And it was such drama and such theatrics in the world of rally as a fan.
• 1:00:53
  I've, I've attested to many times on the show.
• 1:00:54
  I feel like I'm on a loan and I still follow WRC today, but it was a time in
• 1:01:00
  motor racing that cannot be repeated.
• 1:01:01
  It was attempted when they went to the group, a cars, the Mitsubishi's
• 1:01:05
  and the Subaru's and all those that were slower by half of the horsepower.
• 1:01:09
  Yes.
• 1:01:09
  You had great drivers.
• 1:01:10
  You had the Colin McRae's of the world and things like that, but it wasn't the same.
• 1:01:14
  There wasn't the magic.
• 1:01:15
  There wasn't that unbridled wild west that was group B and the demise of group B.
• 1:01:22
  There's been so many different stories told about it.
• 1:01:24
  And in reality, it was a rookie driver in a Ford RS 200 that was
• 1:01:30
  overconfident, not knowing the car.
• 1:01:32
  And just botched it for everybody in 1987, turning the world on its
• 1:01:36
  nose and changing rally forever.
• 1:01:38
  You know, the center thing made me think about this is that these
• 1:01:41
  brands that spend all this money on motorsport, they want to be associated
• 1:01:46
  with something cool and exciting.
• 1:01:48
  And that's great as long as it's exciting.
• 1:01:52
  And it's not great when spectators are being killed.
• 1:01:55
  You don't want to be associated with that rallying.
• 1:01:58
  As it was this whole business that particularly the continentals would do
• 1:02:03
  where they'd stand in the road until the car came and then they'd step out
• 1:02:06
  of the road at the last minute and try and touch the car until you've
• 1:02:09
  actually been there and had that running of the bulls in Pamplona.
• 1:02:14
  Kind of feeling about it in the group B era, I went and watched our AC rallies.
• 1:02:20
  So the British round, it was 1985.
• 1:02:23
  It was the year our land led in the Delta S four and then crashed out.
• 1:02:28
  That's also the race where the Audi lost the wheel and the co
• 1:02:32
  driver got on the back corner of the car to offset the weight.
• 1:02:35
  So I saw that stage.
• 1:02:36
  I was at that stage with my family.
• 1:02:38
  We'd gone out, it had rained of course.
• 1:02:41
  It was a country house stage, like Tatton park or somewhere.
• 1:02:44
  And my mom and sister were like, this is terrible.
• 1:02:46
  We're going back to the car.
• 1:02:47
  And I remember standing with my dad.
• 1:02:49
  We didn't see the Audi bar.
• 1:02:51
  I remember watching the early cars come through and then
• 1:02:53
  it being cold and raining.
• 1:02:54
  But this is the thing that I'll always remember about that day.
• 1:02:57
  And this is the thing that you should take away from rallying is that most
• 1:03:00
  of the field, Ford Escort Mark twos.
• 1:03:03
  And so that howl of that BDA 16 valve at.
• 1:03:08
  9, 000 RPM.
• 1:03:10
  That is the sound of rally.
• 1:03:12
  And what I remember from that night in 1985, not the Lance's, but so I went
• 1:03:16
  that year, I also went another year, this would have been 2000, something like that.
• 1:03:21
  When the friend that I do the podcast with, we were living together,
• 1:03:25
  doing tech sales jobs, and we were like, let's just take a day off.
• 1:03:28
  And instead of doing the Mickey mouse stages, let's drive down into
• 1:03:31
  Wales and see one of the real stages.
• 1:03:34
  I did all the research, so I worked out so you could see one stage and then drive
• 1:03:38
  to another stage and see the other stage.
• 1:03:40
  And, you know, I planned it so we could see three stages, but it was raining,
• 1:03:44
  roads were blocked everywhere because loads of other people had the same idea.
• 1:03:48
  We walked into a stage, saw three cars come through, like
• 1:03:52
  Colin McRae threw stones at us.
• 1:03:54
  I remember us being on the outside of the turn and him coming through more
• 1:03:56
  aggressively and throwing stones and us being like, we'll cross the road.
• 1:04:00
  misjudged how hard it was to climb up the bank.
• 1:04:03
  Bruno Sabe in his Escort Cosworth nearly ran us over.
• 1:04:06
  Car was like three feet away from us sliding through the kerb as we
• 1:04:10
  were like scrambling up the bank.
• 1:04:12
  And then no other cars came.
• 1:04:14
  Now it's dark and raining and we're like, what?
• 1:04:16
  We've driven four hours to get here.
• 1:04:18
  We missed the first two stages.
• 1:04:20
  It's dark now and there's no other cars coming through.
• 1:04:22
  So we walked back to where we'd got into the stage and there was like
• 1:04:25
  emergency services, blue lights, a little bit further up the stage.
• 1:04:29
  So we walked further up the stage and maybe the fifth car through.
• 1:04:32
  So one of the like group A Subarus or something had end over ended off the road.
• 1:04:37
  They closed the stage.
• 1:04:38
  The ambulance was there waiting and they were there with
• 1:04:41
  the crane to crane the car.
• 1:04:44
  Back up onto the road.
• 1:04:45
  And at that point you're like, well, we could stand here and watch cause
• 1:04:47
  that's what everyone else was doing.
• 1:04:49
  Cause that was the only thing I just hope that people are all right.
• 1:04:51
  But then we got in the car and drove home.
• 1:04:53
  So that was my actual experience of spectating.
• 1:04:56
  Well, John, we've reached that part of the episode where we like to ask our
• 1:05:00
  guests, any shout outs, promotions, or anything else you'd like to share
• 1:05:03
  that we haven't covered thus far.
• 1:05:04
  I interned at the national motor museum, Beaulieu in Britain.
• 1:05:07
  It's a really wonderful institution.
• 1:05:09
  They have four land speed record cars there.
• 1:05:13
  One of them, the 1, 000 horsepower Sunbeam, it's the
• 1:05:16
  first car to 200 miles an hour.
• 1:05:18
  It did it on Daytona Beach in Florida.
• 1:05:21
  The driver was a guy called Sir Henry Seagrave.
• 1:05:24
  He was half Irish, half Canadian.
• 1:05:26
  That car has not run in years.
• 1:05:29
  And they have a project to rebuild both of the 22 liter V12 motors.
• 1:05:35
  They're going to rebuild both of those, take it to Daytona beach
• 1:05:38
  and run it again on Daytona beach.
• 1:05:40
  Now I definitely want to be there, but they're raising money for that.
• 1:05:43
  So I just want to encourage people to go to the National Motor Museum
• 1:05:47
  website and make a donation and see that thousand horsepower sunbeam live again.
• 1:05:53
  English automotive historian John Summers loves to talk about new
• 1:05:58
  cars, old cars, motorbikes, motor racing, driving, and motoring travel.
• 1:06:03
  He was a company car thrashing technology sales rep in the 90s, and later a fairly
• 1:06:08
  inept sports bike rider, as he says.
• 1:06:11
  John now lives in California and collects cars.
• 1:06:13
  Cars and bikes with plenty of cheap and fast and not much reliable.
• 1:06:17
  And if you'd like to learn more, you can follow him on social media.
• 1:06:20
  You can find them on LinkedIn, or you can check out his podcast, the motoring
• 1:06:24
  historian, everywhere you listen, and be sure to look out for other
• 1:06:27
  articles by John through the IMRC, the SAH and Grand Touring Motorsports.
• 1:06:33
  And with that, John, I can't thank you enough for coming on the show,
• 1:06:35
  sharing your immense amount of stories.
• 1:06:38
  You know, we could be on here for a couple more hours.
• 1:06:40
  It's always a pleasure to get together.
• 1:06:42
  And most importantly, thank you for what you're doing, inspiring young
• 1:06:47
  petrol heads to pick up the torches and continue the enthusiasm that you have
• 1:06:51
  and that we all share for the autosphere.
• 1:06:54
  Thank you, Eric.
• 1:06:59
  We hope you enjoyed another awesome episode of break fix podcasts brought
• 1:07:03
  to you by Grand Touring Motorsports.
• 1:07:06
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• 1:07:08
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• 1:07:13
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• 1:07:16
  be sure to check out the follow on article at gtmotorsports.
• 1:07:19
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