HAT TRICK!
Sometime before the 85th running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans ended, t-shirts began to appear along pit lane: Hat Trick, they exclaimed on the front while the backside listed all 19 overall wins since 1970.
Not everyone was wearing one, naturally. There once again were long faces in the Toyota garages. But this year, following one of the most exciting and dramatic races at the circuit in the 21th Century, Porsche’s win was clear and decisive. Le Mans this year saw only two manufacturers competing in its most technologically demanding class, LMP1 – Toyota with three cars and Porsche with two. Audi has retired. The small number of entries suggests the race organizers may reconsider things next year but Porsche publicly committed to compete at this level through 2019 and it’s unlikely Toyota will pull out.
There will be dozens of good, complete, thorough reports of this race of twist-and-turns – both of fate and of the road course – on Porsche’s website and many others in the days to come. I recommend you read and enjoy a thoroughly engrossing tale. One benefit of this third-in-a-row win is that Porsche gets to keep the coveted trophy, a rule established in the earliest days of the race starting in 1923.
Nearer to home, we open this issue with a story by regular contributor Randy Wells on a rally – inaugurated in California in April but soon spreading to the east coast – to benefit Parkinson’s disease research. Randy has a particular tie to this illness. Please see his story to get a better understanding.
We finish the issue with auction coverage, from sales in Italy with R.M. Sotheby’s to Connecticut with Bonhams.
Next month we’ll talk about the coming Porsche Parade in Spokane, WA. a city I recently visited at the far east end of Washington.
In the meanwhile, enjoy Road Scholars Magazine, and thanks for reading us.
Randy Leffingwell
Editor