Journal

A lot has happened with the 1974 Alfa GTV since my last report. Due to numerous delays and unforeseen circumstances, we pulled the project from Alfa Performance Connection (APC) and delivered it to Anthony Rimicci of Santos Italian Car Service...

To get in the writing mindset, I reread a couple articles in The Ultimate Classic. I especially enjoyed The One Family 2002 by James Laray from the Fall issue where he shares the history and soul of his 2002. To...

(Don Pike, Horst Kwech and John Morton) The scene is from a photo shoot at Riverside International Raceway toward the end of the 1971 race season. It was for an upcoming article by Road & Track where they compared three...

Few racing scenes, if any, capture the competitiveness of small bore sedan racing in the early 1970’s as this one at Laguna Seca. It was the last race of the 1971 Trans-Am 2.5 Sedan Challenge season and it came down...

You can almost hear the roar of the engines as the race cars bunch up 2 x 2 for the opening pace lap at the 1970 SCCA American Road Race of Champions at Road Atlanta. As you can see, the...

This BMW 1600 race car that was built by Auto Sport by JIRI in the summer of 1972. It was originally campaigned by Dave Nicholas and John Magee with a beautiful yellow/black Alpina style livery with pig cheek fender flares...

Let’s celebrate Historic B-Sedan racing with a sideways Cortina (notice for sale sign) and a BMW 2002 with license plate and steelies at Marlboro Raceway in 1967. While this was not an U2L Trans-Am race but an SCCA regional B-Sedan...

Celebrate Historic B-Sedan racing at the Michigan Speedway on May 11th 1969. These series of pics involve the Brumos Porsche 911. Peter Gregg comes in for a pit stop. The car is being refueled by 2 team members - the...

The saga begins with Jack Fredricks who owned a Toyota dealership in Los Angeles in the mid 1960’s. One day he was approached by a representative from BMW who asked if he would consider opening a BMW dealership on the...

(Horst Kwech: November 28, 1937 - December 28, 2019) It was 1965, the year I was born, and thanks to the efforts of SCCA’s presiding President, John Bishop, there was now a platform for small bore under two-liter sedans (U2L)...

On September 6th I headed to the Jiffy Trucking headquarters in Redding CA for my second attempt at obtaining my Commercial Driver’s License (CDL). In case you did not read the story I wrote back in July where I failed...

I am often asked how my BMW 2002 became a Hot Wheels with the Eibach livery. Well, it all started with a photo of my rocker panel while in the paddock at Willow Springs raceway for a VARA racing event...

(Photo credit to Dave Nadig: Tony won 6 out of 10 Trans-Am races in 1968) The racing stories from the early days of SCCA Trans-Am and amateur B-Sedan racing never fail to impress me. One driver in particular, Tony Adamowicz...

But that has not been the case for me when it came to meeting two of my motor sports heroes: Phil Hill and Steve Walker. I had the pleasure of meeting Phil Hill in 2001 when he was the celebrity...

I just spent the last 2 1/2 days in an intensive, one-to-one instruction course from Jiffy Trucking in 100-degree Sacramento heat prepping for the driving portion of California Commercial Class A Driver’s License (CDL). Why you ask? Well…during the past...

Have you ever reflected on life and realized it’s so good you couldn’t have predicted it or made it happen on your own? For sure that is how I feel about my wife and daughter, but to say that about...

It was a 1974 Alfa Romeo GTV that was sitting in my next-door neighbor's backyard for 20 years. Greg Higham was my neighbor and friend. He is a car guy like me but unlike me, he was actually pretty deep...

With Sonoma and Laguna Seca in my rear-view mirror, my thoughts are now focused on what happened in the paddock rather than on the track. Even though I finished on the podium for all the races (2 at Sonoma and...

When one of my good friends and fellow B Sedan racer, Keith Lippiatt, approached me to discuss a livery change for his vintage BMW 2002 race car (#83), I was quick to share design ideas for a build that I...

To say I was nervous would be an understatement. It was Willow Springs, it was cold, and I had zero wheel-to-wheel racing experience. What could go wrong?Fortunately, VARA holds a class on Friday and Saturday night. It’s for the rookies...

After attending the Monterey Historic races for years, I told my wife I want to go from the spectator seats to the last car on the track. That was in August of 2015. In January of 2016, I was sitting...