Click on “William Edgar Archive” here for direct link to the new website.
This guy—real estate doyen Warren E. “Ned” Spieker, Jr.—loves vintage racing, today combining his earned track talent and résumé of entrepreneurial successes to continue doing it with what he dubs his “Red Brigade” of three Italian cars wearing respective factory Rosso paint. Gorgeous, fast and gratifying, they were built by a trinity of kingly marquees. From Ferrari—the 1961 SEFAC Competizione 250 GT SWB 3.0-liter V12. From Maserati—this pictured 1957 4-cylinder 200SI 2.0-liter Spider with Spieker at the Wheel (the article’s title). From Alfa Romeo—the 1964 four-cylinder 1.6-liter Giulia TZ in Zagato Kamm tail bodywork. In addition to his hot Italian trio he owns and races Formula Jrs., Lotus 23s, a Lola MK2, plus ultra-rare BMW-powered Frazer Nash High Speed. Ned’s enthusiasm never lifts, aiding him to be high-points finisher in the Formula Junior World Tour of 2008-9. The 5-page story by William Edgar is about 74-year 0ld Spieker’s life in business and on the world’s most famous racing circuits, featured in the coming Nov/Dec 2018 issue of Vintage Motorsport magazine. Photo by William Edgar
AMERICAN ODYSSEY is Forza magazine’s exclusive 3-part look inside Phil Hill’s road to the 1961 World Drivers’ Championship in Formula One for Scuderia Ferrari, written by William Edgar with Phil Hill’s quotes and picture-captioned Phil Hill/Hill Family Archive Kodachrome Leica photographs drawn from Hill’s 3-volume book 2017 Inside Track with permission of the book’s publishers and Hill’s son, Derek Hill. PART ONE [Forza issue #168 now in print] of the series articles is about Hill’s early races with Ferrari in North America. PART TWO [Forza next issue #169] continues the illustrated saga with Hill at Le Mans and the Targa Florio. PART THREE [Forza future issue #170] concludes Hill’s story with Ferrari factory team drives in Formula One resulting in his World Drivers’ Championship, to become the only American-born driver to achieve that world title. This 2004 photograph of Phil Hill at Laguna Seca is by William Edgar at the time Inside Track was already in preparation by Hill and the book’s publishing staff.
THE GRISWOLD GANG article by William Edgar is in Vintage Motorsport magazine’s current July/August 2018 issue profiling the life of Stephen Griswold throughout his career of sportscar restoration and race preparation that brought worldwide fame to him and his staff of expert mechanics and restorers. Pictured with the #88 Alfa Romeo Veloce are, left to right, in chronological order of owning this race car: Stephen Griswold, Jon Woodner, Jon Norman, Dan Marvin, Jere Brown, and then-owner of the Alfa, John Anderson. The 7-page illustrated Griswold story is told through extensive research and eye-witness input drawn from interviewing 14 individuals who worked with Stephen Griswold in period, many of them today carrying on in professions that they learned together and with Stephen during the late-1960s, 1970s and first half of the 1980s at the Griswold Company shops in Berkeley, California. This photograph and others in the article are from the Sandra & Stephen Griswold Collections, and from the Phil Reilly Collection.
Remembered by so many of his friends and vintage racing competitors, here is the late David Love with his famous Pontoon-Fender 1958 Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa Scaglietti Spyder chassis number 0745TR in David’s northern California home garage on July 26, 2006. Photo by William Edgar
Mark Greene, owner and host of the popular Cars Yeah podcast interviews with men and women he calls “Inspiring Automotive Enthusiasts (TM)” has now interviewed author and photographer William Edgar for a new 35-minute podcast posted online September 8, 2017. Mark, himself a photographer and motorsport historian, is seen seated in the very first Ferrari Testa Rossa prototype, at the time of this photograph owned by noted collector and vintage race driver Jon Shirley.
William is seen below standing with Jon Shirley’s Alfa Romeo Tipo P3, the Enzo Ferrari-entrant car that won the 1935 German Grand Prix with its upset victory over Germany’s Silver Arrows when driven by Italian marvel Tazio Nuvolari, about which William wrote a feature article for FORZA magazine as one of his hundreds of motorsport stories published during the past thirty years.
Says Mark Greene, “There are over 850 interviews on the Cars Yeah podcast. Cars Yeah is heard by listeners in over 80 countries around the world with thousands of daily listeners and over 45,000 downloads a month. You can enjoy Cars Yeah on the Cars Yeah website, iTunes, Apple Podcast, Google Play, and Stitcher mobile podcast apps.”
To hear Mark Greene’s Cars Yeah interview with William Edgar CLICK HERE.
August 19, 2007. Ten years ago, the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance Best of Show winner was this yellow speedster, Harry Yeaggy’s supercharged 1935 Duesenberg SJ Special, also known as “The Mormon Meteor,” made world famous when driven by Ab Jenkins, former mayor of Salt Lake City, Utah, to set a 24-hour speed record on Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats. Yeaggy, of Cincinnati, Ohio, is seen standing in white shirt at the front of his car. Click picture to make it full screen. Photograph by William Edgar. [To purchase a large photo print of this image, please see Contact page and email me.]
August 14, 2007. I can still hear the bellow of the first Concours-on-the-Avenue Best of Show winner ten years ago in Carmel, when Doug and Genie Freedman brought the event to Monterey Week. Doing the photography for that inaugural, this remains one of my favorite photos ever … caught when Larry Bowman’s 1963 Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport victoriously left the judges’ ramp and attacked spectators’ eardrums in the Best of Ways. Click picture to make it full screen. Photograph by William Edgar. [To purchase a large photo print of this image, please see Contact page and email me.]
The above photograph of Bill Pollack was shot by John Edgar with his Rolleiflex at Riverside International Motor Raceway on September 22, 1957. The #8 car is the John Edgar-entered 6-cylinder 300S Maserati formerly driven by Carroll Shelby, but for this inaugural Riverside weekend it was Bill’s to race. He finished 11th the day before in Saturday’s Preliminary, and was now set here to enter the fray in Riverside’s Sunday Main. Bill’s first of a total eight drives for Edgar was seven years earlier in a supercharged MG-TC, with his greatest driving career successes at the wheel of Tom Carstens’ multiple-Pebble Beach race winning Allard-Cadillac, as well competing in sports car racing marques that included Morgan, Siata, Ferrari, Jaguar, Porsche, Alfa Romeo, Corvette, Kurtis, Cooper, Lister, and 1950s period Baldwin-Mercury Special. The Riverside Opener’s Main in this Edgar-Maserati became an added highlight for Bill’s racing accomplishments, finishing third behind race winner Richie Ginther in Edgar’s 410 Sport Ferrari and second place Kurtis-Buick driven by owner Bill Murphy. Speaking for myself, William Edgar: “I think Bill Pollack was unlike so many other well-known sports car racing drivers of his time because he could see himself as a figure in the human comedy, through a third-person kind of way, and he could do that because he was smart and he had honest perspective; he could live outside of himself and was able to look in and see what the car enthusiast/driver Pollack was doing and then find the good or bad or very often funny things about that man seated behind the wheel of a car built to be driven at an unsafe speed and that could very easily and quickly kill him. Of course, we know it didn’t, but instead repeatedly gave him life, and continuing joy for all of us who knew him in person and by what he said and wrote in his columns and autobiography [Red Wheels and White Sidewalls: Confessions of an Allard Racer] in his winning Bill Pollack style.” [To purchase a large photo print of this image, please see Contact page and email me.]
He drives open-wheel vintage race cars. Moreover, there’s drive in everything 62-year old Bud Moeller does in life … past, present, future. See my 5-page Vintage Racer Profile article about him and his cars in the current July/August 2017 issue of Vintage Motorsport magazine. Bud’s historic F1 machinery includes a 950-hp Ferrari F2003-GA (above, leaving the pits at Sonoma Raceway) that served Michael Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello in period, as well as the ex-Jody Scheckter Ferrari 312 T5 and ex-Derek Daly 1979 British Ensign N179. Moeller also partners a torrid Ferrari 599XX EVO closed racer with son-in-law Frank Privitera, and pilots his own 6-place 850-hp Piper Meridian Turboprop airplane. Known internationally for his historic F1 driving prowess and Ferrari F1 Clienti track performance, Moeller has set lap records at Laguna Seca, Mont Tremblant, Sonoma, and New Orleans Motorsports Park. Article Story and Photography by William Edgar
