I’ve been a fan of auto racing as long as I can remember. Probably my earliest memory is hearing that Ford had won Le Mans in 1966 when their GT40s finished 1-2-3. I can remember watching NASCAR stockcars, USAC Indy cars, and the GP of Monaco on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, when that was the only place you could watch racing on TV.
My father took me to my first race in 1969, when I was 13, to see the Indy cars at Trenton, New Jersey. This was followed by three straight years of going to Watkins Glen, New York, for the World Championship of Makes and Can-Am races. Of course, during this whole time I was building models, mostly of cars.
Then it was off to college in the late ’70s and I kind of drifted away from racing. In the mid-1980s, with the advent of cable TV, and racing becoming a staple of cable, I was hooked again. Since then I’ve attended and photographed NASCAR, IMSA, WoO, CART, ALMS, NHRA, the SCCA Run-Offs, vintage races and small local tracks. In the ’90s, I got back into building model cars, so that I could have 3-D replicas of some of the great race cars I’ve seen.
This web site was started as a place to show the photos that my father and I had shot at Watkins Glen in the ‘70s and as a tribute to the original Can-Am racing series. It has since grown into a site to display as much of my photography and modeling as I have time to upload.
A couple of notes about the photography: You will see quite a difference in the quality of photos and scans throughout this site. That is because I have changed equipment – both cameras and scanners – over the years, along with my skills improving. My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic. Later, I graduated to several Minolta and Canon SLRs, and finally to digital cameras. My first scanner was a flatbed scanner but I now utilize a film/slide scanner. Also, many of the scans I have were done by Kodak or by local photo shops before acquiring my own scanner.
Beginning in the mid-1990s, I became a part-time automotive journalist, both writing about and photographing the sport. Which also led to me doing the same in the world of model building. In print, my work has appeared in AutoWeek, Model Cars magazine, and Vintage Racecar Journal. On line, my writings have appeared at Racezine.com, Amazing43.com, GPMA.org, Motorsport.com, and Vintage Racecar (where I presently write the “Time Capsule” column). My photos have appeared at GPMA.org, Motorsport.com, RacingPress.com, and AutoRacing1.com. Additionally, photographs taken by my father and myself can be found in the books Racing in the Rain by John Horsman, Porsche 917: The Complete Photographic History by Glen Smale, Gulf 917 by Jay Gillotti, and NASCAR’s Greatest Race: The 1992 Hooters 500 by Rick Houston.