Welcome To The Thunder: This Is Your Hump-Day Trans-Am [Racing]

Wednesdays suck. 1960s American muscle does not suck. Road racing does not suck. YouTube also does not suck. Can you see where we’re going with this? In-car video of a 7500-rpm AMC Javelin and loud noises below. Eat me, Wednesday. My dad is a funny guy. Because he and I both have weird work schedules, I’ll often go a week or two without talking to him over the phone. We communicate a bit more regularly through email, but even then, it’s limited to sporadic bursts of excellence: 500 words on why the much-abused BMW 2002 race car that we share needs more cam. Three paragraphs on the glory of Mark Donohue ’s The Unfair Advantage . Five sentences on how he needs to buy a Vincent Black Shadow and listen to more Richard Thompson while drinking small-batch bourbon. You get the picture. Of all the things my dad geeks out on, the one subject he repeatedly comes back to is the original Trans-Am. (The racing series, not the Pontiac.) The Trans-American Sedan Championship of the 1960s and

early 1970s is one of our shared touchstones, the kind of unspoken father-son weirdness that we both understand and never have to explain. All of this is an elongated way of saying that, a few days ago, Dad sent me the clips below, along with a few appropriate comments (”Holy hell, Marlboro was tiny! “). For a number of different reasons, none of which I will bore you with, I absolutely hate Wednesdays. Maybe you do too. And maybe this will help. Highlights: Peter Revson narrating a lap in his AMC Javelin. Someone saying “…the start, which is frequently a short run to disaster here.” At several points, you catch a glimpse of the all-conquering Penske/Sunoco Camaros . The oft-forgotten Dan Gurney/Swede Savage AAR Plymouth ‘Cuda can be seen peeking its nose through the pack on a start. And Mark Donohue does heroic, Captain Nice Mark Donohue things.) Photo/Screencap Credit: Historic Trans-Am , Dave Friedman/DF Photo Services

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Welcome To The Thunder: This Is Your Hump-Day Trans-Am [Racing]