CONFESSIONS OF A CUCUMBER EATER

I had kept it quiet for years — decades in fact — but in the May 2020 issue (No. 253) I wrote about the Indianapolis 500 in 1960. I confessed that that was the race I most wanted to be transported back to, should the time machine invented many years in the future pop into our present.

COMING OUT

That exposed my love of the humongous, technologically Jurassic, mostly Offenhauser-powered monsters they raced there and then. To some they were ‘big cucumbers’. To the mainstream, these leviathans were simply ‘Indy roadsters’. I received emails and phone calls from friends wondering if I’d taken a knock to the head. Surely those ‘things’ were a stain on motor racing’s quest to push the engineering envelope?

At least one friend has since looked at the highlights of the 500 for the dozen or so years from 1952 on YouTube and has — cautiously, it must be said — acknowledged that he could at least “see what the fascination is”. While mentioning YouTube, during Level 4 and the hiatus of live racing, emails were flying around with links to many old car