AUGUST 2005 (ISSUE 137)

My third and final August issue is from 2005, a few months before I handed over to current editor Steve Bennett. Not much about Le Mans this time – mainly because there had been no top-level factory entry since the glory days of 1998 – but we did preview the 2006-season American Le Mans Series (or ALMS) car, suggesting that it might later form the basis for a challenger at the French circuit.

Plenty of event coverage, though. The Goodwood Festival, of course, this year marking Honda’s four decades of GP success, but at the same time giving Stuttgart plenty of scope to showcase its own sporting achievements from that and earlier periods. Peter Morgan – he was a busy chap for us back then! – reported on the Gaisberg Rennen on the streets of Salzburg, and it must have been during that same trip that he took in a gathering at Zell am See to celebrate the 70th birthday of F A (Butzi) Porsche, now sadly deceased, of course. The same trip, in a 997 Carrera ‘S’ Cabrio, also gave Peter, together with photographer John Colley, a chance to ‘do’ the famous Grossglockner Pass, reprising some classic black-and-white photos of Ferdinand and Louise Porsche taken there way back in the 1930s. Wonderful stuff!