Dat’s Italian, youse jabronis!

With all that green power in evidence – not the biodiesel powering the transit buses, either – your eyes can lock on to a lot of oddballs at Monterey that’s over the top, to say the least. I grabbed this image in the Ferrari club compound at the relocated, but still delightful, Concorso Italiano.

Best guess is that this is started out as either a 365 GT/4 2+2 or a 400i from the Seventies before it got the but wait, there’s more treatment a la a Mighty MendIt spot starring Billy Mays even though he’s, uh, dead. What can I say? This is California.

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Fastest man alive

In the final moments of the delightful Philip Kaufman-directed film The Right Stuff, there’s a launch in which Gordon Cooper, the final American to fly solo into Earth orbit, breaks the aviation speed record, the creed of faster, higher, farther.

We managed to locate this old Ford publicity photo that shows Cooper, on the left, with a 1966 Ford that he must have loved, even though Tom Wolfe, who wrote the book upon which the film was based, claimed that the Mercury Seven astronauts were Corvette guys. That Galaxie 500 is packing a 427 SOHC Ford engine, the legendary Cammer, which Ford couldn’t get homologated for NASCAR and instead used in drag racing, most notably the nitro classes. That car’s worth a bunch if it still exists. The other guy in the photo is Jacques Passino, who was head of Ford’s worldwide racing program during the Total Performance years, under the regimes of both Lee Iacocca and Henry Ford II. Thanks to Ed Rachanski for the photo.

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