inspiration - old photo

I've been redoing the floors in our house and I found this photo had slipped behind my desk.

I didn't think much of it until I looked a little closer.

There's Parnelli Jones' Big Oly Bronco after what looks like a pretty nasty roll over.  The back of the photo says 1972.  It looks like Ensenada so I'm thinking it's the Baja 500.

inspiration - batteries of my childhood

What I'm up to

We made the cover of Toyota Trails!  It's the magazine of the Toyota Land Cruiser Association, so it's not easy to find.  It's a huge article that documents my parents first trip down the Baja Peninsula and my experience in the 2012 Mexican 1000. You can read the first chunk of the article here.

Inspiration - Rod&Custom, August 1969

I picked up this 1969 copy of Rod&Custom magazine on ebay.  With the cool green model T on the cover - I'd remembered seeing it when I was a kid.  Like a lot of other stuff, my folk's copy was lost in the Harris fire.

For a hot rod magazine they dedicated a ton of space to the 69 Baja 500.  The first paragraph is almost illegible.  A long run on sentence with some hip lingo thrown in.  It reminded me that Hunter S. Thompson didn't operate in a vacuum.  There were plenty of people whacked out of their minds writing. Thompson just did it well.

The article's long, luckily there are plenty of pictures to go along with it.  There's also a short article on the "Norra Car Show" which I might get to later on.

This was one of the few races the Toyota Fj40 wasn't zebra striped.  Duffy/Younghusband finished fifth in their class doing the 500+ mile race in 18 hours 38 minutes. 

While looking over the magazine I really admired the amount of hand lettering going on.  You really don't see enough of it anymore.