Fantastic flying lap onboard TPC Racing’s 1990 Porsche GT2 Evo driven by Michael Levitas at the 2015 Tire Rack Ultimate Track Car Challenge. You’ll never guess what’s 6 years old on this bad boy. Spoiler alert, it’s the tires.
Burning rubber and jumping over road gaps in the southwest of Norway. This is what happens when Aksel Lund Svindal, the Downhill Gold Medalist, meets Andreas Mikkelsen, one of the best World Rally Championship (WRC) driver – a wildly beautiful preparation to the Rally Finland, kicking off in two days’ time.
At the world famous Lyseveien in the southwest of Norway, skier Aksel Lund Svindal met rally-driver Andreas Mikkelsen for a man-to-man battle in early June. The two Norwegian athletes gathered there for an unusual challenge and to catch the ferry to go back home: Mikkelsen chasing Svindal to get the maximum out of his mountain freeskiing, while Mikkelsen navigates a narrow path through snow banks up to eight meters high – both always under time pressure.
Each year, the bright lights and sounds of the Las Vegas Strip are temporarily drowned out by the roar of 850-horsepower trucks tearing across the desert at speeds nearing 140 miles per hour for the Polaris RZR Mint 400, the toughest offroad race in America. Boasting bone-jarring terrain, high-speed passes, exasperating equipment failures and spectacular rollovers, the Mint 400 draws top drivers in the world in one of the most thrilling off road races of the season.
“I wanted to experience what they experienced, and I didn’t know any other way to do it except by trying to build a car like they had,” says Peter Giacobbi, builder and owner of this incredible 1959 Ferrari 250 TR recreation.
That’s right: recreation. A master fabricator, engineer, and builder, Giacobbi made this car in order to understand what his boyhood heroes like Juan Manuel Fangio and Graham Hill experienced when driving cars like the Ferrari 250 TR.
His favorite design on any car ever, the project swung into high gear after finding a handmade aluminum body for a ’59 TR that had been sitting for decades. From there, Giacobbi began to figure out what he needed in order to complete the car.
“I made everything look as close as possible…I copied the chassis, found the correct tail lights, had the instruments made…” “There are some things that are different from the original. It was impossible to find a good 3 litre motor, so I used a 4.4 and modified the aesthetics to look like the 250…” he says.
He says that the car is very exciting, especially considering that it weighs 2,300 lbs and has 400 horsepower. “These cars are very hard to drive…It’s pure seat of the pants,” Giacobbi says.
“I drive it as much as I can, I drive it down to the local coffee shop usually once or twice a week,” he says. But on any road—headed to any destination—his respect for racing greats is apparent, saying, “They’re not only heroes, they’re supermen to have driven at the high speeds for the distances they did is an absolute miracle.”