Birth of Sports Car Racing. The birth of sports car racing The sports car as such is a child of the

The regulations for the Corsican race marked it out, however, stipulating as they did four-seater cars of up to 3 litres, properly equipped with mudguards and windscreens. Regulations on similar lines were soon applied to other races, such as the first Belgian Grand Prix and in 1923 to what would become the pre-eminent sports car race: Les Vingt Quatre Heures du Mans or the Grand Prix d'Endurance, which was con-ceived as an endurance test for 'touring cars of the fast sporting type'.

In its duration it was not a complete novelty, for there had been several 24-hour races run over rather primitive tracks in America, and the French Bol d'Or for light cars in 1922.

But Le Mans was different. Initially, each race was not even an end in itself, but a round in the `Rudge Whitworth Triennial Award', the Coupe Annuelle a la Distance not being inaugurated until 1928. In those early races cars over 1100cc had to have four seats, while all had to carry ballast equivalent to passengers; from 1924 to 1927 part of the distance had to be covered with hoods erected.

Slowly the regulations changed, until in 1937 all entries had merely to have `two seats facing forward', and in 1949 prototypes were admitted.

The Le Mans 24 Hours Race became the single most important road race on the calendar, to the extent that its organisers, the Automobile Club de l'Ouest, could influence the formulation of international regulations, or — if these did not suit their race — could ignore them! In view of its stature, winners are given (page 17). By the late 1920s, however, sports car racing was firmly established, even becoming an acceptable sub-stitute for Grand Prix racing when costs of the latter soared beyond reason in harsh economic times. Sports cars thus proliferated at all levels, the French and British industries being particularly attracted to the type or at least having the most appreciative markets.

Italy naturally produced some outstanding examples, the sports car seeming especially suited to the Latin temperament, and to the demanding races run in Italy, epitomised by the Mille Miglia, held annually for 30 years over a near-1000-mile course on public roads.

Austria and Germany also contributed sports cars large and small, some of them truly outstanding; only in America did interest in sporting automobiles wane. Success in major racing events was nationally im-portant in prestige and economically important in sales terms, and the practice of marking success through model names spread, with a spate of types such as `Brooklands', 'Montlhery', 'Mille Miglia', le Mans', and `Nurburg', their names not always fully earned.

This practice only began to lapse in the late 1960s, when the association of racing success with road cars became rather anti-social, or perhaps as sports-racing cars became ever further removed from the cars one could use on the road.

By that time, however, such examples as `Targa' and 'Carrera' had become so much part of the motoring vocabulary that their origins were almost forgotten (as, sadly, are the races from which they derived).

The 1930s, even more than the 1920s, saw the spread of mass-produced cheap 'sports cars', many of which were at best 'sporting' cars, however much they looked the part. In outward appearance the break with the Vintage years was obvious by the late 1930s (al-though the cycle-wing look lingered in odd corners for a surprisingly long time after the Second World War).

There had been streamlined essays in the 1920s, main-ly from French concerns such as Chenard-Walcker, Voisin and Tracta, but the next decade saw a pgsitive swing towards efficient body shapes on cars by Bugatti, BMW, Adler and, of course, by leading Italian coach-builders on chassis from Alfa Romeo.

Thus the closed coupe, anathema on Vintage sports cars, found acceptance and did not seem out of place on prominent cars in major races. The flowing lines were carried through quite logically on post-war models, gaining full expression on open and closed examples built by companies such as Jaguar, Mercedes-Benz and the great Italian coachbuilders.

By the 1950s the era of the `sports-racer' had firmly arrived; there had been false dawns for years, with `production-derived' but clearly rather special sports cars being admitted to races.