Al deze gegevens vind je uitgebreid terug in de naslagwerken van Janos Wimpffen. Je kan hem gerust de meest vooraanstaande historicus in de uithoudingsracerij noemen. Bij hem vind je letterlijk alles tot in detail.
Hij heeft continu een kleine note-book bij, waarin alle info per merk/type/chassisnummer in terug te vinden is. @Viper GTS-R: een simpele input van hem volstaat om op al jouw vragen te antwoorden.
Hieronder meer over deze man:
Every organization needs a bearded weird one and János Wimpffen fits the bill. The fifty-year old Seattleite (that's a resident of Seattle - not an orbiting spacecraft) has been a fan of sports car racing since teenage days. While his friends were trying to figure out girls, János was en route to becoming maniacal about sports statistics. A by-product of this process has been that while he has become the foremost repository of sports car racing trivia, it has taken him until nearly middle age to start chasing the opposite sex.
János became forever hooked on sports car racing while watching the first live telecast of the 24 Hours of Le Mans to the United States. It was the 1966 edition that was dominated by Ford. "You mean these people are crazy enough to drive around a course all day and night? And, it's not simply a case of one winner like at Indianapolis, but there are a bewildering array of categories? Why, this perfectly suits my own lunacy!" Wimpffen exclaimed.
He tried to take the matter one step further by club racing a Triumph TR4 during the early 1970s, but he soon found out that the only thing he had in common with Franz Konrad was that they were all born in Graz, Austria. What Wimpffen did excel in was keeping track of all this, and he also found himself to be a halfway decent writer.
Real life intervened and he spent the next two decades fooling around with academia, earning a doctorate, building a career in transportation consultancy--but mostly just fooling around. Wanting to write a definitive history of our beloved branch of the sport, he cast about for support in doing so and was finally able to convince a group of enthusiasts in the Pacific Northwest that endurance sports car racing deserved the type of in-depth review that had thus far mostly been reserved for F1. Wimpffen got carried away with the notion and produced
a monstrous two-volume 2200 page set called, Time and Two Seats.
The book continues to garner acclaim, two years after its publication. Ensconced within its pages are the minutiae of the sport, down to the chassis numbers of many participants (drivers? Ed.) so that generations to come can continue to argue about exactly which Ferrari 512S ran this or that particular race. All this has made János something of a combination between his heroes, Henry Manney, Denis Jenkinson, and Michael Cotton, and that weird guy in the trench coat standing at the end of a train platform.
Wimpffen enjoys providing play-by-plays of the races in a style that mixes historical perspective with insight on the actions and strategies of the teams, along with the occasional snide attempts at humor. His background in geography causes him to mix in a bit of travelogue at each new circuit. Although generally amiable and sociable in mixing among the denizens of the paddock, woe is it to any team manager that withholds the chassis number of their latest acquisition from János' ever-present notebook.
Bron: Dailysportscar.com
Meer over het boek:
http://www.bentleypublishers.com/product.htm?code=h727