Variety is the name – Sports Car Racing is the game. This is the claim on the website mastershistoricracing.com for the Masters Sports Car Legends race series. And this claim is pretty much the right one. There is always a very large grid with a lot of different sports cars at every historic motor racing events I witness the last years.
Masters Historic Racing
The Masters Sports Car Legends is a series for Le Mans-style sports cars and Group 4 period cars from 1962 up to 1974. They are representing the history of an iconic period of endurance racing. The great time of the 24h race in Le Mans and the famous 1000 KM races in Spa Francorchamps, Monza and the Nürburgring with the greatest drivers of their times like Jo Siffert, Joakim Bonnier, Vic Elford, Henri Pescarolo, Francois Cevert, Pedro Rodriquez and a lot more.
The Masters Sports Car Legends make for a beautiful sight, with the big-bangers battling with the smaller-engined sports prototypes and GT cars. Chevrons take on Porsche, Lola and Ferrari, with Osella, Coldwell and Ford all represented on the ground-shaking grid. My favorite race car of this historic motor racing series is the Lola T70. This is such a beautiful race car, powerful, loud and most of the times even the fastest one, which is almost obvious due to the largest engine inside – a real big-banger.
But I do like the small Chevron B9 too, the shape reminds a bit on a Porsche 904, but with stronger „hips“. I prefer the Sports Cars with a roof and the typical shape of that time. The open seater like the Osella are not mine.
The race-classes in this series are split by engine size and year of building and are named after the iconic names in sports car racing. At every weekend there are two one hour races with a pitstop which has to be held while the pit stop window is open, the drivers could be changed but this is not a must do. The mandatory pit stop does give the teams the opportunity for strategic planning, sometimes this could make the difference between winning or losing.
All the drivers which want to race at the Masters Sports Car Legends must be in possession of a current racing licence, minimum MUK International C, or ASN equivalent. All the cars, which want to be raced at the series, must be presented with a current FIA Historic Technical Passport and be presented in that specification.
As every race series of Ron Maydons Masters Historic Racing company the Masters Sports Car Legends are very well organized and pretty much supervised by a great team of staff at the race track. It is always a pleasure when they appear at a historic motor racing event. It does look always very professional but also pretty familiar, a large group of women and men who share the same passion. The grids of the Masters series are always filled with very rare and special race cars which represent the golden era of motor racing or to say it more clear the era of my own youth, which is my personal „golden era“.
The year 2022 saw the races of the Masters Sports Car Legends at several locations throughout the whole western Europe. They appear in England at Donington Park, Brands Hatch and Silverstone, in the Netherlands at Zaandvort, in Belgium at Spa Francorchamps, in Germany at the Nürburgring, In Portugal at Portimao and in Austria at the Red Bull Ring. Find out more about our photographer Ralph Lüker.
