Road & Track February/March 2022

MP Curtet Marlyne and Patrick curtet are a wife-and-husband team in Los Angeles pursuing a “cinematographic vision.” Patrick, a professional photographer for more than 30 years, long concentrated on sports and journalistic images and has now shifted his attention to automotive and lifestyle work. Marlyne graduated from Penninghen Art School in Paris. She has her own design studio, L.A. Creative Team. She also operates as the creative coordinator when the Curtet collective shoots together, which they did to produce this issue’s cover. Fred Smith Indianapolis, Le Mans, Daytona—racing is Fred Smith’s first passion. It has led him to explore that point where human and machine find a limit together. He took all the wrong lessons, though: His first car was a 1974 Porsche 914 with a broken transmission. He has since graduated to…

“YOU WANT SOME ORANGE JUICE?” Tony Stewart asked, playfully bopping the top of my head to wake me up. It’s midmorning in the late Aughts. I’d slept in my clothes on a beige sofa in Stewart’s childhood home in Columbus, Indiana. We’d spent a long and, for me, arduous night that started 1700 miles away in Phoenix. I was shadowing the tubby, prickly three-time NASCAR champion for a story I was writing about the cresting of his wild career—as a karting champion, dirt-track racer (and owner), USAC champ, IndyCar ace, and NASCAR phenom. For so long I’d watched Stewart dominate U.S. racing with a combination of rare raw talent and ill-tempered, sharp-humored rebellion. It was mesmerizing and maddening. It was, in the sterile, lowercase-methodist confines of stock-car racing, a heroic career. And…

HERO STORIES become more impressive with retelling. Memory is malleable, and nuance is forgotten as we recast everyday events into otherworldly feats. That’s what we have here with the Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus Boot, a modern revisiting of a Sixties legend that forgets the details in favor of a knockout ending. This is a bona fide off-road racing machine that—somehow—has a license plate. Like everything else SCG intends to build, it was designed for competition but carries just enough DOT-approved equipment to qualify for a 17-digit production-car VIN. It’s 5550 pounds of ugly, like a spider on 39-inch tires. The headlights are too high and too far back. Aside from the most rudimentary pieces—doors, roof—there’s hardly a body panel you could identify by name. It’s like that for a reason. SCG’s Boot is an…

IN 1959, FRANK ADAMS gave his nephews a go-kart. His wife worried about the kids driving it in the street, so she asked Frank to build a track on their land in Riverside, California. In the dirt he mapped out what would become Adams Kart Track, initially just for the one kart. But the track proved to be one of the more interesting things found roadside in the Inland Empire, leading passing motorists to ask if they could run on it. By 1960, word-of-mouth made it a viable business. Six decades later, the track, now called Adams Motorsports Park, still stands in its original layout. Frank’s grandson Troy Adams owns and operates the circuit, which has become one of the nation’s most significant cradles of racing talent. Active alumni include NASCAR…

RACING IS HARD WORK, but you would’ve never known it to watch Sabine Schmitz drive. She dove into every corner with the gleeful chuckle of a child playing peekaboo. “Where is the apex? Where is it? There it is!” Shriek, giggle, dimples, and a big grin. It looked so easy when she did it, so fun. No glowering race face for Schmitz; she loved driving and loved the Nürburgring, and it was so obvious that it made everyone who saw her love them too. It’s one thing to be talented at something and take pleasure in doing it well; it’s another level altogether to make everyone around you feel that same joy. When Schmitz died of cancer at age 51, it resonated as a personal loss to people who had…

ALAN COOPER ALEX WELLEN ALEXANDER MARMUREANU BILL FENECH BILL MURPHY BILLY EDWARDS BLAKE TOVIN BLUE JENKINS BOB BRAYTON BOB STANFORD BRIAN LAM CARL FORSHAGE CHARLES AROLLA CHARLES EDWARDS CHARLES HOOPER CHRIS HANNES CURTIS JENNINGS SCHOFIELD D. NICHOLS BROWN DANIEL J. VOELKER DARYL MCLINDEN DAVID JULIAN WRIGHT DAVID L WESTER DAVID MAFFUCCI DAVID RAY DEAN E SCHREINER DENNIS GIBSON DENNIS ROBERT SMITH DONNA L MICHAELS DOUGLAS ROSS DR. ROBERT GIRGIS ERNESTO CARRIZOSA FREDERICK A BARTZEN FULTON HAIGHT GARY RETELNY GENE PONDER GIL WEST GILBERTO PINZON GURDON HORNOR HUGH WHIPPLE J C LOMBARDO JACQUES FAVRET JAD SALIBA JAMES A WOLF JAMES BLY JAMES CATLOW JAMES COWEN JAMES DOUGLAS LACEY JAMES WALKER JAY STEINER JEFF MARTIN JEFFREY CAPPEL JEFFREY TROWER JIM BAY JITINDER SETHI JOHN & CLARA HARDESTY JOHN & SHELLEY AVILA JOHN BRAVMAN JOHN BRUBAKER III JOHN DE PALMA JOHN GAUCH JOHN GREENBURG JOHN S. HAMILTON JOHN WILLCOX JONATHAN D CUMPTON JONATHAN WEIZMAN JONATHAN YARMIS JOSH SPENCE KANE ALLEN KEITH & JERITA WILLIAMS KEVIN HUNTER KEVIN JOHNSON KURT FEHLING KURT W BRAEUTIGAM LANCE MCRITCHIE SMITH LEAH K HUDSON LEE LEVENSON LES ANDERSON LESS LINCOLN LESTER JONES LUCAS MARGOLIS LUCAS TRABER LUKAS AMLER MARCUS STROM MARK ONEIL MATT GENUARDI MATT NIAURA MATT STRATHMAN MATTHEW COOPER MATTHEW FRANKEL MAX POWER MOTORS MICHAEL GREEN MICHAEL LAMACCHIA MICHAEL MUZZIN MICHAEL WEIL MIKE BAUR MIKE JENNINGS MITCH SHEITELMAN NICHOLAS MORRIS NICK ALEXANDER IMPORTS NICK MATARAZZO NICOLAS PUJET PARAMDEEP…