Books update
I recently purchased volume 2 (1970) of the Anthony Pritchard series, along with a replacement to my volume 1 (1969) which had vanished off of the face of the Earth. Both from a place called "Vickers", in some place called St. Leonards-on-Sea, in Hastings. While the drop in the value of the Pound versus the Dollar since the "Brexit" vote might be unpleasant for most here, it's been a godsend for me. So I will exhaust these before going back to working out of my Mike Lang volumes. All for the greater glory of the Wiki.
Defining retirements in races
I was working on the page for the 1984 Dallas Grand Prix, and was struck by a thought. There were a lot of retirements in that race, mostly a sum of very hot weather, a terrible track surface, and close proximity of a lot of concrete walls. Which to me are crashes, or, more formally, accidents. But most of my source materials insist that so-and-so always "spun out".
I think of a spin out as a car going off and either getting stuck, or just stalling the engine. And always preceded by an actual spin. The "spinouts" in Dallas were all of the car-getting-off-line-and-hitting-something-solid variety. I still remember the race on TV. The only actual spin in the race involved a driver (Jacques Laffite) who ultimately finished in the points. So the D…
Where I'm Taking This
I've now been here long enough to get a feel for things, and the direction that my edits have been going in. My primary edits are going to be for the 1969 through 1972 seasons, due to my having access to the tremendously detailed 'Motor Racing Year' books by Anthony Pritchard. I currently own the books for 1969, 1971 and 1972, and am on the prowl for an affordable 1970 edition. It's a shame that he did not write any more of them. I check and supplement the data with sources like Formula1.com, Racing Reference.info and even (gasp!) Wikipedia, just to make sure that I don't have to make a lot of changes later. My race pages so far have been just background, entries, qualifying times and results, but there will be at least one more pass throu…