By 1956 the Monte Carlo Rally was already 45 years old, and very well established as one of the world’s pre-eminent road racing events. Automobile manufacturers used it as a way to publicly show off the toughness and reliability of their vehicles, and played down the amount of mechanical work the driver and co-driver typically did over the course of each event.
If you’d like to read more about this history of the Monte Carlo Rally you can click here – the Wikipedia entry is actually one of the best sources you’ll find about it online. The film above is 480p but it’s a recording from the original film of course, so the quality is a little lacking. Depending on your screen size you might want to reduce the size of your web browser to make the playback window smaller for clarity.
Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
