It isn’t widely known that Gilles Villeneuve started his motorsport career racing snowmobiles in his native Quebec. It’s hard to imagine a racing series further removed from Formula 1 than this but somehow he took his talent from these humble beginnings to win the US and Canadian Formula Atlantic championships in 1976.
In ’77 he was hired by McLaren and his entry into the Formula 1 paddock was complete, it’s widely believed that if it wasn’t for untimely death in 1982 he would have won at least one, and possibly more, F1 World Championships.
Ben Branch has had his work featured on CNN, Popular Mechanics, the official Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, 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 millions of readers around the world and hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
This is Ayrton Senna’s Lotus 98T steering wheel from the 1986 Brazilian Formula 1 Grand Prix, it’s likely that it carried some sentimental value for him as he took pole position and a 2nd place finish at his home race with it. The current owner of the steering wheel, Michel Royer, was an engineer…
Editor’s Note: This film was transcoded from VHS so it’s not perfect, there are also a couple of black screen sections where I assume the original ad breaks were – I suggest fast forwarding through them. The original Widowmaker Hill Climb took place on a hillside in Draper, Utah. It became a world famous event…
This is one of the original cars built for the 2000 film Gone in 60 Seconds, a car famously nicknamed “Eleanor” by Nicholas Cage’s character Randall “Memphis” Raines. Eleanor, Chip Foose, and The Dream Car 11 examples of Eleanor were either fully or partially built for filming and 5 were destroyed during stunt sequences, all…
The Aston Martin V8 Vantage Zagato is a two-door GT car with performance figures that came close to rivalling the greatest supercars of its era – the Ferrari F40, the Porsche 959, and the Lamborghini Countach LP5000 Quattrovalvole. Remarkably it managed a 186 mph top speed and a sub-5 second 0-60 mph time without sacrificing on…
The California Star has always been a controversial car, it was built in the early 1980s as a modern day interpretation of the Ford Model T Roadster using a full space frame chassis, competition grade suspension and Wilwood brake calipers, a mid-mounted turbocharged engine, Porsche 911 rack and pinion steering, and a hand-formed aluminum body….
Cortina: The Story of Ford’s Best-Seller is a definitive book about one of the most important British Ford’s in history and a staple of the British working class from the 1960s into the 1980s. If you grew up in the England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa it’s almost certain that either…
