The Blonde Comet is a 1941 film starring Virginia Vale and William Halligan, it follows the story of Beverly Blake (Virginia Vale), the daughter of a wealthy tire manufacturer.
The film kicks off in Europe with races in France, Italy and Monaco (initial 2 mins of commentary is in Italian/French but the rest of the film is in English) then makes it’s way back to the US where a rivalry/romance kicks off with a fellow racer. I won’t give any more of the plot away, it’s a great film and the window it provides back onto pre-WWII motor racing is fantastic.
You can watch the full length film above or click through to Archive.org here and download it for free, the film is out of copyright now so you won’t get a knock on the door from the MPAA.
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 short film shows what went into building a car engine back in the 1930s, including casting, forging, machining, assembly, and testing. It’s a remarkable look back at how it was done before the robots took over, the amount of hand work required is impressive – as is the somewhat casual nature of the safety…
The Mazda RX-3 – An Introduction The Mazda RX-3 “Savanna” was a paradox of a car. Fledgling Japanese car maker Mazda built a pretty typical for the period small passenger car and dropped a twin rotor Wankel engine into it. This had the effect of making the little RX-3 an exotic road rocket despite its…
The Timex x Todd Snyder MOD is a recent collaboration between what is almost certainly America’s most famous watchmaker and American designer Todd Snyder. Timex was founded as the Waterbury Clock Company in Connecticut in 1854 and made a name for themselves producing clocks in Connecticut’s Naugatuck Valley, nicknamed the “Switzerland of America” due to…
The Continental R-670 is a 7-cylinder, air-cooled radial engine that was used in planes, blimps, tanks, landing craft, and armoured vehicles – mostly during the Second World War. The most famous aircraft fitted with the R-670 was the Boeing-Stearman Model 75, a single-engine biplane that made use of a large centrally-mounted engine – over 10,000…
South Africa to Ireland in a Vintage Alfa is a short film that tells the story of Jethro Bronner’s journey across the length of Africa and Europe as he drove his Alfa Romeo step-nose from The Dargle South Africa, to Dargle in Ireland. Jethro is an Alfaholic whose lifelong ambition was to get his own…
A couple of years later in 1957, Dean Jeffries set about customizing a Porsche 356A Carrera GS he’d bought secondhand, he wanted to showcase his abilities as a body-man as well as a painter, and he knew the best way to do this was to create a show car.
