Racing History Archive

Slot racing has always been an act of homage. Every chassis an IMCA member built, every livery they masked and painted, and every scale replica that lapped a club track traced back to a real car that once howled down the Mulsanne Straight, slithered through the Sicilian mountains, or thundered across the Kyalami plateau. Over the club's active decades, members researched the real-racing history behind those projects — the machines, drivers, seasons and circuits worth recreating — and documented it in a long-running series of feature articles, race reports and quizzes.

This page is the community's index to that motorsport-history material: a single place to find the eras and subjects the club studied and reproduced in miniature. The references gathered here are maintained for enthusiasts and researchers who followed those articles over the years. Where it helps, we link to authoritative sources for deeper reading. For the story of the hobby itself — the raceways, the federations and the championships — see our Slot Car History and World Championship pages.

The Targa Florio

Few events captured the club's imagination like the Targa Florio, the open-road endurance classic founded by Vincenzo Florio in 1906 and run through the mountains of Sicily on the Piccolo Circuito delle Madonie — a public-road lap of roughly 72 kilometres, threading more than 700 corners between stone villages and cliff edges. To lap it quickly a driver needed to memorise the entire circuit, because no amount of practice could make it truly familiar.

The archive's centrepiece is the 54th Targa Florio of 1970, a round of that year's International Championship for Makes. It was won by Jo Siffert and Brian Redman in the diminutive Porsche 908/03 — a car built specifically for the two tightest events on the calendar, the Targa and the Nürburgring, and pared down to around 545 kilograms so it could dance through the Madonie switchbacks where the big 917s were too much car. The Targa held World Championship status only until 1973, and after a fatal accident in 1977 it was dropped as a top-level race, which is part of why the era the club documented feels like a lost world.

Porsche's Endurance Dynasty: the 908 and 917

The Porsche 908 arrived in 1968 as Porsche's answer to the three-litre prototype rules, powered by a 3.0-litre flat-eight and built in a succession of forms the archive follows closely — the long-tailed 908 Langheck coupé for fast circuits, the open 908/02 spyder, and the featherweight 908/03 for the twisty rounds. Its most poignant chapter came at the 1969 Le Mans, where Hans Herrmann's 908 LH duelled the older Ford GT40 of Jacky Ickx to the flag and lost by barely a hundred metres after twenty-four hours — one of the closest finishes the race has ever seen.

Redemption arrived with the Porsche 917. Homologated in 1969 with a 4.5-litre (later 4.9 and 5.0-litre) flat-twelve, the 917 was fearsomely fast and, at first, fearsomely unstable — until aerodynamic development produced the short-tailed 917 K that tamed it. In 1970 Hans Herrmann and Richard Attwood gave Porsche its first outright Le Mans victory in a 917 KH; a year later Helmut Marko and Gijs van Lennep set a distance record that would stand until 2010. Later 917/10 and 917/30 turbo-spyders went on to demolish the Can-Am. The archive keeps separate files on the road-racing 917 and on its 1970 works campaign, reflecting how central the car was to the projects members built.

The 1967 World Sportscar Championship Season

The club devoted a three-part study to 1967, the high-water mark of the Ford-versus-Ferrari war and the last season before the governing body cut prototypes to three litres. Its defining day was the 24 Hours of Le Mans, won by the all-American pairing of Dan Gurney and A.J. Foyt in the seven-litre Ford GT40 Mk IV — a record-setting run against Ferrari's beautiful 330 P4. Earlier in the year Ferrari had answered with a crushing 1-2-3 at the Daytona 24 Hours, and Mario Andretti had taken the Sebring 12 Hours in a Ford Mk IV, part of a golden run that made him a fixture of the season's story.

The third instalment closes the year at the British round, the BOAC 500 at Brands Hatch, where Jim Hall's winged Chaparral 2F scored its lone major victory in the hands of Phil Hill and Mike Spence. Read together, the 1967 files trace how outright speed had outrun safety — and why the rule-makers reshaped the sport for 1968.

Ferrari, Matra and the Three-Litre Prototype Wars

The three-litre formula that followed produced some of the most closely fought seasons in endurance history, and the archive covers the Italian and French protagonists in depth. Ferrari's 312 P of 1969 carried the fight in the three-litre class, while the five-litre 512 S of 1970 — 25 examples built to meet the sports-car homologation rule — was Maranello's heavyweight answer to the 917, taking a famous win at the 1970 Sebring 12 Hours before the Porsches asserted themselves over the full season.

France's challenge came from Matra, whose MS650 and MS660 prototypes carried the marque's glorious 3.0-litre V12 — an engine remembered as much for its operatic sound as its results, and the seed of the cars that would win Le Mans three years running from 1972. The rivalry peaked twice in the archive: the 1972 season, when Ferrari's 312 PB swept the Championship of Makes it entered while Alfa Romeo's Tipo 33 chased hard; and 1973, a straight fight between Ferrari's 312 PB and the Matra MS670 that Matra settled by taking both the title and Le Mans. These were the liveries — Ferrari red, Matra blue, Alfa's Autodelta colours — that filled club display cabinets.

Lola and the Can-Am: Unlimited Sports-Prototypes

Not every hero was a European works car. Eric Broadley's Lola T70 — and especially the Mk3B GT coupé of 1969, a Chevrolet-powered privateer favourite that won the Daytona 24 Hours that year — gave the archive one of its most-recreated shapes. The T70 also belonged to the wildest arena of all: the Canadian-American Challenge Cup, the near-limitless Group 7 series that ran from 1966.

The archive opens the Can-Am story at its 1966 inaugural season, won by John Surtees in a Lola T70 and famous for Jim Hall's Chaparral 2E, whose towering driver-adjustable wing helped invent modern racing aerodynamics. It carries the thread into 1967, the year Bruce McLaren's orange M6A began the papaya team's long domination of the series — the start of what fans called the "Bruce and Denny Show." Big engines, few rules and spectacular cars made the Can-Am irresistible to modellers.

The Springbok Series: Endurance Racing in Southern Africa

One of the archive's more unusual subjects is the Springbok Series, the southern-hemisphere endurance championship contested across South Africa, Rhodesia and Mozambique through the late 1960s. Run in the European off-season — roughly November to January — it drew works refugees and privateers to circuits such as Kyalami, whose Nine Hours was the jewel of the calendar, along with Roy Hesketh at Pietermaritzburg and the seaside blast at Lourenço Marques. The 1966–67 seasons the club documented offered a rare chance to see European sports-prototypes racing under African summer skies, and gave slot builders a set of sun-faded liveries found nowhere else.

Le Mans, Spa and the Tourist Trophy

Alongside the marque studies, the archive keeps a shelf of individual classic races. The 1964 Le Mans 24 Hours — won by Jean Guichet and Nino Vaccarella in a Ferrari 275 P as Ford's brand-new GT40s all faltered — is documented in detail, including the drivers lost that hard weekend. The old Spa-Francorchamps, a 14-kilometre road course through the Ardennes forests where sports cars averaged terrifying speeds, gets its own "Spa legends" file for the mid-1960s. And the archive reaches back to the 1963 RAC Tourist Trophy at Goodwood — a race first run in 1905, making it one of the oldest in the sport — where Graham Hill won in a Ferrari 250 GTO, still among the most coveted shapes any modeller can attempt.

Group 5 and Group C: Silhouettes and Ground-Effect Prototypes

The archive does not stop in the 1960s. It covers the Group 5 "silhouette" era of 1980–81, when turbocharged specials loosely based on road cars filled the grids — the dominant Porsche 935, the BMW M1, the Ford Capri and Escort Zakspeed turbos and the BMW 320 turbo — cars whose boxed arches and big wings made them a modeller's delight.

It then follows the sport into Group C, the fuel-economy prototype formula that ran from 1982 to 1993 and is widely regarded as a golden age of endurance racing. The club's second Group C instalment covers the later years, from the Porsche 956/962 dynasty through the Jaguar and Sauber-Mercedes challengers to the 3.5-litre finale in which the Peugeot 905 won Le Mans in 1992 and 1993 before the category was retired. Few eras produced a richer catalogue of liveries to reproduce.

From JGTC to Super GT: Japanese GT Racing

The most modern strand in the archive follows Japan's premier GT championship. Established in 1993, the All Japan Grand Touring Car Championship (JGTC) paired a headline GT500 class with the smaller GT300 category, and turned homologation icons — the Nissan Skyline GT-R, the Toyota Supra and the Honda NSX — into touring-car legends. In 2005 the series was rebranded as Super GT, and the club's "history of JGTC" study traces the whole arc from the 1993–2004 JGTC years into the Super GT era that followed. The same period saw Europe's GT boom, and the archive's 2006 Italian GT Championship file records the reign of the mighty Maserati MC12, the closed-cockpit monster that dominated GT racing across the continent in those seasons.

Features and Quizzes

Beyond the marque and season studies, the community published a run of lighter pieces — motorsport-history quizzes that tested readers on the great races and the sport's rule changes, along with standalone race reports. Those features remain part of the archive's character: they were how a club of builders and racers shared the stories behind the cars on their tracks. To see how that passion translated into competition in miniature, explore our Racing Classes and browse the photo gallery.

The Archive at a Glance

The subjects indexed here are historical references maintained for the enthusiast community. For questions about the club and its championships, see About IMCA.