Everything passes, everything changes. The objects I idolised as a boy are now museum pieces and the heroes I worshipped are gone but, the obsessions remain. I am old enough to look at these machines and remember their day of revolution; the days they rolled off the transporter ramps into a world aghast at their modernity. I am old enough to remember the consequences of their frailties.
Relic
noun
plural noun: relics
– an object surviving from an earlier time, especially one of historical interest.
– a part of a deceased holy person’s body or belongings kept as an object of reverence.
Both definitions apply. All of these machines have personal significance beyond their histories: the first time I saw them in the pages of Autosport; the first time I saw them in the ‘flesh’; the first time I saw them in flight; the still moment I heard of the tragedies. All of them represent remembrance of things past and none more so than those that carry the green and yellow badge:
Maybe in some distant place, everything is already, quietly, lost. Or at least there exists a silent place where everything can disappear, melding together in a single, overlapping figure. And as we live our lives we discover – drawing towards us the thin threads attached to each – what has been lost.
Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami
Jim Clark’s 1967 Dutch GP winning Lotus 49 – Classic Team Lotus, Hethel.
Rindt’s Lotus 72 – the Donington Collection
Lotus 25 – Classic Team Lotus, Hethel.
Lotus 25 – Classic Team Lotus, Hethel
Clive Chapman
northumbrian : light 
Great post on relics….whenever I see Rindt’s and Clark’s Lotuses, I can’t only think of the accolades…..
Thanks Sue – exactly so – Monza and Hockenheim are forever stained.
Precisely
What beauties! I know what you mean about age and relics. 🙂
janet
Thanks Janet – less aerodynamically efficient than this but much prettier 🙂
https://www.blipfoto.com/entry/2332204106787063381
Beautiful relics, beautiful nostalgia. It must be bittersweet to remember the excitement of discovering them.
It is good to see them again but nearly all are indelibly linked with tragedy.
Beautiful relics. And I like the Murakami quote.
Thanks Su, indeed they are. That quote continues: “I closed my eyes and tried to bring to mind as many beautiful lost things as I could. Drawing them closer, holding on to them. Knowing all the while that their lives are fleeting.” A good man that Murakami.
Yes, and words that seem particularly resonant for me right now. Thanks for reminding me how much I draw from his work.
Remembering…I saw , on TV, Ronnie Peterson crash, and the shock that he really died – despite him not being deadly injured. I don’t think Sweden ever got a better man for Formula 1.
A great man was Ronnie and a great loss – I saw him race many times. His autograph is here:
https://northumbrianlight.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/an-autograph/
Oh – you have a history too. And a sad one.