Sports Car Race, Pacific Raceways 1963
August 2, 2010 by
Filed under racing videos
8mm film of the 1963 United States Road Racing Championship, July 20-21 1963. Features lots of shots of vintage race cars including Ferrari GTOs, some of the first Cobras and others. This was shot by a friend of my parents, Tex Steere, who asked me to help convert it for him and has graciously allowed me to post it on YouTube.
WOW is right.. THANK YOu for the video.
born and raised in Renton/Kent, I have been to this track many times and only recently begun to drive it. The historical/nostalgic feeling of this film is humbling
The track is pretty much like you see it here but with more trees on the upper part. At the 1:49 mark, there is a white Corvette going through turn 5a, that part has changed some. 5a is now more of a turn and that changed 5b and 6 a little bit too. More skill is needed now to get through that complex quickly and back up the hill to 7 and 8. They do vintage events there four times a year and the big one is always the weekend of July 4th. See this stuff racing again.
The track is pretty much like you see it here but with more trees on the upper part. At the 1:49 mark, there is a white Corvette going through turn 5a, that part has changed some. 5a is now more of a turn and that changed 5b and 6 a little bit too. More skill is needed now to get through that complex quickly and back up the hill to 7 and 8. They do vintage events there four times a year and the big one is the weekend of July 4th. See this stuff racing again.
Yes
Group 7 racing – nothing like it before or since. Wicked fast and wicked loud. I saw Mark Donohue win his second race at Pacific in 67. I remember the 2 liter Porsche 907s saying “oooooooo, noooooooo” as they downshifted for the uphill esses, a good ten years before anyone had ever heard of Mr. Bill.
awesome video, ive been to pacific raceways many times but it looks a whole lot different from this haha
The track is Pacific Raceways in Kent, Washington and is still in operation today. The track was leased back in the late 60’s and became Seattle International Raceway. Over the years the leaseholder did the bare minimum to keep the track up, so little that the SCCA magazine included it in their “Ghost Tracks” series. The lease ran out in 2001 however and the current owners changed the name back and have slowly been improving it but the course itself is still pretty much the same.
WOW! i cant thank you enough for posting this! where was this track located? i’m guessing its all rubble today?
is that white car @ 3:43 a chaparral 1?
This video is amazing! I would sell my soul to have the Ferrari TR or GTO!! It is very cool to be able to see most of these cars racing each year with SOVREN at SIR!
nice pits…
Thanks for the great footage solaracer66!
1963 USRRC race at Kent, Washington.
1st Dave MacDonald #97 (black)csx2128 289 Cobra, 2nd Ken Miles #98 (red) csx2129 289 Cobra, 3rd Bob Holbert #99 (black) csx2127 289 Cobra.
Glad to see safety was at a premium in those days,passenger cars parked 4 feet from the race track,one straightaway seperated from another straightaway by a good 20 feet and of course, any car spinning out of control could expect to be brought to a safe halt by,em, rows of spectators…
A friend of my parents had this film and asked me to convert it to video for him. I did so and he allowed me to post it to YouTube since he’s a little web-challenged. All the racing footage I have is posted to the various videos on my account, however I do have a lot more videos of old cars I might post at some point.
Thanks for doing this conversion, not many video records exist for this type of racing and it is truly some of the best racing and finest machines ever produced. Thanks for helping your parents friend. The video is great!
Incredible footage- how did you find this? Do you have more to post? Thanks for posting!
Wow! Thanks for posting
Thanks for the reply. I have great memories of those events and am really glad they are available to see.
You could be right, it’s all from one long movie with the drag racing, USRRC, old car drag racing and the NWGP all spliced together. I made my best guess as to where the events switched and I could have selected the wrong point. I’ll re-cut the NWGP video and post that but I’ll probably leave the ‘bonus” video on the end of the USRRC race.
After looking at this video again, I’m convinced that there are two sperate races on this tape. The first is the USRRC race as stated, but after the scene where the crowd is leaving, that race is the Fall Northwest Grand Prix held on 9/29/63. The reason I think this is that Graham Hill in the Lotus 23, Stan Burnett in Dick Hahn’s Ferrari TR and The Harrison Special of winner Lloyd Ruby are shown as well as Dan Gurney in the Genie. They were not at the USRRC race.
You’ve transposed two seperate races here. Gurney was not at the USRRC event in the Huffaker Genie, That was the NW Grand Prix later in the Fall. I believe that this video has footage of both these races spliced together. My dads Jaguar is in the picture at turn 3A where we worked at these events.
Dan Gurney was driving the #7 Car, a 1963 Huffaker Genie, chassis #3, with a Ford 289. Gurney DNF’d this race but the same car was driven by Pedro Rodriguez in October of that year at the 1963 L.A. Times Grand Pix where it finished 3rd.
was bob bondurant or dan gurney in this race?
PIR is in Portland. This is PR, Pacific Raceways.
Thanks! Check back in a week or two, I’m going to try and re-encode it with better video quality as what I have on my computer looks much better but I couldn’t squish it down below 100mb without either cutting it back a lot or loosing quality. I’m going to see if I can hit a better balance before I post the rest of the old 8mm race films I converted.