1985 12 Hours of Sebring: Legendary Sports Cars and Vintage Racing Photography
As I continue to throttle back on my fulltime motorsport photography career and adjust to life off the road, I'm having more and more time to work on my film archive as I build a resource where writers and publishers can license images for their projects and where fans can browse old memories and even purchase an historic print for there walls.
Each event in my vintage racing photography archive stirs old memories of the races I've seen and the experiences I had making the photos.
Today I'm working on my 1985 12 Hours of Sebring photos and it strikes me that this was an era American sports car racing when some of the coolest race cars ever to speed around American race tracks were streaking past our cameras.
Also, this was a time when most of the racing venues had not yet tasked teams of risk management lawyers to tell us photographers where we could or could not work. I distinctly remember that on one of my first trips to Sebring I had races cars passing by me in both directions with absolutely no barrier between me and the action. Granted, I was a at least couple of hundred yards from the cars, but try telling that to race track security today! Even my 25 year-old self knew that my chosen shooting location was probably not well-advised.
But back to 1985. I recall that there was literally nothing like standing behind a strand or two of Armco shooting Porsche, Jaguar, March, Lola, etc prototypes with a 24mm wide angle lens as the races slid through the hairpin lust a few feet away.
And don't forget the huge field of 935's, Camaros, Ferraris and so on that made up the 74 car starting field.
These images taken at Sebring's old hairpin in 1985 remain among my all-time favorites.
You can view my 1985 12 Hours of Sebring gallery at: 1985 12 Hours of Sebring.
Photo Stories at BCPIX.com
Original photography and firsthand visual history by Brian Cleary.
All images © Brian Cleary. Editorial licensing available.
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