[Muzza]

Hello Adam Ashmore, MickJ and Paulzinho,

Adam, great pictures. You pictured two cars that are true legends. A factory Porsche 956, in Rothmans livery, is as close to Darth Vader as a racing car can be.

Mickj, the Fittipaldi brothers - Emerson and the elder Wilsinho - were involved with motorsport since their early teens, pushed by their father, Wilson "Barão" Fittipaldi ("The Baron"), a sports journalist and sometime racer (by the way, what a man - a character on himself).

Even before they could have a driver's license, they were manufacturing hand-made steering wheels that became the thing to be amongst young daredevils. Wilsinho and Emerson's business tact - hiring people, promoting products - and the support of their fanatic family propelled them forward and forward.

By their late teens, around 1967, Formula Vee was blooming around the world. In Brazil, a place where the Volkswagen Beetle (nicknamed "Fusca") reigned absolute for decades in the automobile industry, this low-cost formula was the first stepping stone for many successful drivers, from José Carlos Pace to Nelson Piquet. Wilson and Emerson were immediately lured to F-Vee. More than that, they decided to build their own chassis, the Fitti-V, which went on to completely dominate the category. These guys were not even twenty by then!

Racing was a pretty much amateur activity those years, and the "F Brothers" were driving all sorts of machinery, from single-seaters to karts to touring cars. They were surely talented and skilled. Wilson, and shortly later Emerson too, were hired by the highly respected Escuderia Dacon. Dacon - still in business, today a flagship Porsche dealer in São Paulo - was dominating long distance races with modified Volkswagen Karmann Ghias (remember them, those cute roadsters?), replacing the original engine by a Porsche 911 powerplant.

After winning races with Dacon, Wilsinho and Emerson took the idea and move the bar higher. They built a beautiful prototype with tubular spaceframe and a neat bodywork, and called it Fitti-Porsche. The car was as fast as it was pretty, and completely dominated the 1968 edition of the Mil Milhas Brasileiras (Brazilian 1000 Miles, still the most important race there), just to fail a few laps shy to the chequered flag, when the car broke (the alternator, if I am not mistake, gave away).

Motorsport in Brazil was plenty of crazy ideas like the "Twin VW" MickJ mentioned. People must be creative when they haven' got much money, I feel. There were several two-engine cars, a sort of desperate way of increasing horsepower, rather common those years.

Another team buit a prototype with two DKW engines (yes, those two-stroke East Germany cars), that had two throttles and two clutch pedals. I am not even going to comment how aero development was done then, but I remember seeing several cars with wings that would make them eligible for the "World of Outlaws" races in the US today (I mean, the wings were sometimes larger than the cars, and I am not kidding).

I do not recall the extent of the involvement of the Fittipaldi brothers in that dual-engine VW, but I remember the car (most of my motorsport library is back in Brazil, so unfortunately I cannot check it). The car was extremely fast, but also explosion-prone. The compression rate was kicked sky-high, and the engines last for a few laps only. But while it stood on track, oh boy, what a fast machine that was...

Cheers, and thanks for bring me back these memories.