Martini Racing is the name under which various motor racing teams race when sponsored by the Italian company Martini & Rossi, a distillery that produces Martini vermouth in Turin. Martini's sponsorship program began in 1958 as Martini International Club, founded by Count Metello Rossi di Montelera of Martini & Rossi. The race cars are marked with the distinctive dark blue, light blue and red stripes on white, red or silver background body cars. The car model which has won the most titles for Martini Racing is the Lancia Delta HF Integrale.
The Mille Miglia was an open-road, motorsport endurance race established in 1927 by the young Counts Francesco Mazzotti and Aymo Maggi, which took place in Italy twenty-four times from 1927 to 1957.
The Gumball 3000 is a collection of companies that includes an apparel brand, a registered charity, and is best known for an annual 3,000-mile (4,800 km) international celebrity motor rally, which takes place on public roads. The name comes from the 1976 movie The Gumball Rally. It was established in 1999 by Maximillion Cooper, with his vision to combine cars, music, fashion and entertainment.
Car and Driver is an American automotive enthusiast magazine. In 2006 its total circulation was 1.23 million. It is owned by Hearst Magazines, who purchased prior owner Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. in 2011. It was founded as Sports Cars Illustrated. The magazine is based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Hal Brett Needham was an American stuntman, film director, actor, writer, and NASCAR team owner. He is best known for his frequent collaborations with actor Burt Reynolds, usually in films involving fast cars, such as Smokey and the Bandit (1977), Hooper (1978), The Cannonball Run (1981) and Stroker Ace (1983).
Paul Richard "Richie" Ginther was a racecar driver from the United States. During a varied career, the 1965 Mexican Grand Prix saw Ginther take Honda's first Grand Prix victory, a victory which would also prove to be Ginther's only win in Formula One. Ginther competed in 54 World Championship Formula One Grand Prix races and numerous other non-Championship F1 events.
Hans Herrmann is a retired Formula One and sports car racing driver from Stuttgart, Germany.
Brock Wendel Yates was an American print and TV journalist, screenwriter, and author. He was longtime executive editor of Car and Driver, an American automotive magazine. In 1971 Yates, his son, and a friend developed and drove the first the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash.
The Gumball Rally is a 1976 American comedy film directed and co-written by Charles Bail, a former stunt coordinator also known as Chuck Bail, about an illicit coast-to-coast road race. It was inspired by the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash run by Brock Yates, which inspired several other films, including Cannonball (1976), Cannonball Run (1981), and Speed Zone (1989), as well as an actual event, the American Gumball Rally and Gumball 3000 international race.
The Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, widely known as the Cannonball Baker or Cannonball Run, was an unofficial, unsanctioned automobile race run five times in the 1970s from New York City and Darien, Connecticut, on the East Coast of the United States to the Portofino Inn in the Los Angeles suburb of Redondo Beach, California. The Cannonball Run races have additionally inspired numerous contemporary efforts by independent teams to set the record time for the route, known as the Cannonball Run Challenge.
Björn Waldegård was a Swedish rally driver, and the winner of the inaugural World Rally Championship for drivers in 1979. His Swedish nickname was "Walle".
François Delecour is a French rally driver.
Andrew Comrie-Picard is a Canadian race car driver, X Games athlete, stuntman, and TV personality. In 2003 he left a career as a young New York City entertainment lawyer to pursue a career in race driving. He has since won international and American championships, hosted and produced internationally-distributed automotive TV shows, and designed, coordinated, and driven stunts in feature film and television.
Alexander Roy is an American writer, podcaster, TV host and rally race driver who has set various endurance driving records, including the US "Cannonball Run" transcontinental driving record, which he and Dave Maher broke in 2007 in 31 hours and 4 minutes, featured in the 2019 documentary APEX: The Secret Race Across America.
Rudolf Karl Wütherich, most commonly known as Rolf Wütherich, was a Luftwaffe mechanic and pilot, and later an automotive engineer and racer. He was passenger in James Dean's Porsche at the time of Dean's death in a fatal car crash in 1955. He experienced many personal difficulties as a result of the crash and himself died in a car accident 26 years later.
The Rental Car Rally is a 36-hour city-to-city road rally that takes place on public roads several times a year in different cities, with a different route each time. RCR sees an annual entry of about 30 cars per rally, with each team required to compete in a themed costume of their choosing, so long as the costume includes their vehicle. The rally is not a serious race in the traditional sense of competitive rally driving, though teams win by merit of their costumes and low mileage. Organizers emphasize that Rental Car Rally is a road trip and not a race.
In international rallying, Group R-GT, is a formula of rally car defined by the FIA for GT cars introduced in 2011. Between 2014 and 2019 technical passports were issued for individual vehicles built by tuners. Since 2020 R-GT cars are required to be homologated by the manufacturer in common with other rally car formulae.
Richard Rawlings (born March 30, 1969) is an American entrepreneur and media personality. He is the star of the reality television show Fast N' Loud on Discovery Channel. He is also a proprietor of the Gas Monkey Garage as well as both the Gas Monkey Bar N' Grill and Gas Monkey Live music venues in Dallas, Texas. Beginning in 2014, Rawlings was featured in national television commercials promoting Dodge vehicles and financing.
Robbie Dickson is a British-Canadian engineer and entrepreneur who worked with racing legends Bill Drossos and Jacques Villeneuve to invigorate the Canadian racing industry through the creation of Area-27, an F1 racetrack and Canadian Bullrun Rally.
A Cannonball Run is an unsanctioned speed record for driving across the United States, typically accepted to run from New York City's Red Ball Garage to the Portofino Hotel in Redondo Beach near Los Angeles, covering a distance of about 2,906 miles (4,677 km). As of October 2021, the overall record is 25 hours 39 minutes, with an average speed of 110 miles per hour (180 km/h), driven by Arne Toman and Doug Tabbutt along with spotter Dunadel Daryoush.
