Shaken, Not Stirred.
'VOLERE
É POTERE'
These are the words immortalized on the gates of Casa Martini
& Rossi. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” echoes the shared
vision of Alessandro Martini and Luigi Rossi to represent the greatest in
Italian quality and style.
Unlike most other people I know, I never really got into
racing games or watching/keeping up with car events. It’s kind of similar to how I feel about car
shows, I just get bored of it after a while, which is a bummer because I never
know what or who they're talking about in conversations. Anyways, because I never watched any F1,
Endurance, Rally, etc races I had never really heard of Martini Racing. It was a Saturday morning last year at Hunt
Valley Horsepower that I came across my first encounter of Martini Racing. You will come across a great variety of
interesting cars at this Cars & Coffee and I was there playing with my
camera just snapping away...
One of the pictures I took was a Porsche 911 GT3 in Martini
Racing livery pictured below.
It wasn’t until last weekend during Drift Nirvana at Summit
Point Motorsports Park that I became distracted from the drifting to watch what
looked like a Porsche track day. There
were a few other makes racing but there were an abnormal amount of Porsche’s for a
typical track day. A few of the cars
racing were sporting the Martini Racing livery and it was at this point that I realized
I knew nothing about this livery that always caught my eye. Legit, half the pictures I had taken are of
cars with their legendary colors on them. I decided
to do some research to educate myself a bit.
Martini &
Rossi, a distillery, founded in
1863 in Turin, Italy, that is typically associated with Martini of vermouth and
sparkling wine. They registered their well-known Ball &
Bar Logo in 1929 and created one of the first sponsorship's in history which
began in 1968. Martini’s iconic livery
is marked with dark blue, light blue and red stripes on white, red, or silver
bodied cars. It was late December 1970
that the official colors were disclosed to trim the Porsche 917 for the 1971
World Sportscar Championship. Since then, Martini Racing has been present by powerful names in racing like Porsche,
Ferrari, Alfa Romeo, Lotus, Brabam, Lancia, & Ford. They have come and go from Formula 1 but
recently reappeared back in 2014 with Williams F1 team with their stripes down
the Mercedes powered FW36. Earlier this year, on February 19, going into their third year with Williams, they disclosed the new Williams Mercedes FW38.
Dominating much of racing’s history in the past 48 years I
can now understand why I come across numerous vehicles sporting Martini’s
legendary livery. I really should start
paying attention to more racing events and teams so I can be in the know a
little more. There have been a few well
known people who have come up to me and I had no idea who they were until
later. Haha, whoops, guess I need to get my head out of my car a bit and into
the sport a little more.
RACING
IS IN OUR BLOOD
Racing is life. Flowing. Rushing. Souls shaken by the energy of
the track. Senses heightened by the perfume of burned rubber. Decisions made at
the mercy of passion and emotion, for the head cannot keep up. Power and faith
combining in a dance that life depends on.
TGIF!!
