Historic Professionals

Recently, I was judging at a racecar concours in Southern California, when I ran into an old friend named Dave Wolin. Dave was showing an interesting creation that he had put together—it was a fiberglass Mercedes Gullwing body, nicely adapted to enclose a NASCAR Sportsman tubeframe chassis and running gear. According to Wolin, “I built it to have something interesting to race in the NASA series. It looks like a Gullwing, but is fast, inexpensive to run and will run forever without breaking!”

Wolin, who has continually raced, as both an amateur and a professional, for the past 40 years, went on to lament the fact that he didn’t see how the younger generation was getting the kind of entry level racing opportunities that he and his generation received when they started racing in the early 1960s. “Back then,” Wolin commented, “you had all these entry-level opportunities in the SCCA that just don’t exist nowadays.”