1962 Mosport Players 200

I love old racing footage, especially when in colour. Another Roaring Season member, Mike Feisst, forwarded this beautiful coverage of the 1962 Players 200, at the newly built Mosport Park, in Ontario, Canada to me. When this event was filmed, the track had only been open for just over a year, and this was the second running of the Players 200 sports car event. Stirling Moss won that first race in a Lotus 19.

The line-up for the 1962 event was star-studded, and although Moss wasn’t in attendance, the second and third place finishers from the ’61 event, Jo Bonnier, and Olivier Gendebien, had returned. Additionally, Innes Ireland was also entered. The more localized drivers were headed by the bespectacled Masten Gregory, as well as Dan Gurney, Jim Hall, Roger Penske, Jerry Grant, Bob Holbert, and two-time Indy 500 winner Rodger Ward.

But the line-up of cars was just as fascinating as that of the drivers. The early 1960s marked the cross-over in sports car racing from front-engined to rear-engined machinery that had taken place in single seaters a few years earlier. So the field was fairly evenly divided between front and rear-engined cars. Bonnier was entered in a Porsche RS61, while Gendebien was to drive an American special, a Dailu MkI. The Dailu (the name being an acronym of owners David Greenblatt and Luigi Cassiani’s first names) was copied from a Sadler MkIV. It featured a tube-frame chassis, small block Chevy, and Jaguar rear suspension. Unfortunately, oil pressure problems in practice meant the car was scratched from the race, and a Porsche RS60 was hurried in for Gendebien to drive. The beautiful Dailu caught fire later that same year at the Nassau Speed Week and burned to the ground.

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