János Wimpffen got hooked on sports car racing while watching the first live U.S. telecast of the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1966. He tried his hand at the sport by club racing a Triumph TR4 during the early 1970s, but soon discovered that hand exercised more control over a pen than a four-wheel drift. Lucky for us. He is the author of Time and Two Seats, the acclaimed two-volume, 2,200-page record of sports car racing, which accounts for just about everything ever attempted, accomplished, argued over, and agreed upon in the sport between 1953 and 1998.
Real life intervened and he spent the next two decades fooling around with academia, earning a doctorate, building a career in transportation consultancy--but mostly just fooling around. Wanting to write a definitive history of our beloved branch of the sport, he cast about for support in doing so and was finally able to convince a group of enthusiasts in the Pacific Northwest that endurance sports car racing deserved the type of in-depth review that had thus far mostly been reserved for F1. Wimpffen got carried away with the notion and produced a monstrous two-volume 2200 page set called, Time and Two Seats.
The book continues to garner acclaim, two years after its publication. Ensconced within its pages are the minutiae of the sport, down to the chassis numbers of many participants (drivers? Ed.) so that generations to come can continue to argue about exactly which Ferrari 512S ran this or that particular race. All this has made János something of a combination between his heroes, Henry Manney, Denis Jenkinson, and Michael Cotton, and that weird guy in the trench coat standing at the end of a train platform.
