When you can find a copy of it, you can expect to pay a three-digit price for the long out-of-print autobiography of Sam Posey, the remarkably brave and erudite artist and designer turned world-class racing driver and Emmy-winning TV analyst. Now in semiretirement, Sam is famous for calling the closest Indianapolis 500 finish at the time for ABC Sports, a portfolio of architectural design that includes the buildings at his home circuit, Lime Rock Park, where the main straight is named in his honor, and for being an exceptionally skilled scale model railroader. Sam is also a complex, erudite individual, which makes this retrospective of his career in motorsport so compelling. There’s also another reason.
I’ve had the pleasant occasion to meet Sam’s co-author, his son John, who assisted Sam in sifting the extensive Posey family archives to develop a concise, heartfelt assessment of his father’s hall of fame career in motorsports. It’s a series of crucial vignettes rather than a narrative in the normal autobiographical sense, with cars, races and personalities standing as short individual chapters. Sam’s remarkably varied racing career has taken him everywhere from Le Mans to the Baja peninsula, Indianapolis, NASCAR (grenading a Cotton Owens engine in the process) to the charming, and challenging, Mount Equinox Hill Climb in the Green Mountains of rural Vermont. He’s one of the most appealingly approachable guys in all of international motorsport. You ought to read Sam’s Scrapbook, which you can order from Evro Publishing.
Jim Donnelly On Wheels 