Walter Cronkite was a car guy, no kidding. He was a sports car guy, having fallen in love with the small speedy cars while working as a front line war correspondent during WWII. Cronkite owned and raced a Lotus at tracks all over the country from Lime Rock on down. In fact, in 1960 he was part of a live broadcast from Daytona and one of the filmed segments featured in-car footage of him ripping around the “super track” at more than 130mph in said Lotus. In this video we do not get the Lotus but we do get the man in a sports car.
We’re not sure from exactly what show or series this footage came from but we do know that it was shot in Connecticut and it’s Cronkite in an Austin-Healey cruising to the legendary road course known as Lime Rock. This would have been the era when John Fitch was working as the track manager and hosting weekly races for sports car enthusiasts.
Cronkite waxes poetic about sports cars, why people love them, and how fun they are on the way to the track and then once there we get to see a load of neat cars, some identifiable and some home built “specials” being pushed to the grid. Beyond Lime Rock we see Cronkite in Monaco among other places. What a gig, right?!
The amount of guys who legitimately loved cars you’d never expect is long. Many of them newsmen! Perhaps the most unlikely Sunbeam Tiger owner ever was Andy Rooney but he bought it new and owned it until the day he died, writing joyfully about thrashing the little car on fun bending roads. Enjoy this glimpse into the history of sports cars!
