This week on the Sunday Pitstop, we're back in familiar territory, which is to say, somewhere between obsession and excellence, with the handbrake firmly off. A Milanese dynasty that has spent a century proving that the best things are never rushed. A racing driver who walked into a sport that didn't quite expect her and quietly refused to leave. A stuntman with a family heirloom, a long-overdue confession and a motorcycle that somehow outrides everything built in the fifty years since. And a Frenchman who gave up on his childhood dream, filed it away neatly and then found it again, at full throttle, in a 1962 Jaguar, somewhere outside Valence.
Four stories. Four machines. The same truth running through all of them, that the people who love this world most are never in it for the obvious reasons. They're in it because something got hold of them early and never quite let go. And the cars, the motorcycles and the open road have a way of making that feel less like a habit and more like a calling.
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Build By Blood. Perfected by Legacy |
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For a century, Zagato has done what few coachbuilders have managed, endure. Founded in Milan in 1919 by Ugo Zagato, whose aeronautical instincts gave early automobiles their first taste of true aerodynamic form, the atelier quickly became indispensable to the greatest names in motoring. Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Aston Martin, Lancia, each sought out that distinctive Milanese touch, and each was made better for it.
Where competitors faded, Zagato adapted. When wartime bombing reduced the workshop to rubble, it rebuilt. When mass production threatened to render the coachbuilder obsolete, Elio Zagato modernized without compromise. When the digital age arrived, Andrea Zagato embraced it while preserving every ounce of the brand's handcrafted soul.
What has always separated Zagato is the philosophy beneath the aluminum skin. The double-bubble rooflines and Kamm tails were never conceived as stylistic signatures, they were the natural consequence of prioritizing function above all else. Beauty, in the Zagato tradition, is simply what happens when engineering is done with conviction.
One hundred years on, the atelier remains family-run, fiercely independent and utterly singular. In an industry defined by scale, Zagato remains defined by standard, a standard that has never once been lowered.
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Lyn St. James arrived through instinct, raised by a mother whose love of cars transcended her physical limitations, St. James inherited something elemental: the belief that a car is freedom, and freedom belongs to anyone willing to take the wheel.
From a special-ordered Pontiac Catalina that dealers insisted she didn't need, to a submerged Ford Pinto at Palm Beach, to the hallowed straights of Le Mans and the brickyard at Indianapolis, her career was not a statement, it was a pursuit. Pure, relentless and entirely self-willed.
She earned Ford's backing not as a symbol but as a talent. She studied Indy cars from the commentary booth the way a craftsman studies a rival's workshop, quietly, deliberately, hungrily. When Dick Simon finally called, she was on a plane before the conversation ended.
What St. James leaves behind is not a cause. It is a standard. She competed because the sport demanded everything she had, and she gave it without hesitation, without performance and without apology. The 1991 Lola hanging in her living room says everything a trophy shelf never could, some relationships between driver and machine simply transcend the race.
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Stolen, Recovered, Inherited |
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There are motorcycles, and then there are motorcycles that carry the full weight of a life lived well. The 1960 BMW R60 belonging to Tom McComas, Hollywood stuntman, lifelong rider, is unambiguously the latter.
The story begins, as the best ones do, in the Marine Corps. A passionate friend, a borrowed weekend ride and a seed planted in Tom's father that no amount of time could uproot. The moment he was discharged in 1960, the R60 was his. It has been in the family for 55 years since.
For Tom, the bike was a baptism, his first ride at age two, his first solo at thirteen and the centerpiece of a police pursuit he wisely never mentioned to his father for decades. When he finally confessed, his father, exhausted from a long day of riding, responded with a single word: "Oh."
That ride was a 2,300 mile sweep through Utah, Nevada and Arizona, three generations of BMW technology rolling together. The R60 outran them all in comfort and character.
The bike has since been restored to factory specification, every nut, bolt and painted surface true to 1960, by Rick at Black Kat Motorwerks. It rides exactly as it always has. Which, it turns out, is better than anything built since.
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