I'm Jim Hayes

and this is my page about my vintage racing

While growing up in Nashville, Tennessee, my brother and I became interested in sports car racing. While drag racing and stock car racing was more popular there, we had lots of "road races" being held on abandoned military air bases throughout the southeast, in places like Courtand, Huntsville and Montgomery, Alabama and Bainbridge, Georgia. We also had several purpose built courses like Mid America Raceway outside of St. Louis, and War Bonnet near Tulsa which are long gone, but Mid Ohio and Virginia International Raceway in Danville, Virginia, are still with us. While we started in sportscars with a MGA Coupe, my brother gravitated to selling cars, exotics to be exact (Porsche, Alfa, Mercedes Benz, Fiat and Ferrari) and soon traded the MG for a '62 Alfa Giulietta Spider. After a year as my personal transportation, the Spider became a SCCA racecar and we began a five year stint of SCCA racing. Besides the courses noted above, we ran on roads in places like Burns Park in Little Rock, Arkansas and Montgomery, Alabama. Here's what Burns Park in Little Rock looked like: Those were great times in Nashville. At one point, there were three or four Alfa Spiders being raced out of the dealership, along with an Alfa GTA, a 904 Porsche, several Abarths (one double bubble and a Allemano spider) and even a Ferrari Monza with a Corvette engine! We even ran a '65 Giulia Veloce at Sebring in '67. Alas, an aborted year in grad school intervened, then a short time back working on my brother's ill fated McKee ASR car and a Zink-Alfa sports racer, even crewing a little Can-Am, before I gave up and went to a conventional job. Fast forward to the late 1980s, when enough time and money became available, and I restored a Giulia Spider followed by a Giulietta Sprint racecar, formerly raced by a Rod Chambers of Glendale, California. That got me into vintage racing, where I felt very much at home. In 1993, I found our original Spider racecar in a barn in Nashville, where it had been stored since 1971! Unfortunately, that same year, I had a suspension failure on the Sprint at Mosport and did three spectacular "snap-rolls", fortunately only damaging the car - not me ! But it was a writeoff.
I restored the Spider as a 1600 Veloce (in yellow as it was raced) with a GTA gearbox and disks as a "serious" racecar. I raced the yellow '62 Spider from 1993 to 2001 and it was fast! GOt a bunch of trophies and was second in class one year in the SCCA vintage series in the NE. It was maintained by me with lots of help from Paul Glynn Motorsports. I decided in 2001 to retire from racing. We rebuilt it completely and I sold the car to a friend in New England who continues to race it actively - appropriate for a racecar with a real history - now spanning 40 years!
I have created a web page on the history of the Giulietta Spider and it's on the AONE AROC convention website commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Giulietta if you'd like to know more about these great cars. The site also has a cool booklet called "Enjoying Your Alfa." In 1995 I had the opportunity to test the new Alfa Spider on a visit to Italy for the US club magazines. While there, I travelled all over northern Italy, visiting Maranello (Ferrari was closed!), Mantova to see the new Tazio Nuvolari Musuem, Monza, and the Alfa Museum in Arese. I also attended a vintage car show and swap meet in Ferrara and shot this photo of the new Spider with a '59 Giulietta Spider!



Back to my car page

Return to Jim Hayes's Home Page