Tim Considine

Actor and motorsports journalist Tim Considine died March 3 at 81. · While best-known for roles in My Three Sons and the early Disney TV show Spin and Marty, ...

"He had great stories to tell because he was there at the cross section of car enthusiasm and Hollywood. Among the stories he did was about Ernie MacAfee's death at Pebble Beach and how it led to the founding of Laguna Seca, I remember some other stories about Ferraris and Johnnie Von Neumann and certainly his later work on Le Mans was really good stuff. Another favorite from that book, and typical of the stories Considine rooted out that no one else ever got, was this one: Briggs Cunningham needed a team of signal workers to man the Mulsanne corner signboards. While we may know about Dan Gurney, Mario Andretti and Michael Andretti, and some may even know about Bob Bondurant’s years in F1, there were actually 141 Americans who raced in what used to be called Grand Prix but is now known as Formula 1, the pinnacle of motorsport. "I liked him a lot, he was a regular contributor to Autoweek," said former editor Matt DeLorenzo, who was editor while Considine was contributing. The boys’ story is told in sleepless detail, including one of the youth's romance with a local French girl. Penske told of the time he co-drove a Luigi-Chinetti-entered Ferrari with Pedro Rodriguez and was running third up until he missed a shift coming out of Mulsanne Corner and blew the engine. “It's all about the stories,” Considine said when he gave me an advance copy of the Le Mans work. "(Joe) Bonnier was behind me in a (Porsche) Spyder, and with all the smoke, he went off into the trees and wrecked. “It's hard to choose, but I think my favorite pull quote of all was from a dentist, Dr. Edwin Abate, an amateur from San Jose who paid 25 large to drive one of Barbour's rent-a-ride Porsche 935s in 1979, the P. L. Newman/Whittington brothers year. It was typical of the exhaustive work Considine showered on his subjects. The result was a work full of riveting race reporting, wonderful anecdotes, and hundreds of fascinating stories you hadn’t heard before and wouldn’t find anywhere else. His two greatest works were American Grand Prix Racing and Twice Around the Clock: Yanks at Le Mans.