Motorsport Memorial off-line?

The once incredibly useful motorsportmemorial website has been uncontactable for some time now, attempts to open it just producing a '509 bandwidth of this site has been exceeded' notification...

I would be grateful if anyone can enlighten me - with my exceedingly primitive log-burning computer capability - as to what this means?  

Is it terminal for the website and the wealth of information it could provide?  That would be such a shame.

DCN

Edited by Doug Nye, 30 April 2022 - 11:56.

Bandwidth problems may crop up at the end of months. Try again tomorrow?

And another thing.  I have been. trying to find reliable on-line currency conversion data for 1930s Italian Lire to the Pound Sterling and/or the US Dollar.  I appear to have chased myself up a tree finding only partial or conflicting data.  Can anyone recommend a reliable online source?

Disgruntled of Farnham

Is Nanni Dietrich still active on this forum? I remember he was involved with the site somewhat? 

Edited by FLB, 30 April 2022 - 12:42.

This is probably an unhelpful reply (what else would you expect?). All I know about currency exchange in the thirties is that the market became chaotic, with frequent devaluations, some countries abandoning the link to gold and others not, and some currencies deemed "not convertible" whatever that means. That may explain why there isn't a simple conversion table somewhere. Having said that, obviously there must have been de facto exchange rates, but perhaps they weren't formally recorded.

And another thing.  I have been. trying to find reliable on-line currency conversion data for 1930s Italian Lire to the Pound Sterling and/or the US Dollar.  I appear to have chased myself up a tree finding only partial or conflicting data.  Can anyone recommend a reliable online source?

 

Disgruntled of Farnham

http://www.paper-dra...9/exchange.html

Needs to be interpreted with this, which explains the mid-1930s fluctuation and subsequent return to approximately the same parity with the dollar: https://www.gold.org...d/1936oct07.pdf

The online news archives of The Times and Daily Telegraph - one or both of which which should be available via your local library service with at-home access - will also have daily rates against the pound on their financial pages.

And another thing.  I have been. trying to find reliable on-line currency conversion data for 1930s Italian Lire to the Pound Sterling and/or the US Dollar.  I appear to have chased myself up a tree finding only partial or conflicting data.  Can anyone recommend a reliable online source?

 

Disgruntled of Farnham

Thank God it's you Doug, for a moment I thought it was Mrs Trellis of North Wales...

This may help: https://www.jstor.org/stable/650450

Bandwidth problems may crop up at the end of months. Try again tomorrow?

Hopefully, but it has been down since April 12th.

I've PM'd Muzza who runs MM advising him of this thread so hopefully we'll hear from him. If not, I'll try emailing Pier Paolo Garagnani who is also involved. Nanni posted during March I think so hopefully will see this thread

Edited by LittleChris, 30 April 2022 - 21:04.

MM back up this morning.  Good-oh... And thank you all for the currency conversion data assistance above.

DCN

Doug, I did a little digging; the average rate of Lire through 1935 was 11.66 to the dollar, at which point the Dollar/Sterling rate was averaging 4.75, which gives us a derived rate of £/Lira at 55.38.

As pointed out above, the day-to-day would be volatile, with this and that happening, being predicted, etc., but I think it's reasonable as a rough guide. 

Edited by RobertE, 01 May 2022 - 07:05.

Noted.  Thanks again.

DCN

The Motorsport Memorial site is working regularly, now. It had been out of order for almost one month.

Our apologies to Doug, Michael, FLV, Sterzo, Vitesse2, Bloggsworth, LittleChris, RobertE and all others who we may have disturbed or annoyed with our temporary shutdown. For reasons still unknown Motorsport Memorial suddenly exceeded its allowable bandwidth and was taken offline by our server manager. I wish I could say that the rampant popularity of our website drove that, but such doesn't seem to be the case - and the likelihood of a DDoS or another sort of cyber attack having taken place is not high either. We're still trying to understand what happened. But yes, we are on - and we continue to update thousands of pages a month, nearly 20 years after it started.

Many thanks to Jim and Nanni for keeping you informed. And a second apology for being absent from this wonderful forum - a comeback is more than overdue, even if I continue, after all these years, to be able contribute with very little.

May you all be well, wherever you are,

Muzza
Thousand Oaks, CA, United States 

Edited by Muzza, 04 May 2022 - 17:46.

Not disturbed nor annoyed, just concerned Sal !!

Edited by LittleChris, 04 May 2022 - 21:31.

Not disturbed nor annoyed, just concerned Sal !!

Ditto - it's a most impressive - and useful - font of information.  Thank you for producing it.

DCN

I admit to having my robot read whole MM website couple of times - but not this month, so it wasn't me.

Anyway - keep up your work.

Grzegorz

Ditto - it's a most impressive - and useful - font of information.  Thank you for producing it.

 

Hey, how about some kudos for the grunts doing the research and writing? 

Nah - it's well known that only the officer ranks get credit...  

DCN

Nah - it's well known that only the officer ranks get credit...  

  I wasn't able to get to this at the time, but I would like to salute the incredibly hard-working Jim Michels for his work on American entries at Motorsport Memorial. I truly don't know what MM would look like without his work, especially during the time when he was the only American that could access the database. Also, a salute to former members Rick Kelly, Dick Cole and the late Steve Estes, for their work on U.S. entries. And, I salute Nanni's work on European entries. Also, a salute to the great efforts by Andrei Sidorov in his work in turning up many more entries around the World. I'd salute another member of the team, but I don't know if he wishes that, so I'll leave it there.

Edited by Jim Thurman, 02 June 2022 - 16:24.

And another thing.  I have been. trying to find reliable on-line currency conversion data for 1930s Italian Lire to the Pound Sterling and/or the US Dollar.  I appear to have chased myself up a tree finding only partial or conflicting data.  Can anyone recommend a reliable online source?

 

Disgruntled of Farnham

Just bumping this thread to update this entirely off-topic diversion for the benefit of Disgruntled of Farnham and anyone else who may need to find conversion rates for Italian Lire - and more - from 1918 onwards. Just came across this online calculator, courtesy of Banca d'Italia. It will work out historic conversion rates for Lire, US Dollars and €uros into the currency of your choice.

https://tassidicambi...-web/timeSeries

It's just provided me with the astounding information that the lucky chap who drew Varzi in the lottery for the 1946 Gran Premio di Torino walked away with the equivalent of over £29000! A not inconsiderable sum in 1946, which would have bought you a fleet of nine Bentley Mk VI 'standard steel' saloons, including purchase tax - and still with a couple of grand left over ...

Just bumping this thread to update this entirely off-topic diversion for the benefit of Disgruntled of Farnham and anyone else who may need to find conversion rates for Italian Lire - and more - from 1918 onwards. Just came across this online calculator, courtesy of Banca d'Italia. It will work out historic conversion rates for Lire, US Dollars and €uros into the currency of your choice.

 

https://tassidicambi...-web/timeSeries

 

It's just provided me with the astounding information that the lucky chap who drew Varzi in the lottery for the 1946 Gran Premio di Torino walked away with the equivalent of over £29000! A not inconsiderable sum in 1946, which would have bought you a fleet of nine Bentley Mk VI 'standard steel' saloons, including purchase tax - and still with a couple of grand left over ...

I’m afraid you have made a mistake…

There was no 1946 Gran Premio di Torino.

Edited by jbbugatti, 09 January 2023 - 01:44.

There was no 1946 Gran Premio di Torino

So the Gran Premio del Valentino is probably the race being referred to, the one considered by many to be the first F1 race.

Indeed. Some contemporaneous sources - notably l'Équipe, which was where I found the original prize amount (in lire and francs) - did refer to it as the Gran Premio di Torino/Grand Prix de Turin. I've found similar discrepancies on other races - the supporting race at Nice in 1946 for example, which is variously the Coupe du Palais de la Méditerranée or the Coupe du Casino, depending on which reports and/or previews you read. Not to mention inter-war German publications insisting on calling the RAC Tourist Trophy the Grosser Preis von England!

Just bumping this thread to update this entirely off-topic diversion for the benefit of Disgruntled of Farnham and anyone else who may need to find conversion rates for Italian Lire - and more - from 1918 onwards. Just came across this online calculator, courtesy of Banca d'Italia. It will work out historic conversion rates for Lire, US Dollars and €uros into the currency of your choice.

 

https://tassidicambi...-web/timeSeries

 

It's just provided me with the astounding information that the lucky chap who drew Varzi in the lottery for the 1946 Gran Premio di Torino walked away with the equivalent of over £29000! A not inconsiderable sum in 1946, which would have bought you a fleet of nine Bentley Mk VI 'standard steel' saloons, including purchase tax - and still with a couple of grand left over ...

Are you sure of the prize and conversion rate?  That seems an unbelievable amount of money for the post-war Italian economy.

Are you sure of the prize and conversion rate?  That seems an unbelievable amount of money for the post-war Italian economy.

Total of ticket sales over 'several weeks'* - at 50 lire (a little over 14 old pence, or about 1s 2¼d per ticket) - 194 million lire, first prize twenty-five million lire according to Maurice Henry in l'Équipe, September 4th 1946 p2. He converts that to 14 million francs. I first cross-checked that with the daily exchange rate in The Times - only the franc was listed, but working on the rate quoted for francs it was pretty much the same figure at round about £29000. Like you I found it remarkable, which was why I hunted out the calculator linked above. My figures worked out via francs/The Times were within about £100. The calculator works on an annual average, whereas I was looking at a particular day rate in September.

https://gallica.bnf....99/f2.item.zoom

* I've looked at the workings of the 1938 Tripoli lottery previously, for different reasons (but also involving Wimille!) and the tickets for that were on sale for at least three weeks. Probably longer, as they were available throughout the Italian Empire. The headline of La Stampa's report of the 1938 Tripoli race says that the lottery winner, who lived in Addis Ababa in what was then Italian-occupied Abyssinia, took home 4 million lire - an even more astounding £43000 at 1938 conversion rates!

Thank you.   I did enjoy speculation of what the holder of Wimille's ticket might have thought of Alfa Romeo team orders.

Reading his 1946 reports in l'Équipe you can see Monsieur Henry become increasingly annoyed with the Italian teams - both Scuderia Milan and Alfa Corse - from Albi onwards, complaining that they were behaving unsportingly in various ways. I think in this case he was perhaps being a little paranoid, although it's beyond doubt that team orders were in effect in Turin.

Just had a look at La Stampa for 1946. Lottery tickets were certainly on sale from at least July 30th. This advert is from that day's paper.

It's offline again.  

It’s working OK for me.

I confirm!

Working for me too. By the way, Nanni, Fiamma Breschi appear as a male in her page...

... and IMDB has her complete death date which at the moment is missing on MM.

If we use this thread for corrections, too, I have also one: In the entry for motorcycle racer Bob McIntyre (August 1962), it says:

(...) later it was determined the accident was caused by a gearbox seizure.

That is not true. A few weeks after the accident, an inquest of the local police returned the verdict of "misadventure". The Sergeant of the police vehicle maintenance department was quoted as saying that "McIntyre was riding a perfect machine", and "there was no evidence of any mechanical failure which could have contributed to the accident" (Liverpool Daily Post, Thursday, August 30, 1962, page 3).

The site appears offline again - says that it is under construction and has an unsafe certificate. Temporary problem, or something more serious?

The site appears offline again - says that it is under construction and has an unsafe certificate. Temporary problem, or something more serious?

Works fine for me Darren.

Me too