I had to scout more than just the pit lane. As I moved on to another scene, I realized I had been so mesmerized that I hadn’t opened up the aperture on the lens, and all of the shots would be too underexposed.

I fired away with my widest-angle lens, no more than a couple of feet from him. I was behind the Brabham pit wall when Lauda walked over and began pulling on his gloves, balaclava and helmet. The initial shock of heroes come to life caught me out at first. Then I saw Mario Andretti, Jody Scheckter, Niki Lauda, James Hunt and Emerson Fittipaldi. That was the moment it became real as I laid my eyes on those beautiful machines from McLaren, Lotus, Ligier, Brabham and Ferrari. On Friday morning, the cars were towed out of the Convention Center up to the pit lane on Ocean Avenue. But when dressed up for the race, Long Beach did have a special charm, with the harbor off to the west, palm trees, and the circuit itself, laid out by Dan Gurney. Some of the older hotels were boarding houses, and there were a lot of cafés, bars, strip clubs and porn theaters-not exactly “Monaco West”. Downtown redevelopment was mostly evident in the Convention Center, which served as the garage and paddock for the Formula One cars. The city was mostly an aging ‘navy town’ with older multi-story buildings.

Download 1978 formula 1 champion