This Spice is nice

I got a chance to see (on TV at least) the Group C cars run at the historic race before this year's 24 Hours of LeMans, and was very happy to see the 1990 SE89P.002 Pontiac Spice in action once again.

I have a certain affinity for this car - my father worked at Pontiac in the 70s, I have always owned Pontiacs and I've always had an affinity toward the Spices and Pontiacs (both in Lights and in GTP).

The Pontiac Spice was a lightweight car with a powerful engine, but initially was skittish on the track because, thanks to its light weight, it couldn't get heat into its tires. By 1990 the team had switched this car to Goodyear tires and an Oldsmobile engine, which lead to some improvements.

That weekend in 1990 the car was being driven by Mike Brockman and Paul Newman. They had qualified seventh for the race, and finished in the same place. It was one of four races the car would run in 1990, a time when IMSA was changing the rules to favor the stockblock, push-rod engines developed by Olds and Pontiac. But it was also a time when the fortunes of many teams was in a state of flux, as the Milner team demonstrated. There was the feeling that there was a lot of potential in the car, but that there wasn't the budget to make it a true front-runner.

In 1991, the car was sold to Rudy Klein and raced by Tom Milner's group, but it would not continue beyond the 1991 season. It sat in Milner's garage for over 10 years before Rudy sold it to Jim Oppenheimer in 2005. The car would spend only a short time in his company before being sold to Italian racer/businessman Stefano Rosina.

I watched Jim a couple of years ago when he brought his 1990 Nissan NPTI-9/C to the Goodwood Festival of Speed, just a few months after he bought the Spice, which had been restored to its original specifications by Florida-based John Starkey. I had always hoped to see Jim run the Spice-Pontiac in anger stateside, but was happy enough to see it found a home in Europe running the the historic Group C championship series.

Rosina, who has 18 years of rallying experience, has been a regular visitor to the historic LeMans races; he qualified the Spice toward the front and finished in the top 10 in the "classic" race.

The following is the complete broadcast of the Classic race from this year, courtesy of my youtube page.