No More Wind In My Hair

1938 Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B Le Mans Speciale

Cool old car, but what got me is this line from Wikipedia:

The car featured a streamlined coupé body at a time when Le Mans racers were almost always open cars.

because just a couple of  years earlier Howard Hughes was going 350 MPH in his open cockpit H-1 racing plane.

1932 Alfa Romeo 8C 2300 supercharged engine

The picture of the engine is from an earlier model, but it's basically the same: straight 8 engine with dual overhead camshafts. But what's the Prancing Horse logo doing there? I thought that was a Ferrari thing. Seems it goes back to WW1.

Francesco Baracca and his SPAD S.XIII

The prancing horse is from the Baracca family coat of arms:

Enzo Ferrari was a racing driver for Alfa Romeo in the earlier decades of the twentieth century. Following one of his wins at the Targa Florio, he met Francesco Baracca's parents, who told him that their son used to paint a prancing horse on his airplane and suggested that if Ferrari painted the horse on his cars, he would have good luck. Ferrari took their advice and started to use the black Prancing Horse on a yellow background (yellow being one of the colours of the city flag of his native Modena) as the official Ferrari logo.
Initially, all Scuderia Ferrari's cars were manufactured by Alfa Romeo, but after the foundation of Auto Avio Costruzioni (later known as "Ferrari"), Ferrari began to use his Ferrari cars.

 Via daily timewaster