The vanishing art of the analog racing poster
A generation of screenprinters, ink-under-the-nail obsessives and pit-lane draftsmen kept the sport loud on paper long after television made it look quiet. What happens when the last of them retires this spring.
TThe last real poster press in the paddock lives in a converted horse trailer on the north side of the Snetterton circuit, and I spent two damp weekends last November watching a man named Reg Pilkington run it. He is seventy-three. He rebuilt the platen himself in 1988 after a marshal reversed a Ford Transit into it. He prints in five spot colours, always in this order: black, then chrome yellow, then his signature racing red, then a fluorescent orange no factory has manufactured since 2004, then a final varnish that smells, faintly, of hot solder.
WHY THE HAND STILL MATTERS
Reg was thirteen years old when he watched Jim Clark win at Aintree, and he decided on the drive home that he would spend his working life turning cars into shapes flat enough to nail to a wall. He has since made 4,112 posters for club races nobody remembers, and eleven for events people will still be arguing about in fifty years. He does not use a computer. He does not think this is a virtue; he thinks it is a job description.