Early Years
Peter Elbert Brock (named Elbert after his grandfather E.J. Hall, designer of the Liberty engine and co-founder of Hall-Scott Motor Car Company) grew up primarily in the Sausalito area of northern California. When he was 12 years old, his next door neighbor had an MG TC. He’d never seen anything like a sports car prior to then. The owner would occasionally take Brock for a ride. By the time Brock was 16 he’d saved just enough to acquire a broken-engined ’49 that had been impatiently shunted away in the back of the shop where he worked. In addition to all the work Brock did on the car, he painted it white so the car’s livery would match America’s international racing colors of blue and white. Every weekend was a racing adventure as he spent many a rainy Northern California night sleeping under the MG’s long sweeping fender. Since many of Brock’s friends raced he was seldom at the track alone and had access to the pits and a chance to learn about racing from the inside at an early age.
Brock was first exposed to professional racing when he went to his first road race at Pebble Beach in 1951, photographing whatever he saw that interested him. In the 1952 race, Phil Hill made a lasting impression on Brock, as he recalls; “Phil Hill was driving an XK-120 and I was hooked for life. Cars were the focus of my life at that young age, and the whole new sport of road racing, which was just coming into its own here after WW II”. As he was still too young for a racing driver’s license (SCCA requirement was 21 at that time), he hung out with the guys who were building the fastest cars and took pictures; lots of them.
Soon after, Brock’s family moved to Menlo Park, away from his road racing friends in Sausalito. There he found a new group of younger car-guy friends. No one seemed to know much about sports cars and as much as he loved his MG, Brock found he was just as interested in hopped-up flat-head Fords. He started looking for something faster than his MG and found a half-completed ’46 Ford convertible on a used car lot. It was love at first sight.
Brock started in on the customization of the Ford, which included converting the livery into his favorite white and blue American racing scheme (white car with two blue stripes down the center). While still in high school, he would win the Oakland Roadster show with the car, by then referred to as the Fordillac because of the Cadillac engine Brock had installed.
Brock would win the show again with the car in 1956, months before he would be leaving California for GM Styling in Detroit.
Read more about this topic: Pete Brock
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