The Gee Bee R, my favorite...Looks like the R1 will 11 on the fuselage...and Doolittle at the controls as stated. The R1 and R2 were well handling aircraft, which were later sold, and both new owners modified the planes extensively, causing both to fail and crash. One had the fuselage modified and extended to add an additional fuel tank, aft of the center of gravity, making it unable to take off, and it ended up in a fireball at the end of the runway. The planes got a bad rap, but only after the Granville Brother's original designs were modified by amateurs.
Have you seen the build of the GeeBee QED. A GeeBee super XL with two seats. Took over ten years to complete, but it was worth it! Here's a link to the build: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-PnnSb1QYFMk.html
Thanks for posting this footage! This is footage from the 1932 Cleveland National Air Races, plus the start of the Bendix cross-country race that culminated in Cleveland during the NAR.
As someone who attended my share of air shows in my teens and early twenties watching this makes me feel like I was there and that aviation in America has been such a great tradition for generations. The planes may look a little different but it’s really the same. Just wish I could have been there to check out some of those great machines and those awesome radials. Not to mention actually meeting Roscoe Turner and Billy Mitchell etc. We owe these guys so much. Thanks so much also for uploading this for us to enjoy.
Pretty sure this is a mash-up of Bendix, Thompson and Reno races over several years - Jimmy Doolittle's Thompson win in the R-1 GeeBee was in 1931, and there are no mountains last time I checked in Cleveland. Still very enjoyable.
There no longer was a GeeBee R-1 in existence in 1934. There could have been the "Long-Tail", built from the scraps left over from the R-1 and the R-2 , but that plane wasn't raced by Doolittle in 1934... so at least the portion with Doolittle in it must have been from 1932. Also, I spotted the Wedell 44 "Miss Patterson" which was pilotet by Jimmy Wedell himself in the 1932 Bendix race.
That big awful thing just past the 10:00 mark is the Vance Viking, probably taking off from Burbank for the '32 Bendix coast-to-coast race-- I don't know if it ever competed in anything else... At 11:00 we've got Roscoe Turner's Wedell-Williams NR-61Y, which only wore its Gilmore Oil livery in '32. The other two Wedell-Williams' are Jimmy Wedell's and Jim and Mae Haizlip's, also campaigned in '32; and of course Doolittle and the Gee Bee feature prominently because he won both the Thompson and the Shell Speed Dash (caught on film here) in '32. In '31 Doolittle was flying the Laird. God, I'm such a nerd.
