Since I became a Coloradan a few years back, I’ve joined all the other car freaks in the Mountain Time Zone for the annual pilgrimage to the 30th-tallest mountain in the state for the big race. I shared my photos from the year Monster Tajima broke the 10-minute barrier, and from from the year the course became all-asphalt, and now I’ve got some shots from last weekend’s event.

This isn’t quite in time for Father’s Day, mostly because it took me a little bit of time to get permission to use the photos, but these photos of club racer Mark Domo and his son Tyler working the pitlane at the recent Grand-Am Continental Challenge are timeless examples of how motorsports bring generations of men together.

When Allan Simonsen crashed his Aston Martin in the opening minutes of LeMans and lost his life, it was a brutal reminder of the fact that auto racing has not, despite the vast amount of intelligent effort put into safety and crash survival, lost its power to end a driver’s life.

The precise mechanism of, and reasons for, Mr. Simonsen’s death are not yet known. However, on Sunday night noted racing instructor Peter Krause shared a new article that delves into the risks drivers face and offers reasoned, intelligent explanations as to how these things happen.

This video, taken at HyperFest in the Spec E30 class, shows exactly why club racing is so much fun and also why it’s not for everybody. One minute you’re chasing pavements, the next you’re rolling in the deep (grass).

Fans of the Acura NSX have long wondered about Ayrton Senna’s personal NSXs. Little information was known, aside from a couple rumors on his Wikipedia page, and a few Youtube videos showing him driving both a red prototype and a white NSX-R.

My rant about colorless F1 drivers of the 21st century may have been honored more in the breach than the observance this past weekend; while Lewis Hamilton was doing the interview with David Coulthard at the end of the race, champagne drinker Raikkonen was having a convo with race winner Alonso. When Coulthard asked the two men to share their conversation with the crowd, both of them declined, Kimi snarking a bit a bout “tires”, but the local camera director for the race coverage made sure you could see that Alonso’s stunning girlfriend had a friend with her. Or a sister. Or who the hell knows.

Anybody who watched it happen and still thinks the winner of China had a lot of extra room in his king-size bed last night is being willfully naive. To the winners go the spoils, and our trio of podium finishers each demonstrated why their teammates weren’t standing next to them when it was time to hand out the trophies.

Rubens Barrichello’s daughter once asked him why he looked so sad on the podium; to make his children as well as the tifosi feel better about Ferrari’s relentless approach to team orders, he decided to make sure he always smiled from then on. The contrast between the crinkled mouth and unsmiling eyes he displayed in the podiums after that makes for an interesting study in human dynamics. How can a man feel so conflicted about standing on the most important podium in the racing world, week in and week out?

At the end of the Malaysian Grand Prix yesterday, however, there were no smiling faces at all.

Toyota dropped out of Formula One in 2009, and said it won’t come back , claiming that the sports is “too elistist” and out of touch with Toyota’s customers. Now, the company is dropping hints that the door is not closed forever. Asked by The Nikkei [sub] whether Toyota might come back to the sport, Toyota Managing Officer Kiyotaka Ise was much less dismissive than in the past:

La Carrera Panamericana 2012 ran its third day yesterday, and we’ve got a report of a five-cars-over-a-cliff wreck during yesterday’s race segment ending in Querétaro.