Larry Perkins
Larry Perkins retired as a race driver/instructor in 1969 to further his rocket science career in computer engineering. Following his next retirement, he studied and taught sculpting. Among several of his large public bronzes is an award-winning action figure of his fellow driver, World Champion Phil Hill. Larry’s long-ago racing campaign with the Ferrari GTO has been transformed into an unexpected and extraordinary life story, captured in this memoir.
Petra Perkins
Petra Perkins, a storyteller from childhood, retired from aerospace engineering and became a widely published author. She is the winner of the Faulkner-Wisdom Gold Medal in Poetry (2015) and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in creative non-fiction (2016). Petra’s stories and poetry can be found in the NYTimes, Sports Car Digest, Huffington Post, The Denver Post, ArtAscent among other magazines, online publications, and literary arts journals.
At age 15, Petra witnessed Larry’s famous car on the track at an endurance race in Sebring, Florida, but did not know a Ford from a Ferrari, or that it was a Ferrari GTO, or that it was famous, nor met the driver until she was 30. She was introduced to the car 30 years after that, and finally understood everything.