It’s 3am and the battery was flat in the Canon 5Ds. It had died while spraying the shutter across the grandstand-banked oval at the Classic 24 Hour at Daytona. I tried turning it off and then back on again. The battery light blinked apathetically. Not just dead, but dead dead.
“Thank God.”
My body was wasted, crashed out, shriveled up like a true Minnesotan who had fantasized a warm Florida spring, thousands of miles from three feet of snow, sleet, and ice. From there it had been easy to imagine temperate nights and beautiful, bluebird-skied afternoons. Wrong. Now, shivering, dead as the battery, I walked back to the paddock. Other than the grease monkeys keeping these old things running, there’s no one around. The wheel on the camera whizzed around in a circle and all the images came flying up. The panning shots somehow, not a forte of mine, stood out. The livery, the color, looked so good at speed.
“Damn. I really love this livery.”
It’s not just nostalgia. Even if you do not drink, it still hits you. So it’s not the booze, though more than a few frozen hands (especially mine) probably wished they had some to warm their bellies. It’s the way the orange cuts through the fog of a 3am pit stop like a road flare in a rainstorm. The Jägermeister livery isn’t only trying to be cool. It’s trying to be seen, and you feel it in your chest before you even know why.
The color glows like it’s backlit. It’s radioactive, obnoxious, and perfect. It doesn’t belong here, not really. It belongs on a bottle behind a dive bar somewhere, but there it is, wrapped tight around a 934 as it hiccups through cooldown. A ghost of an era you never lived, but somehow still miss. There’s a word for it: anemoia—nostalgia for a time you never knew.
You see this 934 and start building the picture. Group 4. Fire-belching exhausts. Sliding on slicks over questionable pavement. Cigar-chomping team managers yelling over the turbo whine because someone twisted the boost knob too far. Mechanics mumbling about CIS something or another. You weren’t there. But the orange makes it feel like you could’ve been.
Eckhard Schimpf was the unlikely godfather of this madness. Journalist. Gentleman racer. Brand architect. He didn’t just strap in and go flat out, he pitched the idea that made it all real. In 1972, he convinced his cousin Günter Mast, CEO of Jägermeister, to sponsor a Max Moritz Porsche 914/6 GT. It rolled onto the grid at Hockenheim wrapped in the same orange from the bottle label. It was raw. Aggressive. And unforgettable.
That’s where the fever started. The orange wasn’t sacred. It was just smart. Pulled right from the rebrand Jäger did in the ‘60s to get attention in dark bars. Now it was screaming across Europe at redline.
And it spread fast. BMW CSLs. Alfa 155s. Opel Calibras. Even a few Formula cars. Almost always orange. Always feral. Win or lose, Jäger cars were the ones that stuck in your head.
Even now, decades later, privateers paint their cars in that color like they’re gearing up for war. The tributes come ou tof the woodwork all the time. That timeless orange still punches through the noise, pulling you in by the collar.
And this particular 934 owned by Tom McGlynn? It’s not a replica. It’s not a wrap. It’s the real thing. It’s the most raced 934 of all time. We’ll have more on it soon, much more. Because behind that glow-in-the-dark paint lies a deeper story. One of survival, and resurrection. Stay tuned.
