On Sunday, October 1, 1967, I stood on a hillside at Watkins Glen with my father and watched Jim Clark win the United States Grand Prix in a Lotus 49. I was sixteen. I have never forgotten a single minute of it.

My name is Richard Castelli. I'm a tool-room machinist in Elmira, New York, about twenty miles down the road from the Glen. I've spent thirty years making parts to a ten-thousandth of an inch, and for the past year I've spent my Sunday nights trying to drive that same Lotus around that same track without putting it in the Armco. I'm getting better at it. Slowly.

The program that lets me do it is called Grand Prix Legends, made by Papyrus and released last fall. It puts you in the 1967 Formula One season: the cars, the teams and the tracks as they were that year. I race it online in a league, with a force-feedback wheel and pedals bolted to a plywood stand I built in the garage. This page is about the game, the league, and the real 1967, as best I remember it.

My father, Salvatore, was a mechanic at a Ford dealer in Elmira. He didn't care much about baseball or football, but he cared about engines, and every October from 1961 on he took me up to the Glen for the Grand Prix. We'd leave before dawn with a cooler of sandwiches and a thermos of coffee, park in somebody's field, and walk in.

In 1967 the talk of the paddock was the new Lotus 49, with the Ford-Cosworth V8 bolted right to the back of the driver's seat as part of the car. Clark had won with it the very first time out, at Zandvoort in June, and he and Graham Hill had the two of them at the Glen. My father was beside himself. A Ford engine, winning in Formula One.

We stood on the bank above the Esses all day. The two Lotuses ran away from everybody. Late in the race something let go in the back of Clark's car, and on the last laps you could see the rear wheel leaning in at a crazy angle. Everybody on that hill was on their feet, sure he wouldn't make it. He made it. He won, with Hill second and Denny Hulme third in the Brabham. Hulme won the championship that year, and Clark won four races, including the last two.

The next April, Clark was killed in a Formula Two race in Germany. My father cried at the kitchen table when he read it in the paper, the only time I ever saw him do that. Formula One left the Glen for good after 1980. My father passed in 1991. I still go up to the Glen for the vintage races every September and stand on the same bank.

Grand Prix Legends gives you the seven teams of 1967: Lotus, Ferrari, Brabham, BRM, Eagle, Honda and Cooper. (The Honda goes by another name in the game, for some legal reason, but everybody calls it the Honda.) The engines sound right. The Ferrari V12 screams, the BRM H16 sounds like a sack of wrenches going down a staircase, and the Lotus has that hard, flat Cosworth bark I've never forgotten.

And it gives you the tracks, eleven of them, the ten from that year's calendar and Rouen standing in for the French Grand Prix, which in 1967 was actually run at a short course at Le Mans. The old Spa. The old Nürburgring, fourteen miles of it. Monaco with the old Gasworks hairpin. The Glen the way it was before they lengthened it.

People who play other racing games pick this one up, spin off at the first corner twelve times in a row, and put it back on the shelf. I don't blame them. It's hard because the cars were hard.

No wings. Nothing is pushing these cars down onto the road except their own weight. Wings came a year later. In 1967 the grip you have is the grip the tires give you, and that's all.

Skinny tires. By today's standards, the tires are narrow and hard. They slide. They slide a lot.

A lot of horsepower. Somewhere around four hundred horsepower in the best of them, in a car that weighs about eleven hundred pounds, less than a Volkswagen Beetle. Touch the throttle in a corner and the back end comes around to see how you're doing.

So you don't just steer these cars. You steer with the throttle, you set the car up sideways before the corner, and you drive it the whole way through with your right foot, the way they did. When it works, there's nothing like it. When it doesn't, you're in the hay bales. The game has slower training cars to learn in. I spent my whole first winter in them, and I'd tell anybody to do the same.

For the record, here's who won each race that year. We try to beat these on Sunday nights. We mostly don't.