The 1967 Monaco Racing Car Stamps:
A Philatelic Grand Prix On fifteen small pieces of paper.
The 1967 Monaco racing car stamps (catalog S40606) represent one of those quietly remarkable moments when a very small country decided to tell a very large story. Monaco, which you could walk across in twenty minutes if you weren't distracted by the casinos, chose to commemorate its 25th Grand Prix with a set of eight stamps that somehow managed to capture the entire history of people going fast in cars.
What's particularly appealing about these stamps is their generous view of automotive history. Rather than simply celebrating the contemporary Formula One cars that screamed around Monaco's streets in 1967, the designers reached back through the decades to include the early racing machines—those wonderfully earnest contraptions that look, to modern eyes, like someone had fitted wheels to a Victorian sitting room and added a steering wheel as an afterthought.
The Monaco Grand Prix has always been one of motor racing's more improbable events. The circuit winds through the actual streets of Monte Carlo, past the casino and along the harbor, with all the space for error you'd expect from a course that was never designed for racing cars in the first place. That anyone thought this was a sensible venue for high-speed competition says something interesting about human nature and our relationship with calculated risk.
The stamps themselves have become something of a challenge for collectors—dealers describe the set as "Hard to put together," which usually means either expensive or elusive, or both. Part of the difficulty may stem from the fact that many were actually used for postage, carrying letters and postcards around the world with tiny racing cars as their ambassadors.
There's something rather charming about the timing of these stamps. 1967 was a year when the world seemed to be accelerating in all sorts of ways—socially, culturally, technologically. Yet here was Monaco, calmly celebrating the mechanical pursuit of speed in its purest form. No grand statements about progress or the future, just fifteen small tributes to the enduring appeal of well-engineered machines doing what they were designed to do.
The beauty of the set lies in its quiet comprehensiveness. Each stamp captures a different era of racing, from the pioneering days when drivers wore cloth caps and crossed their fingers, to the sophisticated machines of the 1960s with their sleek lines and serious engineering. Together, they form a kind of visual essay on how humans have refined the art of going fast.
My contribution to the set
For collectors today, these stamps offer something more than mere automotive nostalgia. They're a reminder of when speed was still somewhat mysterious, when making a car go faster involved more intuition than computer modeling, and when the gap between racing cars and road cars wasn't quite the chasm it would later become. The 1967 Monaco set captures this moment perfectly poised between the gentlemanly traditions of early motor sport and the high-tech precision that would soon transform racing into something closer to aerospace engineering. Fifteen stamps, each no bigger than a postage stamp (which, of course, they are) but together containing decades of human ingenuity applied to the simple desire to get from here to there as quickly as possible.
