The entire Monterey Peninsula is vintage this weekend. It’s the 36th Monterey Historic Automobile Races at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, featuring Porsche, just one of the many vintage car oriented events happening this week. It would fill my column to list all the activities. The only event running longer that the Historics is the famed Pebble Beach Concours D’Elegance, which started in 1950.
The traditional class photo was taken at Laguna Thursday afternoon with nearly 100 Porsches preening and posing for the photogs in Turn Three. It was a stunning sight.
The paddock filled up fast with rows and rows of cars, story boards, exhibits, more exhibits and people everywhere, some in vintage garb. Rookie drivers had orientation laps around the 2.238-mile road course.
In the paddock area surrounded by tented exhibits of cars, people mingled at the Welcome Party in the late afternoon. Fine food and wine, camaraderie and catching up was the lead-up to three days of celebrating vintage cars dating back to the early 1900’s all the way up to 1990. The entries include Can-Am cars, FIA Manufacturer Championship cars, IMSA Cars, all kinds of sports cars, production cars, sports racers, GT’s, and Porsches, Porsches and more Porsches.
The fifteen classes of cars, 450 in all, will be on track Friday for practice. Saturday’s schedule is devoted to the eight A classes with morning warmups and ten-lap races in the afternoon. Sunday has a similar schedule for the remaining seven B classes. Scattered among those sessions will be various Porsche events including laps of demonstration, exhibitions, and parades.
The fiery red sun shone on into early evening, its strange color filtered by the ash and smoke from the wildly out of control wildfires sixty miles away in the Santa Cruz mountains. The fog and smoke mixed and caused unusual cloud and color patterns. Ash was blown all the way to the track. The fires started Wednesday and by Thursday mandatory evacuations were ordered. No people were harmed and no structures have yet been affected. Fire departments throughout California have been responding.