In which Sid and Doris enjoy Monterey in car week, display the JGG, visit the Concours de LeMons and see Joe race at Laguna Seca.
On Friday when we got to Lighthouse Avenue and the Rotary Club Concours we found that despite our invitation all the places had gone. Sid and Doris were a little cast down but rallied with a visit to the deli where we found Susan Nannini again. Not settling to anything we set off to see the RM Sotheby’s auction view.
By this stage we are going past very special cars at jogging pace – even the gleamiest old Roller cannot compare with driving one on the open road at Joe’s – and were soon round. Back at Peckham HQ we belatedly got to planning the route to Troy Hills. The road map is fully opened on the table with Google maps and Ride with GPS hot on the Mac. Several of Sid’s node points have survived and the 4,000 mile route plan can be seen at Doris’s post.
Saturday is a busy day, up early to get to the Concours d’Lemons. We park the JGG in Pete’s Coffee and Cars with many others of the Salon des Refusees, where he is a star. The Lemons are an engagingly odd mix of awfully decorated exhibits, some ordinary old cars and a few that are a little bit special but with no home in the very marque and price conscious Car Week. The Tour d’Elegance, auctions and Concours are full of Porsche, Ferrari, Delahaye, 300SLs, Packard. This means that generally in Monterey there is not the variety you would get at the NEC Classic Car Show in Birmingham. This is remedied here.
Anyway, we are en route for Laguna Seca which does have a wide range of cars racing and many just in for show. In fact one of the best areas is the Bring a Trailer lot (a .com auction site which has brought together physical stock to have a look at). Sid likes a Toyota Sentra while Doris has found a much larger FCM motorhome all re-engined and ready for adventures.
The Bonkers household also find they are strangely interested by a super grand luxe RV which is available to buy for $163K or to rent by the day/week from familyrv.com. The life of luxury is obviously corrupting us.
An emergency stop at the Ford Model T exhibition is needed to restore the balance.
Laguna Seca is a good place to watch racing as you can see most of the track from up the hill and then pop over the ridge to see the cars crest the hill and go squirreling down the Corkscrew. Or crest the ridge and go straight on into the gravel. Ground lizards and lounge lizards enjoy the spectacle. And yes, that is an inflatable sofa.
Joe’s racing is good in parts. He qualified the Dana Camaro well up the huge grid only to find on race morning that the selector forks were failing. Doh. His purple Wynne’s 962 was running in an odd race with Group C cars, IMSA cars and some powerful tin tops. Still, a third place and a second (after an exciting first lap of the second race) was a good haul. Doris video’d Joe through the Corkscrew complex – generally acknowledged to be one of the world’s hairiest racing corners – he is in the purple car in the short YouTube video.
Then it’s all back to Pacific Grove for Chinese dinner with Scotty and Cecile before watching the RM Sotheby’s auction live on streamed TV. And general good byes as we will all go our separate ways tomorrow.
The Corkscrew is a lot more exciting in the car. It seems comically slow here. It is not. It is not comical. But it is great fun.
It is so hard to photograph that corner, because it just drops off the edge of the world from the driver’s point of view, but the camera flattens it all out. I don’t know what the gradient is there, maybe 1:6 or 1:4 but it looks vertical when you are by the side of the track.