Watkins Glen – June 11-13, 2010


This last weekend saw me once more visiting one of my favorite racetracks, Watkins Glen. I just love the track and I also very much like staying at the “Seneca Lodge” hotel, where all the motor racing greats of the last sixty years have stayed. The town of Watkins Glen has an ambience all of its own too, set as it is in the beautiful Finger Lakes area of New York State. There’s even the Watkins Glen Road Racing Research Center, started by IMSA entrepreneur John Bishop. I’ll admit it, I could easily live near there, except for the cold snowy winters!

This was the second meeting of the “Legends of Motorsport” series co-promoted by Bobby Rahal, Zak Brown and Peter Stoneberg and I was curious to see how the new series was progressing, as this is a brave attempt to run a series for “pure” original cars. Unlike our usual HSR series, there was no “run what you brung” about Legends of Motorsport.

So to the meeting itself. It suffered from a lack of entries, about eighty cars in total took part but, to ameliorate this, there were some very nice cars there, Predator Performance alone fielding four Lola T70s and a Porsche 962, plus the racing was good. In particular, I watched a race on the Saturday afternoon in which the first three cars (two Lola T163s and a McLaren M6B) dueled intensely right to the finish. I've included photos of some of the entries.

“Legends of Motorsport” is a brave attempt to fill a gap in the American Vintage racing scene. There has been a need for a series for “proper” original vintage racecars to compete in for some time but I believe individual race meetings are not the way to go. America is too big in distance for most people to do the traveling this series will require and there are not enough original old racecars in this country. What is needed, in my opinion, is an equivalent to the Classic Endurance Race series in Europe. That is, sports/racing, sports/prototype and GT racecars from 1965-1979, arranged in their various classes, running a 1-hour race with one mandatory pitstop, either one or two drivers. This could run as a support race on the Saturday afternoon to ALMS or Grand Am. In Europe, CER supports the ELMS (European Le Mans Series) and is a great success. Regular grids of great cars of forty plus, nearly always with an over subscribed grid.

And now for some sad news, but with a happy outcome...

George Tuma, my old racing co-driver was also there on Thursday testing the Jagermeister RSR, so you can imagine my shock when, on checking in on Friday and mentioning his name, I was told at registration that the Jagermeister RSR had been crashed, George was okay, despite visiting the emergency room in the local hospital, but that the car was “totaled”.

I don’t usually believe the “totaled” judgments of folks outside the track but, in this case, they were right on the mark. The poor old car had a tarpaulin draped over it at the Predator Performance set up in the paddock and when that was pulled back, the sad carcass only told you one thing; Finished. Thankfully for George, the RSR had a NASCAR-type rollcage with three big sidebars, where the door fitted but still the car had hit an oil drum filled with sand side-on, right on the driver’s door and the rocker panel had been bent about six inches inward, hitting the driver’s seat and moving that towards the center of the car. Additionally, the nose of the gearbox was broken off and the distributors on the engine had been damaged when the back had spun around into the ARMCO. You can see the photo below.

Poor George was stiff and sore but I’m happy to say well in spirit and he drove the seven hundred miles back to his home in Richmond on Saturday in his road car.

Sunday morning dawned with low clouds, rain and gray skies. I headed home to watch recordings of Le Mans (congratulations Audi, commiserations to Peugeot) and the Canadian Grand Prix – Great race, full of action, well done Lewis Hamilton and McLaren!