Legends of Motorsports, Sebring, Florida– December 4th-5th, 2010


Four days of glorious weather greeted Bobby Rahal’s “Legends of Motorsports” meeting at Sebring last weekend, which had taken the place of the usual HSR meeting there.

The last time I had attended a “Legends of Motorsports” race meeting had been at Watkins Glen in June, when it just poured with rain an/or was foggy, so they were due some luck from the weather gods.

Also lucky was the fact that this time, they had over one hundred and thirty entries, so the grids were reasonably full, as against the poor number of entries that had attended Watkins Glen.

I congratulate Mr. Rahal and his partners, Peter Stoneberg and Zak Brown, for their enterprise and slick marketing in an attempt to attract “real” historied cars, as against “replicas”, to attend race meetings but can’t help feeling that:

a) America is too large a continent for the people who have “real” racecars to attend many meetings; and

b) There just aren’t enough “real” cars to go around. (This is why HSR’s “run what you brung” philosophy worked so well.)

Of course, part of the trick with this new organization will be finding out which car owners want to race their babies. The 2-liter Sports-racers attracted a decent entry, as did the IMSA cars (although the classification for these seemed somewhat weird). The entry for NASCAR cars seemed low but time will tell....

The big news for us was that not only did the Predator Performance Racing Team field 10% of the entry(!), but they also claimed top honors in every race they entered! David Ritter won his first ever race in his Lola T70 coupe, SL76/149, which we sold to him. Other winners were Farrell Preston in his McLaren M1B and Larry Ligas in his E type. Don Norbey, Chris Nussbaum and Farrell in his E Type also put up sterling performances. Well done, lads!