Monterey seemed like an easy Sunday morning hitchhike down from Palo Alto on a
gorgeous fall California day, although it turned out to take a little longer
than anticipated. Arriving late, we ran down the hill to the overlook across
from the pits just as the lead cars were cresting the rise on their first
flying lap, blasting around the insanely fast left bend that was Laguna Seca
before the infield was added.
The sights, sounds, and smells of 30 high winged Can-Am cars at full tilt,
absent any of the usual preliminaries, was like nothing I'd ever experienced
in the few years that I'd been around club racing. I recalled a description
I'd heard of racing being a form of controlled aggression, but this was more
like outright violence, and the controlled part was pretty questionable. From
our vantage point we could look down into the cockpits and observe very busy
hands trying to balance some incredibly brutal forces; not quite the precision
sense that you sometimes get watching a current Formula 1 hot-lap from an
in-car camera.
This was 1969, so it was the Bruce and Denny show, but nipping at their heels,
for a while at least, was Dan Gurney, in what I recall being some variant of a
McLaren. Behind Gurney were a range of luminaries from Andretti and Amon, to
Revson and Surtees. Some of these characters really knew how to hustle a
racecar.
I guess I never took time to think much about any cause and effect from that
event, but as I look back on it now, barely two months later I was taking off
winter term and headed down under on the Tasman series, working on a McLaren.
Aw, probably just a coincidence. Somehow, in the course of all of this, my
lowly D Production TR4 lost some of its luster. By then, of course, there were
all those damned Datsuns. And after all, it wasn't a real race car, so one
day down the road it went, behind the pickup of a very happy club racer to-be.
I did get a bit of a chuckle recently at a vintage Can-Am event, watching the
cars being driven carefully off of the corners, and once squared away to the
straightaway, the pedal went to the metal and off they went. It occurred to
me, that with the exception of a few examples I recalled from the Mid-Ohio TR
gathering, it had been a while since I'd seen anything at a vintage race that
faintly resembled the concept of "driven in anger".
Of course, having neither the financial capacity, nor the reflexes to indulge
in a Can-Am car, it's easy to suggest that I'd not care to, even if I could.
I'm just awfully glad I was able to buy back that lowly little TR4. Maybe one
of these days it will actually get back on the track, hopefully being driven
as it ought.
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