I have some new information for those of you who may be interested in
the festival on September 11, 2015 in Watkins Glen. Actually it will
probably last for the entire weekend since the SVRA vintage races have
been rescheduled by WGI to the weekend of July 24 because the track will
be being paved in September.
If you know anything about the Watkins Glen area, you know that there
are several very worthwhile attractions other than racing at WGI. In
fact Watkins Glen was a tourist destination long before there was any
racing going on there. The beauty of Watkins Glen State Park, the
gorge, is unsurpassed. Seneca Lake is also quite beautiful with vistas
from the hills surrounding it and there are tour boats plying the waters
of the lake. Seneca Lake is one of the finger lakes with Cayuga Lake to
the east and Keuka Lake to the west. Lake Ontario is a bit over 60
miles to the north. There are wineries galore in the area to stop in
and check out and take some wine home with you. The Glenn H. Curtiss
Aviation Museum is in Hammondsport on Keuka Lake. And there is also
Corning Glass to the south.
After last year's Grand Prix Festival and vintage race weekend
Austin-Healey was announced as the featured marque for this year's
festival. Many of us Healey owners said it was about time. After MG
and Triumph participation at British car shows, Austin-Healeys usually
have the next largest number of cars attending. So after roughly 20
years of the festival, we finally were named as the Tour de Marque brand.
Unfortunately that has been sabotaged by someone in our midst. Some AH
(no hyphen and nothing to do with Donald Healey) who is high up in a
leadership position of one of our clubs declared that we would not care
to participate because there are no races going on in September this year.
Casey Creamer is one of the organizers of the GPF and put it this way:
"When we decide on a featured marque, one of the major considerations is
whether we have club buy in. In this case we were essentially told off by the
people putting on the enclave. So we quickly dropped that idea, called the
artist who works on the poster and told him to scrap what he was doing and now
we are working on coming up with a different marque with club buy in. I
understand that you are sort of offering some club buy in, but if the enclave
people are poo pooing the idea of being the featured marque when there are no
races, that will be a lot of negative attitude if we were to ignore them and do
it anyway."
So now thanks to some jerk in a leadership position in one of our clubs Casey
believes that they would be lucky to get 25 Austin-Healeys to sign up for the
TDM. Whoever it is that told him that should resign from their position in
disgrace. With well over 1,000 Austin-Healey club members within a state or so
away from Watkins Glen, I believe that even with no vintage races we could come
up with 100 cars which is what they would like to see at a minimum. The event
holds up to 120.
But those up on high have ordered Watkins Glen Promotions to not have
Austin-Healey as the featured marque, so they are afraid to disobey.
It is probably too late to resurrect our marque as the featured marque this
year, but it may help if you have interest in Austin-Healey being the featured
marque in the future that you email casey and let him know that. I suspect that
many were holding off to find out what exactly is planned for the festival this
year. And the website has not been updated so it seems that they will charge
$140 with no laps of the WGI circuit and no tickets for the vintage races.
Here is Casey's email address: casey@senecasaw.com. And here is the website
for the festival:
http://www.grandprixfestival.com/participant.html
Thanks for reading my rant.
Charlie Baldwin
'62 BT7
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