I would love to get my hands on an old racecar so I could go play at some track hosting a vintage event. Whenever they have a weekend at Thompson Speedway in Connecticut, I’m there to drool over cars that ran in anger back in my younger days.
Sometimes the cars come to play on the oval, in modified coupes and old, obsolete Cup cars (Wait, aren’t even today’s Cup cars obsolete?), mostly. Sometimes they’ll be playing on the road course, so I’ll go see formula cars, sports racers, and the likes of road-going Porches, Jaguars and Ferraris that have been converted to race-spec by guys with more money than they know what to do with.
I, on the other hand, do not have more money than I know what to do with. So the idea of actually getting out there with these guys in anything other than my imagination dwells, unfortunately, only in my imagination.
I was thinking, though. Every kind of car I’ve mentioned has a following. Heck, every type of event I mentioned inspires drooling hordes to ogle these machines and get in my way when I’m doing it. Many of these droolers have money, and they’ll return here in a year with their own wallets considerably lighter. And they’ll likely have so much money to blow they’ll have custom-made driving gear, just like the big guys.
But I was thinking, like I said. When I’d go to a race as a kid, say, at Seekonk Speedway, there’d be 20 street stocks for every mod, ten for every pro stock. And almost all of them were old 70s-vintage Chevy Camaros, their owners pretty much just stripping them out and installing the typical safety gear, seat, roll cage and the like, and then going racing.
Nobody ever drooled over the things, and these days I don’t imagine anyone doing it, either. There just has to be a few of these old sleds out behind barns, buried under junk in sheds, or tangled up by overgrowth in the woods somewhere. It might be worth it to some folks to just have somebody come in to dig the thing out and take it out of there.
I’d be happy to do it.