The Long and Winding Road

The Long and Winding Road, I

By far most of my racing with the Siata was done on the tracks of California...the vast majority at either Laguna Seca or Sears Point. I'm not complaining...these are stellar places and Laguna in particular has worldwide fame and mystique. Even though Sears was a shorter drive from our home in San Carlos Laguna always said “home” to me. I think it was the more rural setting, the golden hills filled with hawks and eagles, the fog across the paddock at night, and the stillness when the track was not in use. I as much enjoyed camping there for the Skip Barber racing school or the week between the Monterey “Pre-historics” and the main event the following weekend as the races themselves.

The only other purpose-built track I had driven in California was the old Riverside Raceway, but that was in the Ferrari in the late 1970s.

Besides those tracks I also ran events at temporary road courses set up for special events at Buchanan Field, a former military training airport which then became a general aviation strip for the city of Concord and was the scene of the first post-WWII sports car race in the West in 1947, as well as on the runways and taxiways of the US Navy's North Island Naval Aviation base on Coronado Island.

Out of state excursions were rare, and only as far as Nevada. The first of these was multiple runs on closed public roads with the Ferrari Club...the Virginia City Hillclimb. I also did a couple of events on a temporary track created in the parking lot of the Reno Hilton; once with the Siata and once with the Quantum Formula Junior. Neither of these were happy events as I blew a Bob Graham motor in the Siata (this is the one in which he “saved me money” by using Crosley rods), and blew out the center section of the clutch disk in the Quantum.

The only other Nevada events I ran were on a purpose-built course at Fernley, some distance outside of Reno. A compensation was a street recreation where at least there was the opportunity to drive on that original street course. Unfortunately, the other tracks where the car ran are no longer there-Bridgehampton having succumbed to the bulldozer relatively recently, while Allentown disappeared decades ago.

This is the only tconfiguration of the track I ran
Thy later added other sections
But on this one the only fun for a little car
Is how fast you can get through the esses at the end of the front straight...
At least until some idiot ran into me at the 10/11 chicane

But I always had dreams of going further afield. Of course I thought about the Mille Miglia in Italy, and had actually been invited to do a series in New Zealand, but both of these realistically were financially far beyond my capacity. A more realistic, though still ambitious goal, was to try and run tracks where the car had appeared during its “real” racing career. Sebring would have been the first among these, as that event in 1953 was the high water mark of the car's success, with a startlingly good finish...but Watkins Glen and Thompson would also have made the list, as these are still around, though it would not be possible to actually race on the course the Siata did at the Glen in 52.

I don't recall what provoked me trying to turn that dream into reality, but late in 2003 I began to do so, concurrent with the publication of the race calendar for 2004 in enthusiast magazines. I was hoping to do the Glen and Sebring and perhaps one other event, but it was quickly apparent that this was impossible in a single trip. The Sebring 12 hour is always in March, while the Glen event mirrors the dates of the original street races, sometime in early September. As I viewed the calendar, there seemed to be better opportunities for other events in the Fall, so started to put something together around the Watkins Glen SVRA weekend festival, which included races at the track outside the town as well as a street concours and an escorted “recreation” on the 1952 street course.

The Original 1952 Street Course

The other events bracketing that weekend was a vintage race weekend at Lime Rock organized by HMSA, which was one of my “home” groups and thus very comfortable for me, and one at Mosport in Canada put on by CASC, the Canadian Association of Sports Cars, an FIA affiliate. While the configuration of Mosport did not look all that suitable for a small, low powered car like the Siata, the fact that it was international and sanctioned by the FIA made that event attractive.

The thought of a 7000 mile roundtrip by myself, however, was decidedly less so. Perhaps, I thought, I could talk my racing buddy and engine builder Don Baldocchi bring his motorhome and Nardi/Crosley along. 

Don and his wife accepted...Sherri bowed out. Don requires a bit of patience. He had some serious illnesses and difficulties as a child which left him with a deep stutter, deficient hearing, and some problems in cognition and decision making. These did not keep him from becoming an accompished racer and machinist...but it did mean his engines were always a bit of a mistery.

Don on the Corkscrew
Kip Fjeld's Miller bhind
Me Bringing up the Rear
But in front of a Porsche...for the moment

Don was neither the neatest mechanic, not the sloppiest, I ever knew. Ernie would definitely be the former (Bill Morton thought Ernie must never have used his shop because it was so clean you could eat off the floor); while Bob Graham was the latter...Don was somewhere between, though working with him could be frustrating as we both wasted a lot of time looking for tools he had put down somewhere and then forgotten.

He also never kept notes about what he did, hence the mystery of his motors. When something went wrong he could not remember what specific changes he had made to that particular version which might explain the problem, nor did he discipline himself enough to make a single change and then test the impact before doing anything else, so when things went well...or badly...it was unclear what change or combination was responsible.

Being with Don and Alice together also was somewhat like handling a couple of young children...they always deferred to your own decisions and rarely offered any of their own. They were great people, but Sherri was not willing to take on the full management logistics of things like meals for the trip, and I rather naively stepped in for that as well as all the rest of the planning including routes, stopping places, and timing.

It gave me the longest stretch of continuous migraines I ever had...eight straight days and nearly 3000 miles trying to ignore the hammering in my skull while ferrying over six tons of tuck, camper, and trailer along with keeping Don's huge Class A motorhome and trailer with me. What was I thinking?