1st time having 8D & the sweetie join us at Sonoma
Happy to have gotten RB & AnneMarie up there once too ( gotta find those 's )
also S2020 & the sweetie girl!

 

You stirred up my memories and emotions with this post. Just thinking about the old day Indycar races and I can still smell the sweet odour of exhaust emissions from the Indy cars every time they drove by our area of the grandstands. Michigan was very cool as we always got the pit lane passes. You would walk through a tunnel that went under the track and then you would exit into the infield area of the track to get to the pit lane. I think they called it the ground hog hole as you would pop out of the tunnel like a ground hog coming out of their nest. You could walk up and down pit lane while the cars were staged in starting order , you could go through all of the garage areas, the amount of access they gave you was amazing. You could get pictures of yourself on pit lane within 2 feet of the race cars. Drivers would be walking all around along with race team managers, and you could easily sneak in some autographs. I got Mario Andretti's autograph that way, along with Chip Ganassi, Alex Zanardi, and Greg Moore (RIP) along with a few others. We also got to go to autograph signing sessions between qualifying and practices, but you could just get autographs randomly as drivers walked right past you. It wasn't like we were any privileged people, we just bought pit passes for like $30 extra and it gave us unbelievable access. I don't know if they still allow people to get that close these days but we found it to be an amazing experience.

 

RB again just chiming in on the Make Shift Street courses..... views unless you don't mind being stuck in a stand are sometimes challenging,



1st San Jose GP many 's ago with Unabagler & S2020 also bummped into jedwards when we all cruised around the streets, Joshy the climbed up into a tree at one but I wasn't gonna did however challenge this fence till Joshy had the bust me ( all staged )
great memories

 

Altamont 24HRS Lemons race that featured @WestSideBilly & @lig
8D joined us that day

 

RB & S2020 @ Sonoma

 

Sonoma was fun!

 

We like em. That is the same seating as the Rose Parade. Where else in LA is there need for temporary seating for 70,000.

 

I got day-glo orange spray paint all over that shirt, damnit!

 

I don’t have pics but I’ve been to the Daytona 500 and Daytona 24, Indy 500 and the Indy Road course, Sebring, Roebling Road, Trenton, Seekonk, New Smyrna Beach and a few others.

also the Lil 500.

I want to go to Monaco.

 

As far as racing regrets go, I have a few. Firstly, I never made it to Indy, I planned to do it one time but I just didn't get there. I think it is perhaps an 8-10 hour drive for me, not that bad. And I really should have seen an F1 race in Montreal by now which is relatively close to me. I've visited Daytona Beach dozens of times in my life, but never when a race was happening, I've been to the track but never for a race.

When I was a very young kid my father and I drove to the Daytona racetrack one evening while we were on a family vacation there (one of many). My father simply opened an unlocked chain-link gate and we walked into the facility and looked around the stands one evening when it was totally vacant. We had the whole place to ourselves, they didn't even have security back then to keep you out, and no locks on the gates. The stadium area was much different than it is now, almost like a high school football field bleacher setup, but very large. It seems so strange looking back now.