A Day at Sonoma Raceway

Watching Vintage Racers From a Bygone Era

Some days you go to a car show. Some days the show goes eighty miles an hour down a quarter mile of tarmac in front of you, and you just try to keep the camera steady.

Sonoma Raceway sits about thirty miles north of the city, out past the vineyards, and on the day I went it wasn't NASCAR or the dragsters getting the run of the strip — it was the old guard. A parade lap of vintage racers, lined up nose to tail along the wall like they were queuing for the last bus home: a baby-blue convertible, a brace of reds, something low and black-and-white that looked like it had opinions about corners.

Now, I'll be honest with you — I couldn't name half of them if you held a spanner to my head. I don't know the marque, I don't know the year, and I certainly don't know what's under half those bonnets. What I do know is a bare-knuckle red racer with no doors, no roof, and the engine sitting right out in the open where God and the paddock could see it — the kind of car that makes you understand exactly why they called them "specials," even if you couldn't put a name to it. Behind it, a black single-seater in full period livery, UOP across the nose, Lead Free stamped underneath like a threat.

So this one isn't really a history lesson. It's just the pleasure of watching bare metal and thin tyres go by, driven by people who clearly loved them a great deal more than I understand them. Sometimes that's enough.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/8caea1_6c3da7b882e84bd99d9addeb6b1f4792/720p/mp4/file.mp4

Video: Vintage Race Cars, Sonoma Raceway, c. 2012–2015