The Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion took to Laguna Seca yesterday, like some sort of history book that snarls and speeds and runs over your foot in the pit lane when you stand too close. This year’s event saw more than 500 vintage race cars crammed into the paddock, ranging from cars so old your grandfather saw them when he was just a kid to some you might remember from your childhood. Chevrolet was the title sponsor and provided a display that ranged from the earliest of the fiberglass sports cars to the new C7—and then surprised everyone by unveiling the 2014 C7.R, which is aimed directly at Le Mans.
So why is this 1963 Corvette Grand Sport festooned with so many add-ons? Those cameras, GPS transmitter, and aerials connect the vintage racer with some very modern equipment and bright-eyed students from Stanford University. As part of the Revs program, they are collecting information on not just the technical side of how race cars perform, but even instrumenting the driver. They were collecting brain wave information from driver Bruce Canepa who commented, “Well, I hope they found something.”
You know about the modern Corvette Z06, but the RPO number was started in 1963 when Chevrolet wanted to provide a sub-rossa race package for the sports car. This is one of the originals, raced by Mickey Thompson. In the option package were such items as a fuel-injected engine, a huge fuel tank, better brakes, and an upgraded suspension.
If you were to take on the rebuild of the engine in this Delage, you would forget about plain bearings and find you needed more than 300 roller- or needle bearings to reassemble the supercharged 1.5-liter straight-eight. It makes a marvelous sound and revs to 7000 rpm, which was very impressive for 1926.
Corvette used the opportunity at Laguna Seca to unveil a camouflaged version of the 2014 Corvette C7.R race car. Team driver Tommy Milner did the high-speed honors, clipping out some hot laps before the car disappeared from public view.
For all the Corvettes that have raced throughout the decades, none have been so simply outrageous as those done in the mid-1970s by John Greenwood. With their extraordinary fender flares and all-American paint schemes, they did yeoman duty for Chevrolet.
Porsche didn’t want the 911 raced when it was first produced, but that didn’t stop Autohaus Pompono from doing just that—and winning. That makes this the first-ever racing 911, starting a tradition that continues today.
Source: CarAndDriver
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