Day 16 - Lincoln Highway West 2009 at DennyGibson.com
Sunday's start time was switched from an early 7:00 to an even earlier
6:00 but we made it.
August 30,1999
The folks at Cliff Findlay Auto Center and a roll of racer's tape had the
car ready to head out of Kingman with the Corvette caravan. No, silly,
that's not it in the picture. I made another side trip to Phoenix to pick
up another friend, Denny, for the drive to Kentucky. We had planned to
connect in LA but those plans were scrapped with my drive into the canyon.
After regrouping in Wendover, we were escorted across the salt flats by
about twenty cars from a local Corvette group.
We were joined at
Miller Motorsports Park by the Pacific Northwest caravan.
We started with about fifty cars. We made a brief stop in Rocklin, California,
on the first day and someone said we would be leaving with about 200. That
claim seems to have been off by a bunch. The combined group at Miller
Motorsports Park wasn't much more than 200.
We got to watch some cart racing...
...and visit the museum. Remember the Rip Chords? If your copy of their
"Hey Little Cobra" album is still in decent shape, check out the
cover. This is the car that posed for the cover shot.
...we headed out for a parade lap. We entered the track and moved to the
start/finish line in a sedate single line. Then we lined up three wide for
a group photo. We were supposed to stand by our car for the photo and,
after extensive milling about and individual picture taking, almost
everyone did just that. The couple in the pace car behind us did not. They
may have had a good reason to stay in their car but it almost looked as if they were perturbed
at taking a wrong turn and getting caught up in this huge traffic jam.
Once the appropriate number of photos were taken from the starter's stand,
we moved out single file for the parade lap. We did a full lap without stopping
then continued around the track to exit at the point we had entered. I had
expected a slow crawl around the track but that wasn't exactly the case.
Cars spread out and the pace climbed so that my speedometer was briefly
in three digits. I wisely took no pictures during that phase.
