The Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion (formerly known as the Monterey Historic Automobile Races) is 40 years old this year! Pheww, I’ve got to let that one soak in a bit. That factoid serves as a slightly painful touchstone to my advancing age, considering that this one event has been an annual fixture for damn near my entire life!
While I’m not 100 percent certain, I believe my first trip to the Monterey Historics was in 1979, at the tender age of 13! Back in “them olden times” there was just the races at the track and the Pebble Beach concours on Sunday. There wasn’t the week-long constellation of concours, auctions, shows, club meetings, dinners, product launches, film festivals and ancillary satellite events that now constitute “Classic Car Week.”
But for a wide-eyed kid who was crazy about Ferraris—despite not knowing much more about them than the fact that his dad had just bought a second-hand Dino—this was a brave new world. Before me was a virtual universe of strange and beautiful machinery that I previously had no notion even existed. My pre-pubescent brain was like the proverbial tabula rasa (blank slate) soaking it all in as fast as I could assimilate it. Can’t remember if I slept that weekend, but if I did there had to have been smoke coming out of my ears…it was a lot to process.
Back in those early years, the Ferrari Owners Club used to rent the track on the following Monday for a private, club track day. We stuck around to check it out that first year, which led to one of those innocent moments that can forever alter the arc of a person’s life. Perhaps on a whim, my dad asked a guy he casually knew in the club if he’d mind giving his son a ride in his car. His name was Dennis and he was at the track, by himself, with his Daytona Coupe roadcar. “Sure,” he said, “why not?”[pullquote]
“Experiencing the Monterey Historics as a young teenager in 1979 opened up a virtual universe of strange and beautiful machinery that I previously had no notion even existed.”
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Somewhere, an open-face helmet was procured and I was buckled into the passenger seat of the Daytona. I was so unbelievably excited it’s a miracle I didn’t soil myself, and the Daytona’s Coco floor mats! That was 35 years ago, but I can still replay much of the drive like it was a Super-8 movie in my head. I can still smell the heady aroma of the car’s leather interior, I can still hear the owner winding the V12 up and down the gears, I can even still remember looking over at Dennis in his yellow, short-sleeved Ferrari polo short, with his hairy arms working that big three-spoke steering wheel, as he pitched the Daytona into and through the famed Corkscrew at the top of the track. The one thing I can’t remember about that seminal drive, however, is what the track looked like…because I wasn’t tall enough to see over the dashboard and I was flying back and forth in the seat!
In the years that followed, we returned to the Monterey Peninsula each August, as an annual automotive pilgrimage—a Hajj, if you will, for the classic gearhead. And with each successive year, I was exposed to an ever-broader assortment of historic machinery, which resulted in new interests and new “favorite cars” every year. With each passing year, my tastes broadened, my knowledge deepened and my enthusiasm was stoked enough to carry me through to the following year’s events. Even now, three and a half decades later and now a jaded member of the automotive press, I still learn new things each year and come away with an even larger list of cars I’ve fallen in love with.
While my love of racing can be traced to the first years of the Long Beach Grand Prix, I think it’s safe to say that my love for cars evolved from decades spent on the Monterey Peninsula in August. In the grand scheme of things, time well spent.
Casey Annis
Publisher/Editor
