I know I’m way behind on blogging. Sorry I’ve been busy in my real life away from this website lately. I will finish up the previous post on the Classic Motorcar Rally real soon. In the meantime have a look at this. Some guys on the Jag-Lovers E-type list have been chatting about it and I figured I’d share. Nice to see an engine swap go the other way sometime. So often American V8 crate motors get shoehorned into Jaguars, usually with unwise structural modifications to frame rails, which transform potentially valuable classics into worthless parts cars. However in this particular case, the car’s creator was truly looking to make art first, car second. He chose the motor for beauty, and the Jaguar XK is indeed a beautiful engine. Not a shabby performer either, but you have to admit it looks very much at home in that open engine bay. Much prettier than a squat V8 or a stove-bolt six.
The 2008 Annie & Steve Norman Classic Motorcar Rally is finished. I don’t know our final standing, but I can tell you it won’t be very good. Dad & I were way off our game and did not do very well. Perhaps I can blame it all on the weather! 😉 We’ll find out soon, but in the meantime here are some photos. I’ll add more soon, so check back.
Above: Dad buckles into the Navigator’s seat to start the Rally. The top is up since it is raining. 🙁
Above: The start under the archway of the Inn at Port Ludlow.
Above: Rallymaster Doug Breithaupt gives us a countdown for the start.
We roared off, only to find our odometer not working! We reset it and it started functioning, but this first leg was an odo calibration section… so we were screwed.
Above: Annie & Steve Norman’s 1964 Bentley S3 Continental.
Above: Susan & Ken Olsen’s 1973 BMW 3.0CS
Above: Adele & David Cohen’s 1939 Bentley 4.5 Liter.
Above: Dad working on route/time calculations.
Above: Michelle & Dana (inset) Swanson, in a 1991 Mistubishi Galant VR4. They do gravel rallys in this car.
At a rest stop the Navigators all get serious and try to do as much pre-calculation as possible. Meanwhile us drivers just stand around and look stupid… or in my case, take pictures. 😉
Above: Car 1, a 1958 Alfa Romeo Guilietta run by Alan Chockie & Antoinette Slavich.
Above: A lovely little blue Fiat 500. Phil Rome, the driver ended up swapping it for a Jaguar XJ6C halfway through the first day (he is local and lives in Port Townsend) as the little Fiat could not maintain speed up long hills.
The weather was just downright crappy. The forecast kept giving us a glimmer of hope, but it never really delivered. It just kept spitting rain, mist, showers, and sprinkles all day long. We finally got a sunbreak late in the day and actually dropped the top on the last segment, but it stayed up all the next day.
After lunch we visited a grade school in Port Townsend and all the kids came out to see the cars. I tilted the Jaguar’s bonnet up to give the kids a thrill.
Above: Mike & Howard Becker’s 1960 Pontiac Star Chief (another father/son team.)
Above: The interior of the BMW coupe.
Above: Duane Crandall has a look at the engine compartment of the 1969 280sl driven by his daughter Lauren. Of course once a bonnet goes up, the boys all gather to look.
Above: Red sports cars are always a hit.
After the school, we caravanned to Bergstrom Automotive in Port Townsend, a wonderful shop in an old Hudson Dealership one block off the waterfront. It is chock-full of automobilia! My dad bought a Road & Track magazine from 1960 with a road test of a 300sl roadster. They had zillions of old car mags, books, parts, signage, etc. A gearhead’s paradise! The prices seemed very reasonable too. I highly suggest a stop there if your in the area.
Above: Bergstrom Automotive.
Above: Waiting for our check-out time in Port Townsend.
I’m in Port Ludlow, WA with my dad, once again running the Classic Motorcar Rally. We left Arlington this morning in the rain, and chose the southern route via the Edmonds/Kingston Ferry to get here. Rode the MV Spokane, arrived at the hotel, checked into the rally, attended the welcome meeting, and had a nice dinner. This hotel has the world’s worst Internet connection, so bear with me for the next few days.
Still trying to fix my weird electrical issues in the 65E. I “hot wired” the fan to the “Map Light” switch with a fused wire so at least now I can cool the car off if I need to. Mind you that is unlikely since it is freezing fricking cold and raining! My horn doesn’t work either and I ordered a relay from SNG. It arrived *literally* as we were leaving home. I went to replace it after we arrived at the hotel, only to find it is the wrong part. Grrrr.
We hosted a gathering of Jaguar folks at our home today. These are all people who have met through the auspices of E-type forum/mailing list on Jag-Lovers.org. John Bennett and his wife Eleanor from Perth, Australia were visiting their son, who lives near Seattle. I volunteered to host a get-together so they could meet other “jag lovers” in the Pacific Northwest. Of course, true to form the Pacific Northwest put on misty rain for the event. As such a small fraction of the folks I invited managed to turn up. But we had three E-types (and two XJs) and did manage to go for a nice drive on some fun roads, with John having the chance to drive two different E-types: a S3 V-12 and a S1 car.
Being at RPM was like being a drug fiend in Amsterdam… it was an assault of pure car porn. I loved it. RPM is a family business: Peter Markowski and his two sons, Stephan and Eben Markowski. RPM is best known as a Ferrari shop, and the first time I went there it seemed to be 90+% Ferraris. It seems they’ve branched out a bit now … a little bit of everything. Even Jaguars! From the outside you would never know what lies within. It appears to be a typical Vermont farm, with a house and two barns. Inside the barns however is all manner of magic and delight. Here, lets have a look….
Today was the final day of the 2008 New England 1000. We visited a couple of museums and a restoration shop, while driving on some great Vermont roads with some really cool cars with really nice people.
Above: The Cadillac and a Ferrari at the start.
We started at the front of the hotel and drove some great two-lane backroads around Vermont in a big clockwise circle. We had been given forewarning at breakfast about police activity, since Rich Taylor, the Rally Organizer (of the perpetually wayward clock) had been stopped for speeding in his red Maserati Sebring. So we behaved ourselves and just enjoyed the segment. Dad drove, while I navigated. Route finding was intense, so I didn’t have time for a lot of photography. I did try and get some nice motion-blurred shots of a modern Ferrari along a twisty road. Most times I can nail these shots.. but sometimes I don’t quite get them…
Oh well. Not exactly what I was hoping for, but still not bad.. in their own sort of way. Like I said, I think I need some eyeballs down at my fingertips!
The segment finished in a town noted for marble. Everything was made of marble… the school, the fire station, the tire-stops in the parking lot. It was marble overkill!
We decided to skip the marble museum and just drive the next segment. I drove, Dad navigated. Like the first stage it was long, and intense. No photos were taken, but like the morning, we zeroed the segment again. So far, only our clock screw-up was keeping us from a Perfect Game.
This second segment of the day brought us to RPM, the shop of the official Rally Mechanics. They served us lunch amid a veritable toy store of gearhead treasures. I literally wolfed down my lunch and spent the better part of our time there shooting photos. After we cleared the checkpoint, dad took the car back into the town of Vergennes to top off the gas tank, so I was out of touch with him for most of the time at RPM.
From a start at the top of Whiteface Mountain, to Woodstock via The Trapp Family Lodge… the hills were alive with the sound of roaring engines!
Above: A Maserati displays its carbon footprint.
Above: Same Maserati reflected in the Cunningham C3 Vignale Coupe
We started the day with another great breakfast in the Mirror Lake Lodge dining room. We had heard that the road to the top of Whiteface Mountain was closed and that we’d be starting the days rallying from the bottom. We packed up our bags and hit the road, with me driving the short transit stage to Whiteface.
We were pleasantly surprised to find the road open and we drove to the top!
Above: Scenes from the top of Whiteface… including push-starting the Michie 330GT, which had stalled.
Below: Parked for a rolling start!
We had some time to soak in the view before the start of the rally. I wandered around shooting photos and latter walked down the tunnel to the summit elevator, rode it up and shot some scenery.
Above: The road up Whiteface Mountain
Above: Looking down the tunnel towards the opening from the elevator.
Above: Looking towards Lake Placid
Above: Looking down at the start and road from the summit
I came back down a several cars into the start. Cars go off at one minute intervals. We were parked way back up the line so it would be a while before our turn. Meanwhile, I shot photos:
Above: Can you tell I REALLY like this car? It photographs so well!
Joe & Marge Costa’s Series 3 E-type Jaguar. You can’t see Joe & Marge in this photograph, but I can bet they are smiling. They had grins like Cheshire cats all week. 😀
I even took photos after I got back into the car!
Above: Geri looking serious at the check-out/start line.
We received our check-out time, and I drove this segment while Dad performed the navigation duties. It was a pleasant drive down the mountain, then along a wonderfully deserted, and suitably twisty backroad going mostly north out of the Adirondack mountains. From there the route lazily made its way along a mixture of state highways and complete back roads north and east to the shores of Lake Champlain, then due north to the bridge to Vermont, just shy of the Canadian border. Along the latter portion of this route we encountered several police employed in speed patrols, and even saw some rally participants engaged in intimate discussions with said police officers. Thankfully we had our detector and it provided us with plenty of warning. So much so that another rally participant who was following us asked about what brand we used.
The checkpoint for this segment was located on an island on the Vermont side of the bridge. We arrived at the stand-off point with plenty of time to spare. It was a mildly tricky checkpoint run with a long, u-turn 1/3rd of the way in. Dad checked our clock while I snapped some photos.
Above: The exhaust tip of the Fischer’s Porsche 356.
David & Paula Fischer prepare for their segment checkpoint run at the stand-off. They were concentrating so much on the task they had no idea I was there!
Sure enough, our clock is off the rally master’s by quite a bit, a full second and a half. We calibrate our timing to adjust and go over in our heads how we’re going to get it right. Confident in our planning we switch drivers and dad nails it on the zero. We grab a check-out time and run the next segment. It follows the string of islands down the center of Lake Champlain, through wonderful Vermont countryside.
To our delight, and for the second time on a New England 1000 that we can recall, we encounter a string of pre-war Bentleys going the other direction!
Above: A pre-war Bentley and a 70s Jaguar pass each other in Vermont.
The route left the islands and navigation got tricky, so other than ogling the occasional Bentley, I was too busy for photography. That changed when we went up and over Smugglers Notch on our way to Stowe, and the check-in. Navigation was minimal-to-non-existent (no other road but this one!) and the terrain interesting. I shot photos on the way up…
…and switched my Olympus digital camera to “movie mode” for the trip down:
It looks and sounds like we were going real fast. In reality we’re going the speed limit – that’s just wind noise and what your tires sound like when you hang your ear a few feet away from them on really twisty roads. Think of driving around a parking garage and that sound will be familiar.
I wish I could have held the camera a bit more steady. I really need an eyeball on the end of my fingers.
The checkpoint was in the front of the Trapp family lodge. Yes, that Trapp family.
Above: A few dead bugs on the nose of a 911.
Above: The Costa’s in their Jag wait their turn at the stand-off.
The checkpoint was in the parking lot and had a ludicrously short run. Oddly, or clocks were in sync with the rally checkpoint this time, so no compensation had to be calculated. We zeroed and happily went inside for lunch, after parking our SL next to the 300. There was also a 230sl on the rally but I never managed to get all three in a shot together.
Lunch was great, as is the view from the dining room. The lodge is filled with family memorabilia and would make a nice pace to stay for the rally (something my father communicated to the Rally organizers. The Bentley group was staying there too.)
After lunch I drove the next segment, which wound its way south through rural Vermont to somewhere near Woodstock. We zeroed that checkpoint too, and I also drove the short transit stage back to the hotel. Just outside Woodstock, literally a mile or so from the hotel we were caught in a construction delay that went on for ever. Clouds appeared and we just barely raised the convertible top before it transformed into a deluge!
We enjoyed a dinner at a restaurant (ironically) named “Bentley’s” and collapsed into bed quite exhausted from a long day of rallying. Thursday will be our last day of the rally.
