Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 4, 1995 TAG: 9507050042
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Packed into a '34 Ford sedan, Don Lorrier and his crew - "The Wrinkle City Racers" - roared into Texas' Arlington Stadium at 50 mph. Their driver braked into a power slide. When the car skidded to a halt, they popped the doors open, jumped up on the running board and doffed their top hats.
The red, white and blue-clad mass of people in the stands roared its approval at the guys in the tuxedos. "The crowd went absolutely nuts," Lorrier recalls.
That Fourth of July nine years ago is one of Lorrier's fond memories of the Great North American Race, a precision antique car rally that will be stopping at Virginia Military Institute in Lexington on Wednesday.
Lorrier, who lives in Rockbridge County, has competed in the annual race three times since it was begun in 1983. It's a grueling event of 12- and 14-hour days, and he's not competing this year - he's too busy running his business, The General Store, in Buena Vista. But he's helping promote the Lexington leg of the race.
More than 100 cars - all built between 1911 and 1941 - will arrive at VMI in one-minute intervals from 8:45 to 11 a.m. Wednesday. The|
drivers will be on their way south from Washington, D.C., and Staunton and heading for West Virginia and Kentucky. The leg of the race that ends at VMI is sponsored by the Lexington-Rockbridge County Chamber of Commerce, which hopes to draw spectators from all over Western Virginia. There will be food, Civil War re-enacters, a bagpiper and a Navy color guard.
The inspiration for The Great North American Race was a 1908 round-the-world car race that decades later was the basis for "The Great Race," a 1965 movie starring Jack Lemmon.
This is the first year that its offspring, the Great North American Race, has ventured outside the United States. It left Ottawa, Ontario, July 1 and will finish in Mexico City July 15.
The driving teams don't compete side-by-side on the road. Instead, the race is a timed rally that rewards precision rather than speed.
Each day, drivers and navigators are given a list of instructions - hundreds of them ordaining changes of speed, stops and starts, turns, signs the teams must read. "This is not a road map," Lorrier says. "Often, you don't know what state you're in."
Each day's driving is divided into four legs, and each driving team is assigned an exact arrival time for the end of each leg. They're penalized one point for every second they're early or late. The winning team at the end typically has a score of fewer than 10 penalty points - meaning they were a total of fewer than 10 seconds off their four prescribed arrival times. Only twice in the history of the race has a team finished the day with just one penalty point, Lorrier said.
To make things more challenging, the teams are not allowed to carry watches that measure time at intervals smaller than seconds. Also, they can carry only plain, unlined paper - if they had lined paper they could use it to make graphs to chart their rate of acceleration and deceleration. They are subject to spot searches for such contraband. "In the early days they used to do strip searches," Lorrier says.
But Lorrier - who competed in 1984, 1987 and 1993 - doesn't believe the searches are necessary. The competitors are in it for the experience rather than the $250,000 in prize money. "This, in our opinion, is more of a gentleman's sport than golf," he says.
When Lorrier competed in 1984 and 1987, he was in his '34 Ford Tudor - that's the way Henry Ford spelled "two-door" - Sedan. The car was the same color (Cordoba Grey) and year as the car in which Bonnie and Clyde were killed. In fact, the actual Bonnie-and-Clyde death car also was in the '87 race. There was one way to tell them apart: "Ours was the one without the bullet holes."
Lorrier has since sold his Ford, but he still owns three other antique cars.
His team finished seventh overall in 1987, but it's the memories - such as those wild Fourth of July roars in Texas - that stick with him. His team wanted to do something to impress the huge crowd. And they did, performing their maneuver at breakneck speed. It became their signature move throughout the rest of the race, he says.
"The promotors asked us to keep it up - but not so fast next time."
by CNB