Martin Gastanaga

This weekend I went out to Reno-Fernley Raceway to watch the 5th Annual Reno Historic Races. If you are at all into car racing it is worth the short drive from Reno to attend this event. This years event was “Honoring Vasek Polak and the Great Cares of Porsche” and man did they do a good job of it. There were cars from many great and exciting eras of Porsche racing as well as many other classes and types of racing.

One of the coolest thing about this event in my opinion is the true history of many of the cars. In order to participate each car has to have some kind of race history and many have had some very colorful history about them. Look through the photos and I bet if you watched any car racing in the last 20 years you will see some cars of the past in these photos. I saw two cars I remember watching race on TV when I was a teenager.

The second cool thing about the event is the ability to roam around the pits, which is not common on a race track but this is a spectator event and the rules are different. While you roam around if you stop by any one of the cars and hang out long enough you start to find out who owns the cars and or someone who knows the history. Often that person just loves to share the story behind the car. Many times they opened the hood and doors so you can see parts of the car that are not always easy to catch a glimpse of. If you are really lucky you might even get to sit in one like my son did.

If you missed this years event, I suggest you make it to next years event. After all, the event is a fund raiser for the National Automobile Museum and I promise you will learn and see some history that you did not know about car racing.