Rolex GrandAm Race at Laguna Seca

On Sunday (May 17), Hollis and I drove the Red Menace down to Monterey and attended the Verizon Festival of Speed. That's the sponsor's name for the Rolex GrandAm Race at Laguna Seca. For those of you that don't follow this form of road racing, two classes of race cars compete simultaneously. The DP (Daytona Prototype) are special-built racing cars in an aerodynamic coupe body. The slower class is GT (Grand Touring), replicas of street cars.

DP body/chassis combinations are built by a just a few manufacturers. Riley is the most common. There are also a few from Dallara, Lola, and Crawford. The real variety comes from the many engine manufacturers involved: Ford, Pontiac, Porsche, BMW, Lexus, and Honda. Over in the GT class, the contenders include Mazda, Porsche, and Pontiac, along with a couple of very slow (comparatively) Corvettes. The Mazda's look like normal RX-8s but have a tubular chassis with a carbon-fiber replica body and a three-rotor Wankel engine that produces about 420 HP.

The GrandAm rules are constantly jiggered in an attempt to maintain parity among the top group of competitors. This often results in some interesting racing. Sunday's winners in the DP class were Jon Fogarty and Alex Gurney (yes, son of Dan) in the Gainsco Pontiac-Riley operated by Bob Stallings Racing. The GT race was dominated by the SpeedSource Mazda RX-8 driven by Nick Ham and Silvain Tremblay. A selection of pictures from before and during the race are in the gallery. The complete results are listed at MotorSports.com.