I want to start off by thanking everyone who showed up for the ZONC Z Car Corral on Saturday.  It was a pleasure to see all of you!!

The weather was perfect early on Saturday and I was pleased to see that we had 8 cars a the shop ready to join us on our caravan down to Laguna Seca to meat up with the rest of the group.   Unfortunately the most of the drive to the track takes place on Highway 101 so there isn’t much room for spirited driving, we still managed to get to the track in under an hour and a half.

Once arriving it seems like the rest of the car clubs enjoy getting up much earlier than ours did because all of the other corrals from Porsche, BMW, Ferrari, and others were already nearly at capacity.  Porsche had the most cars by far, easily understandable because they were the featured marque this year.  When will it be Nissan/Datsun’s time!?!?  Are you gonna show up when it happens?  I sure am.

While the practice sessions were underway in the morning hours we walked the paddock area in search for automotive gold.  There are amazing cars at every turn at this event, and you don’t even need your sense of sight to appreciate them.   I can’t even count the times that our group stopped by a running car just to listen to the engine note and to smell the burning race fuel.

After lunch we settled into our seats just outside of turn four to enjoy the racing.  While we appreciate the older racing cars that were up for the first few races, we were simply patiently waiting for the last two races of the day which were the 1964-1971 FIA Mfg. Championship cars (mainly Porsche 917s) and the 1981 -1990 FIA Mfg. Championship cars and the IMSA GTP cars.

You can imagine that when seriously priceless cars are raced that the track time is little more than glorified pace laps,  NOT TRUE!!!!  The cars were wheel to wheel in every sense and there was certainly rubbin and bumpin going on.  The drivers wanted to win, after all when would all of these cars ever be on track again together?  It was truly a sight to behold.

I have found a video of the winner of the IMSA GTP race and it can be viewed after the “read more”.  The video is taken from inside the pilot’s driver’s helmet.  I want one of these cars.  There is also a gallery of the photos that I took on Saturday (the only day I attended unfortuantely.)  I will try to find photos from Sunday from someone who attended.  Hopefully we can get our group numbers a little bit higher next year to show how much support is out there for Nissan/Datsun products.  See you there.

(the photo below was of a really clean 240z that was just sitting by itself in the vendor’s area, we had to check it out.  haha)

Complete gallery and video after the ‘read more’

The video is of this GTP car.  Head over to GrandTouringPrototype.com and see all the cool stuff over there if this car interests you.

GTP: Hotchkis Porsche 962 In-Car, Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca from GrandTouringPrototype.com on Vimeo.