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’

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The Z Owners of Northern California are hosting the Z Car Corral tomorrow at Laguna Seca for the Rolex Monterey Historic Automobile Races.  That was a mouthful.  We will be meeting at Z Car Garage tomorrow morning at 8:00am sharp to form up the caravan and we will be leaving shortly afterwards.

We ask you all to show up as close to 8:00am as possible so that we can leave on time.

You can email me here at ZCarBlog@gmail.com if you have any questions.

Thanks!!  See you tomorrow!!

Link: ZONC Website

Link: Official Monterey Historics Website

And just to get you all a little more hyped up about tomorrow, here are a few more pictures from last year.  These are just a few of the vintage Trans-Am cars that attended last year, this race group was great to watch.  Enjoy the pictures.  (more after the ‘read more’)

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In order to get all of you excited for the upcoming Rolex Monterey Historic Automobile races I have decided to share a few (okay tons) of photos that I took last year.  I didn’t plan on sharing these at first but I think it is important to show what sort of amazing cars come out of hiding for this event, especially for those who have never been to Laguna Seca for this weekend.

Enjoy the photos below of the Pre 1950 cars from last year.  I will have at lease two more posts with different groups of cars over the next few days.  Hopefully this will light a fire under some of you go over to ZONC.org to sign up for the Z Car Corral on Saturday August 15th.

Happy Thursday!!!

Follow the ‘read more’ for all the pictures.

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I figured that since we will be taking the ZCG 370z back to the track in the next couple of weeks I should finally post up the second video that Scott filmed in his track 350z.  I hope that this will hype some of you up to join us on the track in the near future.

Don’t forget that ZCG can prepare your car for your next track event!

This one is for you Scott.

We can’t thank everyone who attended this event enough!  The entire crew at ZONC was amazing and we look forward to the next event with them very soon, Jack and Yolanda special thanks to you.  The caravan down to Laguna Seca on both days was a real blast and I’m happy to report that we had no serious issues.

Another special thanks needs to go out to all of the people who drove some very long distances to join up with us for the races this weekend.  A few of you came from the Sacramento area which is a good drive but there were others who came down from Oregon and Washington.  A good friend of ours brought his ’71 Datsun 510 wagon down from Oregon after a few serious modifications.  The radiator was recently relocated to the rear of the car to make way for a new air-to-air intercooler for the turbo’d drivetrain that came from a Toyota Supra.  (Feel free to leave any comments about putting a Toyota drivetrain in a Datsun in the comments section.)  The kicker here is that he only put on 15 miles before making his way down to meet us.  Talk about commitment.

Like I said earlier,  the drive to the track went great on both days but when we got to the track on Sunday we were blown away at how many Zs were there.  I believe the final count was near 65 cars for the corral.  The Porsche club only had 20ish!  Awesome!!

Our parade lap took place right around noon.  It is always a good experience to get to drive on a track but Laguna Seca is a whole different animal.  The racing history here is immense and Nissan has certainly had its fair share of the limelight here.  The look on people’s faces after the TWO parade laps were over brought a smile to my face, especially for those who have never been on track.  There were so many people interested in doing a track day after this event, it’s a good thing that the Z is up to it!

For me the racing took a back seat to spending time with all of the Z owners that attended.  The MX-5 race on Saturday didn’t produce the carnage that I had predicted, those guys can really drive in close quarters.  The Mustang Challenge race was arguably the most exciting event of the weekend.  Lots of door to door racing and that  V8 rumble will really get your heart going.  I didn’t stay for the entire Rolex Daytona Prototype race so that we could get back to the bay area a bit early but I can’t wait to catch it on one of the greatest inventions ever, the DVR.

We will be hosting more and more Z events at Z Car Garage and ZONC has quite a few shows coming up so make sure to check back here for all the info.  Thanks again to all who attended and to all the readers of ZCarBlog.

Long Live the Z

Follow the “read more” for all the pictures that I took at the event.  The pictures from both days are in the gallery and they are in the order that I took them.  I know that there were a ton of friends with cameras at the event so I will try to get some of their pictures too.  Enjoy

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