On The Road Again Classic Cars In The Great Race Are Bound For Toronto
John Gouveia stepped gingerly out of his 1941 Cadillac limousine, adjusted his chauffeur’s cap and declared it a tough day in The Corel Great Race.
“Man, was it a long one out there,” said Gouveia, who prefers the open-throttle stock cars he raced about 50 years ago to the big black Caddy. He’ll have to settle for the slow pace for the next dozen days until he and partner Mark Cieszynski make it to Toronto.
The big Cadillac was among 123 pre-1943 cars that cruised into the Lake City on the second day of The Great Race, a classic car rally making its first appearance in these parts.
Starting in Tacoma, the cars will roll 4,100 miles to reach Toronto.
The 14-year-old race is a precisely timed road rally. Drivers must match the exact speed given for a particular stretch of road from a list of instructions, and the teams don’t know where the next turn will lead them. Any faster or slower than the time given for each racing round counts against the car.
Gouveia admittedly has a heavy foot. “I don’t like to go slow. I like going fast. We didn’t have such a great day.”
The team was about a minute and a half off the allotted time. But things can change quickly in this cross-country marathon, said Zane Shubert, who is driving a 1936 Ford.
“We’ve gone from first place to 13th place on the last day,” said Shubert, a 12-year veteran of the race. The cars don’t have odometers, making the speedometer and a clock the crucial instruments for driving success.
Shubert’s speedometer wasn’t working quite right Monday, which meant a not-so-good day on the road for him and partner Leroy Wilson. “We’ll get a new one tomorrow. You just never know.”
All the race teams pack plenty of spare parts. It’s not easy, for example, to find a transmission for a 1930 Studebaker President in Pierre, S.D., where the drivers will stop Friday.
“We’ve got a whole other engine and transmission in our support truck,” Wilson said. “But we’ve never blown an engine or anything that big.”
The cars, fawned over by several thousand onlookers on a breezy evening, will wind through the mountains and over the plains states to reach Toronto by June 29. The drivers are racing for $250,000 in prizes.
Joining the polished race cars on display along Sherman Avenue were about 80 other classic vehicles from local auto clubs. Don Dinius of Spokane brought his jet-black 1935 Ford rumbleseat coupe, which he’d painstakingly restored over the last three years.
“I started working on Chevies, but they were just so dang slow,” Dinius said. “Early Ford V8’s are fast, real fast. That’s why I like ‘em.
“I think I could probably do this race. I’ve got the time, but I don’t know how much money it would take.”
For Craig Nicol of Coeur d’Alene, seeing the cars Monday night brought up memories of the last time he’d seen The Great Race, eight years ago in California.
Nicol rode in an old Model A Ford to watch the race. “I remember finding out that the Model A isn’t a three seater. My wife sat on my lap. It wasn’t so bad.”
The Coeur d’Alene Area Chamber of Commerce and local businesses sponsored the overnight stop.
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