Editor’s Note: I just got this note from Alan and Mary Travis saying they will not be able to participate in the 2013 Great Race, but I thought everyone would enjoy seeing what interesting things they have been up to the last few months. –Jeff Stumb Good morning Jeff, Mary and I just returned from more than a month of touring Tasmania and lower Australia in our 1906 Darracq Roadster. We have to meet the shipping container ship in Oakland next week to return to our collection. We have been having too much fun with our old cars and not [...]

Back in December, I got a call from two 21-year olds from Minnesota who wanted to participate in the Great Race in a 1959 MGA. It warms your heart when you hear of two guys that age who are into old cars and want to have the ultimate car-guy experience by competing in the Great Race. So I was really looking forward to meeting this pair of outstanding individuals – driver Alex Ethier and navigator Henry Mackaman, who are both from our start city of St. Paul. However, last weekend Alex’s mother Sara informed me of the untimely death of [...]

Robert Dinges and I were sitting in my 1916 Hudson Hillclimber on about Day 12 of the 2007 Great Race somewhere way out west waiting for our restart time when I decided I was going to build a 1950s vehicle for the event. I wanted something easy to get in and out of and that had some power. I have always loved 1957 Fords and have had two retractables and a convertible over the years, so I started researching a car to build from one of those. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for. I read [...]

Raime Brown has joined the Great Race staff in Chattanooga to help with administrative duties, and Great Racers will get to know her over the coming months on the phone and in person, Director Jeff Stumb announced. She will be helping with registration duties and working with participants, sponsors and everything Great Race related as well as continuing in her role as Tour Coordinator of the Coker Museum, which she has held for more than two years. “And Raime will be with us on the Great Race this summer so everyone will get to meet her,” Stumb said. Raime is [...]

One of the hardest things about the Great Race is you meet so many people from all over the country (and the world) but you only get to see most of them once a year on the race. And when you become friends with literally thousands of people over the years who have participated in the Great Race it is inevitable that you are going to lose some from time to time. We have just learned that veteran racer Jonathan Auerbach passed away in December at the age of 70 after a short battle with lung cancer. In trying to [...]

Great Racers have been all over Florida in the last few weeks, including a group of Northeastern rally fanatics who were in the Sunshine State for Speed Weeks at Daytona. In the photo are Great Race veterans Peter Hersey, Steven Tourje and Bill Josler. The man with the beard is Tourje’s friend Rick from Florida. The trio spent their time at the races, camping in a motorhome and riding around the shoreline in Hersey’s boat. Tourje will be racing again this summer with his father, Ed, and Josler will be teaming up again with veteran Guy McDorr. Hersey will be [...]

Earlier, we told you about two rare, unique and unusual vehicles being prepared for the 2013 Great Race, with the second one being Alan and Mary Travis’ 1915 Scripps Booth speedster. This incredibly awesome vehicle can easily be recognized by its radiator shell. There has never been anything like it before or since. Those of you familiar with Alan know he has brought some of the finest automobiles to the Great Race over the years, including a 1910 Knox that he and Mary won the race in back in 1993. And of course last year, they drove the most popular [...]

The Great Race has always attracted the rare, the unique and the unusual in regard to automobiles. We have had Buck Kamphausen’s Hispano-Suiza, Dick Burdick’s Bentley and Jeff Lane’s McQuay Norris over the years. Two potential entries for the 2013 Great Race down the Mississippi River fit into those three categories, but I am not sure exactly which one. The first is a 1960 Fiat Multipa. Jim Collins and Craig Stephens of San Diego are planning to rally the Multipla this summer from St. Paul to Mobile. The automobile is actually all three — rare, unique and unusual. It is [...]

Late last week I headed to Philadelphia for the annual meeting of the Antique Automobile Club of America for a trade show, business meetings and seminars. I expected to not wear my Great Race hat at all during that time because for the most part it is a different crowd because it is business meeting oriented. But I should have know that you can’t go too many places in this world without running into Great Race people. I was coming out of a meeting on Friday and ran into Tabetha Salisbury, the driver of the only all-female team in last [...]

We have just reviewed the Great Race television show which will air on Speed on Saturday, March 23, at 10:00 a.m. (Eastern Time) as an episode of Hot Rod TV, and I can tell you without a doubt it is the best show about our event ever. And I have seen them all. The time it airs in each time zone may vary, so check your local listings. Here is a link to Speed’s listings for Hot Rod TV: http://www.speedtv.com/schedule//filter/program/808771 We are very familiar with Hot Rod TV around here at Coker Tire and Honest Charley, and the best thing [...]