Friday, July 23, 2010
Every year for one weekend in July, both the ultra-rich and amateur racers get together at Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, for high-octane races and events of every kind. From the muscle car class to the F1 racers, there's something for every gearhead alive. Those who prefer trailer queens can attend the Saturday evening concourse, which has almost every car imaginable and many you're never heard of. People flock from all over the world to attend and race in these events, and some of the most rare, valuable, and strange cars are on display and in the races. This is the Kohler International Challenge.
This year's Challenge was sponsored by Ford, and they brought on the firepower. The Falken/Monster drift Mustang driven by Vaughn Griffin, Jr. did exhibition laps in between races, making a loud enough sound to be heard from the other side of the track. Ford brought along a full line of Mustangs, including the new 2011 GT 5.0, which started deliveries to dealers earlier this month, and numerous Mustang race cars in drag, drift, and NASCAR Nationwide guises. Also along for the ride was a European Ford Focus RS, which us Americans have craved after for a long time but never have received. Though the next-gen Focus has already been revealed this year at NAIAS, a flock of admirers still crowded the RS. All Ford vehicles got into the track for free, a marketing ploy that was probably covered in cost by Ford. Consequentially, there were far more Mustangs than there were of any other muscle car, five of which were GT350 race cars raced by famed Cobra Automotive. There were many Shelbys there, real and fake, and three of them managed to crash during the weekend's largest race, the amateur muscle car race. In fact, when a GT350 clone hit the wall hard in turn eleven of the track, the race had to be stopped. A Cobra replica and a real GT350 experienced mechanical failures, but the vast majority of the fifty-plus car race finished.
Also in great show was classic, pushrod V8 Can-Am cars like Dan Gurney's Mcleagle and timeless Lola racers. These things were the most brutish cars in the field, if not the fastest. Going 170 to 180 miles per hour down the straights, they fielded an extremely competitive race right up until the end, with lead changes almost every lap of the 4-mile fifteen-foot course. They also managed to deafen all spectators who watched in awe from the stands or from the pathway next to the safety fence. There were about twenty to thirty of these priceless gems, most of them powered by American big-block motors. There were a couple oddities like the 1962 Dolphin-Porsche Porphin and the only Shelby Can-Am car ever built, and they raced very competitively and many competed in the concourse, too.
Some of the stars of the races, though, were the screaming, 15,000-rpm F1 and Le Mans race cars. Everything that competed in F1 and race endurance Le Mans after the early days was open to run in this event, and there were Sunoco-sponsored F1 racers of the eighties, the one-and-only Aston Martin-powered Riley MkXI Daytona prototype, and even the #2 Audi R10 TDI that one 12 Hours of Sebring in 2006 and 2007 and 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2008! These shrill, loud cars wound through the curves with little effort, seemingly in complete control of the situation whether they were in the lead going over 200 on the straight or far behind, crashed in the sand pits. Of course, that's exactly what the drivers of these beautiful beasts are trained and paid for, right?
There were many more classes that raced, too, including GT3, Formula 5000 (shown in the to photo), Classic Sports Car racing, and more. You could spend the weekend just in the parking lot of this event, where we found a real Shelby Cobra nonchalantly parked, a variety of Aston Martins, Porsches, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Maseratis, etc, extremely tuned production cars, and not-quite-legal yet still licensed race cars. To Check Out The Full Gallery of the Kohler International Challenge 2010, visit our Facebook fan page and go to photos.
