Everyone’s favorite car on this year’s Mountain Mille was a 1954 Oldsmobile Rocket 88 Holiday Coupe driven by a husband and wife team of newly-retired Army Colonels—Yes, Sir! Yes, Ma’am!—in training for next year’s Mille Miglia. Yes, every Vintage Rallies event is unique!
The call of the road was a key part of the American experience for decades. The coming of the ‘popular priced’ car with the Ford Model T gave folks that lived in the country a way to more easily get to the city and those that lived in the city a more convenient way to get out to the country.
On the 2014 Texas 1000, two rallyists from Santa Fe suggested that Jean and I organize one of our Vintage Rallies in New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. So we did. Our first Southwest Passage was so overbooked that our crew had to stay in a separate hotel when we ran out of rooms.
There are arguably a score of excellent multi-day vintage rally and tour events held around the world each year, many held in wonderful places with terrific roads and contested by exciting and beautiful cars. However, it can be definitively declared that all the rest exist as a tribute to the greatest historic driving event of them all, the historic Mille Miglia of Italy.
In 2015, Concorso Italiano will once again be a key event of Monterey Automobile Week. Concorso Italiano’s unique format features more than 800 vehicles of Italian origin, and this year includes a reunion gathering for over twenty 250 GTE owners.
In 1991, writer/racer Rich Taylor and his wife, artist/photographer Jean Constantine, drove a Lancia on Italy’s Mille Miglia Storica to do an article for Town & Country magazine. When they returned, they decided to organize a similar vintage sports car rally in America.
Alfa Romeo, recognized for motorcars with elegant lines, race-ready engines and evocative use of hand-rubbed paint and fragrant leathers, is returning to the North American market after more than a decade’s absence. The 8C Competizione, introduced as a concept car at the 2003 Frankfurt show, boasts a curvaceous carbon-fiber-composite, steel reinforced body.
