Portland Historics Celebrates 35th Anniversary

Anybody who’s a regular No Fenders reader will undoubtedly know of my Angst towards my Hometrack named Portland International Raceway having been unceremoniously DUMPED from the IZOD Indy Car Series calendar... But wait, let’s see; really IndyCar, you’re gonna go back to Fontana whose crowds drew even LESS then this year’s Milwaukee race – WTF? As Portland’s just sitting there vacant - Whale, NOT exactly, as I’ve just been contacted by the Fine Folks of HMSA regarding this upcoming weekend’s Portland Historics race, which I’ll try refraining from calling Hystericals...

Unfortunately – I’m assuming due to my extremely CRAPY eyesight... I have NOT been able to find an event schedule for the 2011 Portland Historics weekend, nor was I able to open/download the media guide sent to me by the HMSA, as you can visit their Homepage by clicking here.

What I do know is:

The event is slated for July 8-10 and is honoring Chevrolet’s 100^th Birthday, along with a Formula Atlantics race.

Buy Tickets Here

As its been a long-long time ago since I’ve attended the Hystericals; OOPS! I mean Historics at either Seattle’s Pacific Raceway or Portland’s Int’l Raceway – as I’m hard pressed to recollect my last PIR Historics outing – except to say it was then under the Norm Thompson banner and I went down to watch those ground poundin’ Trans Am Boyz mix it up on the Twisty track – as buried aways somewheres is a small Portland Historics poster with that year’s cover car, the ‘Uber BAD ASS Mark Donohue Penske Trans Am Javelin, which at the time was owned & piloted by Kenny Epsman...

It was at Portland’s Historics that I also met (along with countless others) and got some Dude’s John Hancock named Phil Hill when he was celebrating the 30^th Anniversary of his Formula One World Championship, albeit it was actually year Thirty One as the program ‘N poster are both dated ’92; Hmm? Perhaps Dat’s somme of Dat NW Time Convertin’ eh?

Not to mention the year that Lotus was the honoured marque of a very SWEET vintage F1 grid of primarily Ford Cosworth DFV variants – as it was then that I got a bunch ‘O “Loti” drivers signatures – including Seattle’s very own Pete Lovely, who actually campaigned his very own Privateer Lotus F1 car “Back in-the-day,” albeit I think my most favourite Formula 1 racecar that weekend was the sleek looking black Wolf WR5 with somebody’s name Rahal listed as the driver. Yep, none other then Bobby Rahal who made two Grand Prix starts for Walter Wolf  before focusing his attention upon CART as the chauffeur of Jim Trueman’s Truesports race team.

So if you’re in the area, looking for some “Gentlemanly” racin’ action, then by all means drop by the Portland Raceway, and for and added bonus feature – go check out the magnificent Allure of the Automobile exhibit at the Portland Art Museum!