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"Don&amp;#039;t be fooled by its proximity to an ancient glacial lake, or its occurrence in conjunction with a weekend of vintage races at an internationally renowned track: the Watkins Glen Grand Prix Festival isn&amp;#039;t exactly Villa d&amp;#039;Este, and it definitely ain&amp;#039;t Pebble Beach. But if the rustic setting is more working class than leisure class, recall that the contests that originally inspired the races being commemorated here\u2014events with names like Mille Miglia and Targa Florio\u2014were themselves fought not in exotic glamour capitals, but careening through humble hamlets like this one. Picture locals casting a glance over their shoulders at trail-braking Etceterini while hanging their laundry out to dry, and you&amp;#039;re not far off. It was in the late &amp;#039;40s that a group of enterprising sports car enthusiasts successfully lobbied their village elders to close off six and a half miles of undulating farmland roads and turn them over for a day of unbridled hoonery. The Watkins Glen Sports Car Grand Prix would continue to grow until inevitable accidents and spectator casualties sobered everyone up. The seed had been planted, however, and by the mid-1950s a proper closed circuit was constructed in the nearby countryside. It became the U.S. home of Formula One for two decades. It&amp;#039;s this heritage that is celebrated on the first Friday in September each year, as the public roads of the old course, all of them very much intact, once again reverberate with the sounds of unrestricted exhausts. Comprising everything from a concours d&amp;#039;elegance to a gymkhana, the festival draws tens of thousands of spectators\u2014and all of their cars\u2014to the half-mile-long stretch of Franklin Street that doubles as the course&amp;#039;s front straight. What sets the day apart from your typical big-bucks vintage event is a spirit of inclusiveness that owes largely to the region&amp;#039;s characteristic aversion to elitism and pretension. This might be the ancestral home of American sports car racing, but culturally it&amp;#039;s NASCAR country. Nobody&amp;#039;s wearing fancy hats or dressing up as historical re-enactors of a better age.  And while you might end up, for example, with a field of honored-marque participants consisting of roughly two-thirds new Minis (sigh), on the whole this lack of artifice is a very good thing. Because it also means that for every pristine Ferrari 275 GTB/4 you see taking its accustomed place of pride on concours row, there&amp;#039;s also an equally immaculate AMC Gremlin loitering about. A brown AMC Gremlin. Or a weathered Simca Coup\u00E9 that just traveled 250 miles from Connecticut under its own power after not having turned a wheel in years. Or a preternaturally clean 1983 Ford Thunderbird Turbo Coupe defying all reasonable assumptions as to whether or not such a thing in this world actually exists. The list goes on. It goes on all day, actually.  Even amidst such an embarrassment of riches, it seems like every year there is one car that turns up unannounced and takes your breath away. Last year it was a Martini-liveried Porsche 917 that for me encapsulated perfectly the difference between this event and larger, more prestigious ones: whereas the flock of such cars you&amp;#039;d be likely to encounter at, say, Monterey would instantly send your brain into inured overload, here the spectacle of this single, singular automobile, on public roads no less, is properly shocking, and you&amp;#039;re able to fully savor and appreciate how truly astonishing a sight it is.  The 917 was back this year, along with fellow previous prize-winner Peter Giddings and his pre-war, ex-Nuvolari Alfa Romeo Tipo B, but this time my Personal Dropped-Jaw Award went to a tiny Siata 208 Berlinetta so stunning\u2026well, I&amp;#039;ll tell you how stunning it was. It was so stunning that it wasn&amp;#039;t until I returned a half hour later to look at the car some more that I even noticed the D-Type Jaguar parked next to it. That stunning. Runner-up? A car parked innocuously along a side street, that, strangely \u2014 considering it&amp;#039;s at least as rare in this country as a 917 or open-wheel Alfa \u2014 drew no crowd whatsoever. I speak of course of the Ford V8\u2013powered MG ZT-T estate with vanity plates reading &amp;quot;IS TOO.&amp;quot; It was iridescent purple, and yes, as a matter of fact the roof was painted gold, funny you should ask. While the crowds have grown to a point that makes an unobstructed view of the cars as they parade through town almost impossible, that still leaves six miles of sparsely populated road course \u2014 sun-drenched meadow or wooded hollow, take your pick \u2014 just waiting to be staked out.  By day&amp;#039;s end, when you&amp;#039;ve lost track of how many MGBs or TR6s or Loti have nearly run you over; when the Alfas and E-Types have melded into a continuous, covered-headlight, step-nose blur; when the afternoon&amp;#039;s blue DeLorean and deliriously-stickered Fiat 128 Rally and roll-caged, Panasported, bumper-deleted Opel Manta have been obliterated from your mind by the Arnolt-Bristols and Cunninghams and Lancia Aurelias and Maserati Sebrings of early evening; and the final thundering echoes of Donahue Camaros and Follmer Mustangs and Posey Challengers (!) have faded from the gorge walls, and you turn back slowly, pensively, to where you parked, you notice something. A chill in the air that wasn&amp;#039;t there before. Leaves that you could&amp;#039;ve sworn were green on the drive down have begun to turn. Suddenly you&amp;#039;re aware that the music you&amp;#039;ve been listening to is now the music you listened to last summer. Happens every year. There&amp;#039;s nothing that quite clears the senses, or turns the page for you, it would seem, like the sights and sounds of race cars on roads for which they were never intended. A brown Gremlin also helps. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/features/a5436/watkins-glen-grand-prix-festival-thoughts-by-peter-hughes/>