23 August 2012

Nascar and more nice car stuff

Some of you know that I'm a big car enthousiast. I like anything that goes fast :) When we were planning our trip to the USA I started looking if there was any racing going on near the places we were going to visit and it turned out there was. We were going to drive right past Indianapolis and there was a Nascar race there with still enough tickets available. So we decided to plan our trip to Detroid around this date. I never saw any American racing before and was very exited to go there.

When we finally got there we found out immediately that we actually didn't know much about Nascar at all. There are two main competitions at the same time. The Nation Wide Cup and the Sprint Cup. Same idea but different engines. Qualifying is about the highest speed. The noise is very very different for European racing. It was great to  be at the Indy Speedway. You can feel the historic atmosphere at this circuit and the Americans do know how to make a show of course. In the picture on the right you can see a lot of press gathering around Danica Patrick, a female driver that later crashed her car. We had great seats and even the wife and kids seem to enjoy them selves after they got some ear protection.

After the visit to Nascar we drove on to our friends in Michigan. They live in a small city called Brighton and it turns out that during the summer they have their own local car show EVERY Sunday. The whole center of the town is filled with special cars. Most of them are custom build with very proud owners showing them of. Most of them don't only have done a lot of work on the exterior and interior of the car but also the engines. A lot of them were totally chromed! Amazing. And most of them also installed engine tuning to get the engine power to amazing numbers. The whole atmosphere was so relaxed there with even live music and a lot of stalls to eat. Amazing they do that EVERY Sunday :)

But they had an even bigger surprise in stock for us. Our friend works in the car industry and know a lot of people. One of them has a very big car collection called the 'Lingenfelter Collection' and we got a private tour there. There are about 150 cars there and they are all very special. Some custom build, but also my two favorite Ferrari super cars were standing next to each other there :) I knew most of the European cars in there especially the Italian ones. But we learned a lot about the early Corvettes, Camaros, Fords etc. The nice thing was also that the guy that did the tour knew every detail about all those cars and it was a joy to listen to a real enthusiast like that. Well that was it for now. I took a lot of pictures of course, but we also filmed a bit, so maybe you'll see some clips on YouTube in the future as well.

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