I’ve left New York. What started as a ten-day trip to hammer out some business with Alex turned into five weeks of sleeping on his blue velour sectional, plenty of brainstorming, a ton of new friends and adventures the wooly world of startups that I couldn’t conceive of when I boarded that eastbound redeye in Sacramento over 4th of July weekend. But come to an end it has. We’re off to Monterey in 144B. We’ve enlisted the talents of Autoblog’s resident Northern California boy, Damon Lavrinc, to handle additional driving duties. We’re also attempting to warp the poor man’s brain. We’ve never attempted a driveplan that involved meeting an airline flight before, but that’s exactly what we’ll be attempting this time when we pick up Liz Moses.
She claims that she’ll bring some much-needed sense to the proceedings, but we’re a bit curious as to how much sense anyone who hitches a ride in a fake German police car crewed by a bald man, a bearded man and a blogging man could possibly have. Nevertheless, we intend to make our trek a memorable one. We’ll be broadcasting live video from Seero, as well as putting together one of our signature maps. We’ll be ruminating on the nature of driving in today’s America, passing through hamlets large and small as we travel the entire length of Interstate 80 — from the George Washington Bridge in New York to the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, then tooling down 101 through Silicon Valley and south to Steinbeck Country — where we’ll take in the goings on during what’s internationally recognized as the most fantastic collection of automotive events in one weekend. If you call yourself a car guy and haven’t made it to Monterey, mark your calendars. And once you experience it, you’ll want to come back every year.
The Monticello Motor Club near the Catskills is a members-only, high-entry fee club that offers it’s members 200 track days a year on a road course that Brian Redman had a hand in designing. The following is David’s trip to Monticello a couple of weeks ago.
Sunday, June 29. I found myself being handed the keys to a 2007 (Grigio Silverstone over Bordeaux) Ferrari F 430 and the generous owner telling me, “Just drive it like you stole it!” The crazy part was the guy knew all about my driving exploits. So we topped her off with gas and headed up to the Wide World of Cars dealership in Spring Valley, NY. There we would meet up with a lot full of their clientele before rallying up to the Monticello Motor Club in the Catskills.
Team Polizei Master Pilot Michael Ross led Polizia Maritimo Veloce(!) to a watery but stylish finish on last week’s Blade Run, and rumor has it some very interesting pictures will be coming our way in the next 24 hours.
Matt Farah - El Jefe of The New York Motor Club, host of Garage 419and recent addition to Team Polizei’s roster - is about to do something very cool. Awesome, in fact, and his CoEfficient of Cool (CEoC) is about to spike…big time. I can’t tell you what it is, obviously, because I’m sworn as a friend, co-host and journalist (when it suits me, at least) not to tell. At least not first. That’s for Farah to do, and he’ll be announcing his secret very, very soon, I hear. And my sources are very reliable.
Let’s just say Farah is busy. Traveling. Far from New York. He’ll be back in a couple of days with a big announcement, and I’m damn proud of him.
