Oaxaca 2009 (No Clever Title Yet)

First day con­fu­sion. Imag­ine our sur­prise to arrive in the Zoco­lo this morn­ing and dis­cov­er that the Car­rera Panamer­i­cana was fin­ish­ing it’s first stage in our front yard. So to speak.

Lots of clas­sic cars (with clas­sic dri­vers) ral­ly­ing across Mex­i­co. You can find the whole sto­ry of a race that was revived on the offi­cial site (en espanol) and an eng­lish ver­sion.

The race fin­ished some­where out of town but the final tran­sit stage took the cars into the cen­ter of the city. Here’s the fin­ish line.

There are a lot of Stude­bak­ers entered. This one is done up in Mex­i­can green, white, and red. (#116)

Some clas­sic Volvos as well. A PV 544 (#121)

By now you’ve noticed that there isn’t much in the way of crowd con­trol. Tak­ing pic­tures was just a mat­ter of stand­ing in the mid­dle of the street and wait­ing for the cars to arrive. 

We’d hear the police sirens and then see a car turn­ing the cor­ner. (#231 maybe list­ed on the web­site as #407)

This love­ly pur­ple Stude­bak­er is local. To us, at least. (#120)

Some­things are a lit­tle hard to iden­ti­fy when they’re race prepped. This one is a sun­beam??? (#222)

Some­times the shots just don’t work out. Gri­mac­ing is common.

A love­ly Mer­cedes SL that came all the way from Ger­many. (#302)

Every­body want­ed pic­tures and auto­graphs. There were a cou­ple of rec­og­niz­able stars but all the dri­vers got spe­cial atten­tion from the crowd. 

In case you did­n’t fig­ure out who the fel­lows above were. 

This is a rather arty shot. The first SL I’ve seen with a tow hook. (#311)

The dri­vers head­ed back to the hotels. We came back and sort­ed pictures.