Lost Roadside Attraction: Vintage Road Racers at Second Creek, Colorado

In the midst of a long-delayed office cleanup, you find some old snapshots and negatives in a cardboard box.  It's  tempting to escape from cleaning up the office by having a look, and so you do. Soon enough, you find youself in the plains northeast of Denver on a warm, dry afternoon in a long-ago summer. The cars lined up on the track look at first like the usual suspects in the early days of vintage road racing: AC Ace Bristol* and Lotus Europa above. Like the photographer in Antonioni's Blow-Up, you puzzle over time, place and meaning, but unlike that pro, many of your images are blurry and not much help. Wait a minute, what's that sleek coupe heading up the line in the image below?  It looks like a silver car, but when you blow it up you realize it's unpainted, polished aluminum...

But when you blow it up it's too indistinct to tell much else, so you look for evidence in the other shots.  The Alfa Giulietta with non-standard wheels, that Ace Bristol again, and an Austin America (remember those hydrolastically-suspended, transverse-engined shoeboxes?) tell you these cars are running some kind of timed trials, as they'd never race in the same class.  The absence of roll bars puzzles you, because you remember roll bars at the Steamboat Springs vintage races*...

Maybe this was a year or two earlier, or at an event with different regulations.  Another clue was this Mercedes 300SL Gullwing mixing it up with bathtub Porsches, Austin Healeys and MGAs.  After the 1987 stock market crash, the explosion of classic vintage race-eligble cars catapulted the Gullwings into the price territory of collectible art, and people didn't race them so much.  Looking at this shot, you can't recall if this was one of the alloy-bodied Gullwings, but there's a good enough chance it was, with those Rudge knock-off wheels… 

That oil well in the background and the oil drums lining the track are a reminder that these cars were mostly built in the first twenty years after World War II, when cheap gas and postwar economic optimism fueled the sports car boom, and the amateur road racing boom, in the United States.  Finally, that oil well tells you that you were at Second Creek Raceway northeast of Denver, where Rocky Mountain Vintage Racing held events in the 1980s. Unless it's a 4-cam Carrera, the bathtub Porsche shown below hasn't much of a chance to catch that Gullwing...

This AC Ace roadster would've stayed ahead of that Porsche, though, especially if equipped with the Bristol D2 inline six, which made the lightweight, alloy-bodied AC a power in SCCA D-Production racing back in the late Fifties and early Sixties.

The Ace, it could be argued, had a better suspension set-up than either the Gullwing Mercedes or the Porsche 356, both of which used rear swing axles.  AC, on the other hand, had a fully independent layout front and rear, with transverse leaf springs.  Phil Remington would keep this feature when Carroll Shelby made the car into the 260 and 289 AC Cobras*, in the early Sixties…

But you probably didn't care about the suspension design, or the track competitiveness, of these cars if you were lucky enough to encounter one in your neighborhood as a child.  It was the simple, undecorated, hypnotic visual poetry of the thing that caught your imagination…and here it was again, maybe a decade and a half later.

This MGA catches your eye too. It has the knock-off disc wheels that were a standard feature on the Twin Cam.  As on the 300SL, the knock-offs are a clue to road racing intent.

After the MGA you find a picture of a house remodel you designed for a friend in the spring of 1983; you were both panicked because he was aiming to finish the remodel by his wedding on July 4th weekend.  So a shot of the completed house tells you this was summer of that year.  And here's that polished alloy car again, number 72.  Not a great shot, but good enough to tell you that this is an extremely rare car...

It's a Morgan SLR, one of a handful of SLRs bodied by Williams & Pritchard in an effort to make a Morgan competitive in road racing, and maybe to finally drag the Morgan firm into the second half of the 20th century.  You had no idea how this car happened to wind up in the suburbs of Denver, but you recall seeing an early, front-engined Lola throw a connecting rod at Second Creek, so there were old English club racers in the RMVR.

So this Morgan was, compared to all the cars at Second Creek that day, even compared to the Gullwing Mercedes, a truly rare car, a mysterious visitor from the history books to a minor league car club event on a lazy summer afternoon.  How the Morgan SLR came to be, and why it turned out to be the only Morgan that ever looked at home in the 2nd half of the 20th century, is a story for another day.

*Footnote:   For a look at other vintage racers that showed up during this era in Steamboat Springs, see "Lost Roadside Attraction: Vintage Racing in Steamboat Springs", posted January 31, 2019.  Anyone wanting to know more about the pretty (and pretty effective) AC Ace and Ace Bristol cars, and their relatives, might want to check out our 4-part series of photo essays, posted on 12-24-16, 12-25-16, 1-9-17, and finishing with "The Cobra Was a Hard Act to Follow" on 8-20-17.

Photo credits:  All photos are by the author.