Vintage Trans Am Racing

The Coronado Classic Speed Festival runs under the General Racing Ltd. organization, which requires all its cars to have a true racing lineage. This is the actual car raced by Sam Posey in the '70 SCCA series that was built by Dan Gurney's All-American Racers (AAR) team as a Dodge factory team car. Ken Eppsman now owns the car, and is it driven by his brother Gary.

Pro Touring is nothing new. Way back in 1966, the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) began what it called the Trans-American Sedan Championship that was soon shortened to Trans-Am racing. The idea was to race domestic-built production sedans on a road course while limiting these cars to 5.0L, or 305 ci, of displacement. The series quickly grew in popularity, with Chevrolet, Ford, Chrysler, and even AMC involved in the most popular years of 1968 through the end of the 1970 season.

Many notable racers and cars grew out of that series, perhaps the most famous being the team of owner Roger Penske and driver Mark Donohue. High-revving, small-block cars like the Ford Boss 302, the AAR Dodge Challenger, the Plymouth 340 T-A, the Z/28 Camaro, and even an AMC or two were created as factory street versions of their racing counterparts. In the last decade, vintage Trans-Am racing has become tremendously popular, so we decided to catch these Trans-Am cars competing as part of the '06 version of the Coronado Classic Speed Festival, a huge 200-car vintage race held on a road course created from the expansive Naval Air Station North Island's concrete airstrip located on the Naval Base Coronado in San Diego. The race is actually part of Fleet Week-a celebration of all things Navy in San Diego.

The race attracted a large, 36-vehicle field of these "big-bore" cars as part of the overall vintage race. While we were most interested in the musclecar part of this event, there were also some other notable cars, such as the big-block Chevy-powered Can-Am cars that just thundered around the course. We pulled out the best of our photos to give you a flavor of what went down. If you can't get enough of these kinds of cars, take in a vintage car race at a road course near you. You might just want to get involved.

This is the engine compartment from the Posey Challenger. The 303ci small-block is a destroked 340 running a single four-barrel induction system. The factory T/A Challengers used a three-two-barrel system and displaced a more robust 340 ci.

This is the original Penske AMC Javelin driven by Mark Donohue in 1970 and later by George Follmer when the car was owned by Roy Woods. In fact, owner Woods won the '72 championship with AMC backing the car in this color configuration. The car had five overall Trans-Am wins from 1970-1972. The AMC is now owned by Ken Eppsman, who also owns the green Posey Challenger and the No. 9 Penske/Sonoco '69 Camaro.

Vic Edelbrock has a large stable of vintage racers, including the original Trans-Am No. 13 Camaro made famous by Smokey Yunick. Daughter Camee was driving the Camaro on this occasion. "I'm not as fast in the Camaro as I am in my Mustang because I'm a little afraid of this car. It's much faster than I'm willing to drive it." There's a lot of history behind this car. Mike Eddy is the guy who keeps all of Vic's vintage racers in tune, and he also got a chance to drive the Follmer Mustang on Saturday.