MUSIC Every summer, more than 100 vintage car owners, dozens of event volunteers and thousands of fans gather at Pacific Raceways in Kent over the course of a three day weekend in July for the Pacific Northwest historic race.

The Society of Vintage Racing Enthusiasts or SOVREN sanctions.

This event.

And it's been going strong since 1989.

Over the decades, $10.5 million have been raised and donated to Children's Hospital.

Yes, it's a story about cars, but it's really about people overcoming differences and coming together to form a family bound by common interests and a love for the traditions of vintage auto racing.

Producing this piece took months and we did it for you.

So sit back and enjoy this northwest now.

Special racing into the past.

Northwest now is supported in part by viewers like you.

Thank you.

You cannot do it without people.

And it is all volunteer with people who have a love for the sport, a love for the cars, a love of the people that come to these events.

It is more social than it is a race.

Some people view themselves as, you know, they're the fastest guy out there, but they're all here because it's it is social, it is fun.

It's a club.

Power on fuel on accu-sump on - fire in the hole.

Hey, guys, I'm Jake Angel.

We are at Pacific Races for the 34th annual historic.

The historic is what got me into racing.

I'm not a racer.

I'm a chef.

I grew up watching the Food Network before Bobby Flay was big.

I got you, Bobby.

I'll take you right now.

And and that's what I'm good at.

It's not like I wanted to be a chef.

I like to make people happy.

One of the guys that comes to my restaurant has a very cool 1957 Corvette, and they knew I was into Corvettes.

They dragged me here for this event and I still get goose bumps when I tell this story because we were over in the big paddock and my friend said, Here's my Corvette, how's for out?

And I said, Is that Larry Webb?

And he goes, I thought you weren't into racing.

I said, I'm not, but I'm into Corvettes.

And anybody that knows anything about Corvettes knows who Larry Webb is.

My name is Larry Webb.

I'm working on a 1957 Corvette.

I'll be 85 the 28th of July.

And I have been doing this since I was 15 years old.

So it's a good 70 years.

I didn't know he was still doing this and he said I pulled him out of retirement.

Larry Webb was delivered the first fuel injected Corvette in the world on the West Coast, there's a picture of him.

We're taking delivery of the first 1957 fuel injected Corvette.

He taught people how all the mechanics how to service Rochester fuel injection.

He worked for Allan Green Chevrolet.

He pitted for Dan Gurney.

If you don't know who Dan Gurney is, you see them shake up the bottle of champagne at the end of the race.

Dan Gurney was the first guy to do that.

That's how far back this goes.

He is a gentleman and above everything, the man is probably the most gentleman and gentleman that I've ever met.

Jake came out to watch races two or three years ago and he got the fever, the Corvette fever.

And it was easy to catch the sight, the sound.

Everything just turned Jake on.

And Jake decided that it was time for him to go racing with a Corvette.

And so Larry and I became friends.

When my car came up for sale.

I reached out to Larry and I asked him, Do you know the car?

I know of the car.

I know of a selfless history, but I don't believe I've ever worked on that particular car until Jake got it.

There was an owner that had raced the car previously, and Jake contacted him and they made a deal.

And here we are.

I get patches from Larry.

They're historic as the day is long.

They are from the sixties because he's giving them to me and I'm selling them on Amazon one at a time.

We're very good friends, not just because of the Corvette, but I think our personalities complement each other.

And and he respects me, respect my knowledge.

And I think he considers me a father figure.

Of course, I'm much older than he is.

And so that works out really well.

Every day that I race, I face that I just want to put the car back in the box and go home in one piece.

I don't want the car to get broken.

I definitely don't want me to get broken and I don't want anybody to get hurt in the process.

Vintage racing to me is you go out there, you work on your mind, you don't get off your line to help somebody.

You stay on your line to help somebody and stay out of people's way.

They're wonderful, beautiful cars to drive.

It's a lot of fun.

Racecar drivers are a special breed of people.

Politics doesn't enter into anything other than, you know, egos sometimes get in the way.

We look at ourselves as a big family out here.

My son, who is now, you know, coming up, 33 years old, was at his first race when he was two weeks old.

And he had and he, you know, quite readily admits that he had 100 sets of parents at the racetrack because everybody looks after everybody else.

And that's really what it's all about.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter who you are or what you do.

We're a racing family here.

We really are.

It's mostly about friends and family and having fun and some really cool cars on the track and doing it with my family.

Yeah, I couldn't ask for anything better.

My husband, I used to come out here on the weekends, pack a sack lunch, see what was going on, and we kept seeing the same people, same cars.

We thought we could do this.

We took a class at performance racing school here, and after we decided, Yeah, we want to do this, we told him we wait until he was 21 because we want to make sure that he was old enough to handle if something bad had happened on the track with us and haven't looked back since.

I grew up just with cars in the garage.

I've always had a weird knack for for driving.

I run in most of the same groups as my dad, so there's always that jab going back and forth like you're just going to have who this weekend?

The facts are.

The facts.

He's younger.

He's just his reflexes are better, his sight is better, everything's better.

And this year is the first time where we're on the same grid where he's actually beat me in a race.

So out here, I'm trying to keep him behind me.

We all feel the same and we all get excited.

But then you get nervous.

You get the butterflies when the time comes.

And her name is Townsend because Townsend means dancing in German.

So she and I dance together.

We're always encouraging one another.

We're always trying to help each other with lines on the track, breakpoints, things like that.

People to watch for.

We always tell each other we race as a family.

It's an incredible experience to be able to to be able to come out here and do this with them.

We're making history.

We're making memories, good memories, making friends.

It's really cool.

That's the best part.

It's like a big family out here and it just has such a wholesome feel to it.

There's just a different ambiance here.

It's just fun to go to all the historic tracks across the country and you say that you've had your wheels on them and we get to do it with each other.

I wouldn't replace it for anything.

When you pull in your cars, loud people are watching and then you get out and you take your helmet off and your hair comes out and they're like, Whoa, that's a chick.

I hate to say it, but that is the best part.

You only live life once.

If you could do this, do it.

I am more proud when I stand on the sides and I watch him race and I watch him race.

That's it.

Just makes me smile, makes me proud.

You only get so many trips around the sun to be able to cherish these memories.

You know, looking back in 1020, 30 years when maybe we're still doing this, maybe were not to be able to get this under our belt and and have these great experiences.

It's it's indescribable, to be honest.

It was a lot better.

It's got a lot of sentiment to it.

Very, very high sentimental value.

I wouldn't trade it for the world, even though I'm president of Sovereign.

I've only been racing for about four years and I got started because I have a classic mini and I went to a track day and it's really interesting how welcoming, how inviting.

It's like I got toys.

You've got toys, let's play with them and it's it really transcends that.

I mean, there are cars out here that are insanely valuable today.

We've got the Lotus 19 that Dan Gurney won, the first grand Prix in 1962.

That car is priceless.

It's irreplaceable.

It's and yet they're going to go out on the track and race with us.

The car behind me is one of the least expensive cars that you can run, not just in terms of acquiring it, but just how you run it.

I mean, it takes a gallon and a half of fuel to run 20 minutes, right?

It's not it's not a big deal.

But but we all get out there.

We all race under the same rules.

We all have a competitive spirit.

We're all you get to know the people that you're racing with.

Somebody does something on the track that's like, wait a minute, what was that all about?

And you have a conversation with them and and you walk away friends, not just competitors.

So my earliest memory of racing in general and specifically with my dad would be back that winter of 1981, 1982, when he built his first formula V with a couple of his friends.

And they did it in the garage, you know, over the course of the winter.

So you could go to a wrecking yard, buy a bug, tear it apart and make yourself a racecar.

And that's what I did.

It was two of my good friends who are still my good friends.

40 years later, we're still all at the races together.

We actually had to get pictures and go take photographs of other people's race cars because we had no idea how to do it.

I had a two car garage, I had no heat, so we had a cursing, fired heater hanging around this heater than going doesn't work.

Hang around the heater.

And that's how we built the car.

Whenever I smell kerosene, I'm taken back to walking out to the garage when I was, you know, seven or eight years old.

And these guys are building the first car all through the winter.

They had no idea what they were doing.

I'd spend the whole evening out there with us and we'd say, Here, take this and over to the parts, washer and clean it, take that brush and scrub it, and they'd go scrub something and bring it back.

The next spring, when we started racing, he was at all the races.

It was my two pals and Quinn, the four of us.

We would go to California, we would go to Wisconsin wherever we went.

Quinn when he missed some school going go to race in that first year, it was we were had a big learning curve.

But the second year I had my first win, I actually went won a race.

I really got involved with racing in 1985 when I started running sprint karts, summer after fifth grade, know I was 11 years old.

He loved it and we got him a go kart.

He went go kart racing when he was 18.

I bought a second Formula V car and we went racing together, actually competing against each other on the same grid of cars.

And that was cool.

For the first three or four years, my car was a little better, a little faster in his car, and I was a better driver.

At the end of the race.

I couldn't even see him.

He was so far in front of me back then.

But then when he got to be mid 20, he started getting real good.

So it was a transition period at some point where he, you know, he was chasing me more than I was chasing him, tried, decided that I needed to add a Formula Ford to my Formula B, I just wanted to do more racing.

So I got a second racecar.

I raced formula for this was what they call Sports Car Club of America.

SCCA B Ten, 12 years ago I wanted to go vintage racing, so I bought my Titan Formula Ford that I wanted to join in with sovereign racing, the vintage racing.

So I said, When do you want to race my Crosley?

And he said, I sure do.

I absolutely love running with Sovereign.

It's very respectful.

It's wheel to wheel.

You know, we're not giving any quarter.

Some people think that vintage racing means you go out and do it's a little parade, but we're running these just as hard as we are anything else.

And it's tooth and nail.

It's a lot of fun.

We have finished within ten or 20 feet of each other a dozen times in the last couple of years.

And we have finished side by side a couple of times.

We've had literal photos finish.

We came off the boat and went to the port in San Francisco and there was a fire at the port and basically the building it was in burnt down.

The owner of Cal Auto, the team owner, called up the race team and said, Got a car for you.

If you want it, come and get it.

And basically gave it to him was it was is totaled, it was destroyed and all four tires were burned and the gas tank exploded and things like that.

So we repaired it from there and made a race car out of it.

As far as building a race car, he didn't need to fix the interior, fix the weather.

You know, he didn't need to fix all that stuff and, you know, strip it out, put some new wiring and paint it.

They had a row of engines lined up, ready to go transmissions, all, you know, all the spare parts to put another car together.

So they did it was a is a 1967 car and they had it on the track in 67.

I'm born in 1934 and my grandfather owned two sprint cars at the time.

My father owned repair shops and he did all the work on all the cars.

I started racing when I was in high school.

I started running the jalopies type races, actually, road racing I've been in since this car was new.

With this car, they acquired enough points to qualify for the Nationals.

I borrowed a pick up to go to Daytona.

They towed it all the way to Daytona and finished fourth in the nation with it in 1967.

Then Dad drove it in 68 in the northwest region and got the first D production car in the northwest region.

By 69, 70 more modern cars were coming in and it basically was it wasn't competitive anymore, but it was an obsolete race car.

This sat for like 20 years in the garage after I quit.

So it sat in the garage until I got my driver's license.

And when I was in high school, I basically purchased it from my dad and it became my car.

I put it back on the street, I put a windshield on it, had to change the doors so I could put door glass in it.

But other than that, it was basically the still full race drive train and I drove it on the street for a very short period of time because it was just an awful street car.

It was just awful.

It it liked one pedal position, whether it be the gas or the brakes.

And that was all the way down, kind of went in the garage and got covered up with blankets and it sat for some period of time.

It had been sitting for about 15 years.

So I got it running again and I went through the whole car.

We prepared it for racing and the next season I signed up as a novice and started racing and I was 45 years old then.

It wasn't until vintage racing came about that there was a new place for it to run.

It's always been a family affair, and that's the nicest thing about this type of racing.

I've enjoyed every minute of it since for the past 40 years I've been an industrial waste inspector and currently am the pretreatment manager for a city north of Seattle.

I actually got started in this after I crashed my car 1516 years ago, and while I was putting it back together, I started flagging four so other people could race and discovered I have just as much fun.

I hang out with the same people and I spend a heck of a lot less money.

So I've been doing it ever since.

Sports car racing was really, really big in the fifties and sixties and in the seventies.

It really is a concern that the graying of corner marshals and other volunteers we do have some younger people out here and we're doing our best to get as many people out here as we can.

If you want to watch race cars all day, as close as you can get to without being in the driver's seat and spending money come out here.

And we'd love to have you back in the fifties.

I watched all of these cars race.

My name is Ken Lyons.

I think the first job I had was crowd control in the parking lot.

I never saw the race.

I knew the guys that parceled out the positions.

So I became an observer here, just like men were busy taking care of something else or they were short or whatever.

Sometimes I grabbed the flags, but I wasn't really a flag man.

But I loved New Jersey because I had the phone and I knew what was going on all over the track.

And in those days they don't do it here.

We rotated after each race and a car would come along and take us to the next corner.

So during the day we could do all the corner.

I was involved in sports car racing.

I drove a portion those days started with a bug.

They had all bug racers.

The first one had 44 entrants.

Can you imagine Riverside with 44 runs, being in the pack was more fun, passing cars, going back and forth.

That was always more fun than being in a world later in a fourth I was passing a few people, then there was a woman racer called Betty Chute.

She had this push for normal, and so I made a deal with her borrowing the car.

If anything happened to it, I paid for it.

I paid part of the maintenance, the entry fee and all of that.

You know, she let me drive that in a couple of races.

We both got to drive.

We were both short of money.

I had less and treated, but we both got to do it.

Car Oh, we all have cars.

But sometimes cars are special to Old Yeller to which I knew the owner and builder when they got the car.

Very famous, driven by Dan Gurney and Carol Shelby and and Bob Van Doren.

And it's a famous Buick powered special that beat all the Ferraris and Maseratis.

Oh, yeah.

There was interesting stretches inside.

Like there's two cars that you can close your eyes and listen to the garage and know when Old Yeller was going by, there was a driver and he was the villain.

We just started doing damage.

He was the bad guy.

Like in professional wrestling, you could close your eyes.

And when they were doing the parade lap, you could hear the boos when you went and all yeller and he was your strategy car was the only time that you could hear your eyes and know where the cars are.

So Ken Lane is a dear friend from many years ago because he approached me because his favorite car was the Old Yeller, which is the car that we raised in last year.

He said to me, Ernie, I had a dream.

The best birthday present you could give me my 100th birthday would be to sit in Old Yeller and have my picture taken.

And he's just you're not only going to sit in Old Yeller, you're going to ride in it.

And so we just the three parade lap, it was the most brilliant thing that happened, that parade lap.

And as we went around, the flags came out of their stations and they cheered at the track for Ken.

And that was his hundredth birthday wish.

And he said to me, Ernie, pinch me.

And there's always a thrill riding in the car that I watched back in the 50, were grateful and were humbled that this gentleman is sustaining the motorsport and he's one part of the whole fabric of motorsport.

And to me it was not racing to win.

It was racing for the fun of it.