It was time for my favorite annual event: The Mitty at Road Atlanta. As usual I parked my car in the infield, broke out the camera and sunscreen, grabbed a valve cover I polished for a friend, and headed down to the paddock. My friend wasn’t at his trailer, but he had posted his guard dog to protect everything.

While there are the usual people that come to race every year, there are always unusual and special cars in the paddock area.
The Nissan GTP-ZX was one of the fastest cars on the track. No one in its class was even close. In its racing history, the Nissan GTP-ZX was the first car able to defeat the legendary Porsche 962 for the IMSA GTP championship.

This is the third time I’ve seen the Cheetah at The Mitty. The Cheetah is a front mid-engine car with Chevrolet power designed and produced in the 60s to compete with another legendary car, the Shelby Cobra.
Of course, while some people say race cars run on high octane fuel, the truth is that they run on money and plenty of it. This Porsche 918 Spyder was parked next to several cars participating in The Mitty. Between the haulers, RVs and nice cars, there is a lot of money at the track.

I’m always on the lookout for Datsuns, though. Greg Ira brought his car up from Florida to run against classic Corvettes, Camaros, Mustangs and 911s. He was mixing it up with them pretty well, too.

There were plenty of 510s on hand, too. Unfortunately one was lost for the weekend when Bob Leitzinger experienced a mechanical failure coming down the front straight, heading into Turn 1. I was at the end of the front straight at the time and saw him zip past, fly over the gravel trap and slam into the tire wall. While the front clip was much shorter than stock, the roll cage kept the passenger compartment intact. Bob was extracted from the car and taken to a local hospital where he is recovering.
After I finished roaming through the paddock, I returned to infield to spend the afternoon. I set up a chair in the shade of a tree near the bridge and watched the cars fly down from the bridge to turn 12 before getting on the front stretch. I was later joined by a couple of friends, and we swapped car stories during the pauses on the track. I tried my luck at taking photos of the cars coming down from the bridge and going into turn 12, but there wasn’t quiet enough light to give me a fast enough shutter speed, so lots of photos ended up deleted. I had better luck on Saturday, but it will take a while to upload all of those photos. Meanwhile, click on the Datsun 510 above to get to the 400+ photos I posted from Friday.