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The Great Race:Vintage car heads to the 100th anniversary of the "Peking to Paris" race
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And the race is on; local racers rev up in China
They have started their engines. And they're off.
Ventura mechanic Bill Erickson and his racing sidekick, Steve Dole of Pacific Grove, are motoring across China today in a 1925 Buick Roadster they spent nine months restoring.
The pair were scheduled to be flagged away along with 134 other vintage automobiles on Sunday (Beijing is 15 hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time).
Set at the Great Wall of China near Beijing, the celebration was to include fireworks and crowds.
This is the first leg of the 35-day "Peking to Paris" rally, which concludes in Paris on June 30.
The race celebrates the 100th anniversary of the original "Peking to Paris" race in 1907, which was held to show the prowess of the then-brand new horseless carriages. The race was the basis for the 1965 movie "The Great Race."
Dole and Erickson, who call themselves "Team Yakkity Yak," arrived in Beijing (formerly Peking) on Tuesday. On Friday, they picked up their Buick from a ship that had carried it over the Pacific Ocean.
Tonight, they are staying in Datong, China, home of the 1,500-year-old Buddhist garottes. Over the next few days, they will cross the Gobi Desert in Southern Mongolia. Some cities will provide hotels, but there's not much in the way of accommodations in the Gobi. "Originally, we were to be in yurts in the Gobi, but now it turns out we will be camping in our tents, which I thought were for emergency use only," Dole wrote in an e-mail from Beijing. "My tent, a plastic tube, says, 'Attach one end of the rope to the car door handle and tie the other end to a nearby tree.' Guess it wasn't intended for DESERT use!"
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