Cronoscalata at Camucia-Cortona

I am behind on blog posts AGAIN! This past week has been very busy--lots of projects and lots of socializing. Here is what we did on Saturday, April 20.

Dom found notice of a cronoscalata--a hill climb--for vintage cars in one of his magazines devoted to historic cars. The start was in the town of Camucia and the finish up in Cortona at the top of the hill. If Cortona sounds familiar it is because it is where Frances Mayes of Under the Tuscan Sun has her villa.

There was not a lot of sun in evidence last Saturday but it never did rain on us. The drive from Capannori to Camucia takes about two hours. The race was actually on Sunday but the Saturday practice time trials started at 3:30 pm. So we left at about 11 am and arrived with plenty of time to inspect the cars in the pits (paddock), grab some lunch and then walk a ways up the hill to watch the cars go by.

 This photo was taken near the start and shows the town of Cortona on top of the hill. The road switchbacked up the hill providing a challenging run.

 We started out in the pits looking at all the cars. The nice thing about this type of small event is there are no tickets and you can get really close to the vehicles. As you can see from the above photo, this type of racing is favored by a more mature set of drivers.

 There was a wide variety of vehicles. Some of them were stock cars that were modified for hill climbs but the above looked like it had been made from flattened tin cans. It was definitely not stock.

 Thee were small budget operations...

 ...and big budget operations. There were even "rent-a-racer" trucks. Very tempting!

  I believe Dom said all the vehicles had to be pre-197?. There were some very sleek cars...

 ...and some that were on the boxy side.

 There were definite contrasts in the pits.

 Fiat 500s are a favorite race car here in Italy. These were waiting to line up for the start.

 The pits were a lot like a poor man's Concorso d'Eleganza.

 Dom and I liked this obviously homemade trailer.

 This was the oldest vehicle in the bunch--an Alfa Romeo 6C2300 according to the program (also free!)

 We had porchetta panini from the always present food wagon. The porchetta was pretty good but nowhere near as good as the porchetta I bought from one of the market stalls here in Capannori on Friday. We might have a standard Friday lunch from now on.

 Dom eating and looking.

 After we ate we found the start line. There were quite a few people waiting for the cars to begin running.

 There were all sorts of emergency personnel including these firemen standing ready with their extinguishers.

 Here is the actual starting line with the timing equipment. 

 You can see another big fire extinguisher here. Dom said if there are going to be problems they are usually occur at the start. The course corner workers all had fire extinguishers too.

 We climbed up on a bank near one of the early turns to watch the cars go by. There were a number of other people nearby.

 It is tough to tell from the previous picture but we could actually see all the way to the starting line.

 The view of the countryside was great. The golden fields are canola (rapeseed).

 Then the cars started running. There were over 300 listed in the program but a few did not run.

 There were all sorts of cars including some that looked like they should be doing LeMans type racing.

 I always like the red cars. :-)

 This is the tin can car.

This is the old Alfa.

 In the distance we could see Lake Trasimeno...

...and Monte Amiato (I think) in the far distance. Obviously I kept getting distracted by the view.

We watched all of the first run and then walked back down to the car. It was only about 5 pm so we drove up the hill to Cortona (by another route obviously) and strolled around for a while. You can probably guess that we had a little gelato. Finally we headed back to Capannori and arrived at about 8 pm. In spite of little sunshine it was a great day out.