Mace and The Great Race

Almost 90 years after Route 66 was born, the Queen City again played host to classic car history June 20 when 113 racers made Springfield the first of eight overnight stops on a 2,000-mile, cross-country rally.

Dubbed the 2015 Hemmings Motor News Great Race, Springfield is represented by businessmen Guy and Colby Mace, aka The Bomb Squad. The name stems from their cherry red 1932 Ford Roadster, affectionately called The Bomb from its second life as a rebuilt racer in the mid-1950s.

“I don’t know if that’s a good connotation or a bad connotation,” said Guy Mace, a classic car collector running in his 10th Great Race.

The Maces, partners in Baron Venture Capital LLC, and competing racers started in Kirkwood en route to the Santa Monica Pier on the Pacific Coast. Routed through seven states and mostly along the original Route 66, a $50,000 prize awaits the winner June 28. The total purse is $150,000.

Rules of the road
Nine days seems like plenty of time to drive from the Gateway to the West to the City of Angels using modern technology and highways, but unlike the fictional Cannonball Run, the Great Race is less about speed and more about the art of driving. These cars average 10-45 mph on secondary paved roads.

“It’s called a precision, timed endurance rally,” Mace said, adding there are a few proverbial curves in the track to keep things interesting. For one, no cars manufactured after 1972, necessitating a mechanic and repair trailer following close behind.

Springfieldian David Eslick, who worked with Mace as co-chairman of the event’s organizing committee, said roughly 400 drivers, navigators and mechanics are participating from the United States, Europe and Japan.

The Bomb also came by its name honestly during Guy’s first outing with the Great Race, when a sturdy but difficult-to-cool flathead V-8 engine burned up – twice – necessitating a complete engine change.

“We’ve driven through the desert twice and it is horrible on a car because you’ve got very high temperatures and drive for miles with no break. The car has to be very durable,” Mace said. “That’s the true testament of an old car.”

Each driving crew aims to hit up to eight checkpoints a day in perfect timing. Without the aid of smartphones or GPS, team navigators are given packets containing pictures of road signs from which they must glean not only accurate directions, but also appropriate speeds. Being even one second early or late through a race checkpoint earns the team a penalty point.

“The only thing you can have in your car is a stopwatch and a precalibrated speedometer,” Mace said of a $1,000 piece of equipment attached to the dashboard that the team calibrates every morning with a 15-30 minute interstate highway run at 50 mph.

“It’s calibrated exactly in conformance with the rally master’s clock, because if you’re off 1 mile an hour on the speedometer that can put you 10 to 15 seconds off for the day,” he added.

Fittingly, a perfect leg earns the team an “ace,” represented by two decals, one for each side of the car, about 90 of which adorn The Bomb’s hood. When they reach the Santa Monica Pier, the car with the lowest overall score takes the prize.

Colby Mace has served as team navigator on about seven races. He said The Bomb Squad’s best finish was seventh place, but each year the team typically places between 10th and 20th out of over 100 racers.

“If we crack the top 10, we’ll be happy with it,” he said.

The Mace team paid $5,000 to enter.

Rally cry
For Eslick, organizing the event was not without challenges.

First came the $10,000 fee the committee paid Hemmings to secure an overnight stop in Springfield, plus another $4,000 to Springfield’s Hy-Vee for a fried chicken dinner to feed the race’s entourage at the Discovery Center of Springfield. With the added cost of printing banners and flyers, he estimated the total budget for putting on the event at around $17,000.

“This whole thing has been a challenge to organize, but Springfield loves car shows,” Eslick said. “The average crowd at one of these stops is 10,000 people.”

He said a Cape Girardeau committee spent $18,000 when the Great Race stopped there in 2013. The Springfield funds were earned through the sale of ambassador sponsorships wherein contributors escort the vehicle from the finish line at the Route 66 Springfield Visitor’s Center to the racecar and trailer parking area near Plaza Realty and Management Services Inc.

“We started out with that in our budget, but we ended up not needing quite that much, because there was never any intent to have any money left,” Eslick said.

He said the company had 11 contributors at the top level of $1,000 each, with another $5,000 from donations in the $100 to $500 range. Top-level contributors included Central Bank and Trust, History Museum on the Square, Ozarks Antique Auto Club, Don Vance Auto Group and Best Western Route 66 Rail Haven.

Gordon Elliott, owner of Elliot Lodging Ltd., which manages 13 city hotels including Rail Haven, said as of June 16 about 50 of the Route 66 landmark property’s 92 rooms were booked by racers. He estimated those bookings tally $4,000 and expected Rail Haven, originally constructed in 1937, to be at capacity by Saturday. “I don’t know that we get any more revenue because we’re usually full on weekends, but we’re glad to fill up for something like that, which is so important to the route and the city,” Elliott said.[[In-content Ad]]