A pair of student docents from the Maine Classic Car Museum are participating in this year’s edition of The Great Race acting as navigators in a 1961 Cadillac. We will be following their progress on the ClassicCars.com Journal. Here is their first post from day one.
Day 1: The Adventure Begins
We are Max Flynn and Cotton Schlaver, two high school students from Maine getting ready for the adventure of our life participating in the great race 2024. Max is 18, a rising senior at Greeley High School, and Cotton is 16, a rising senior at Biddeford High School, and we are docents at the Maine Classic Car Museum in Arundel.
The Great Race is a 2,300 mile rally with over 150 classic cars and race teams competing. We are part of a special student group called the X-Cup Challenge.
Over the next ten days, we will bring you daily reports of our rally preparation and experiences each leg from the starting line in Owensboro, Kentucky, to the finish line in our home state, Maine.
What better way to get ready for the Great Race than to see some great cars. We flew into Nashville today to start our epic journey. First stop, the Lane Motor Museum. The Curator of Collections, Derek Moore, welcomed us to this amazing collection of micro cars and cars from around the world. We saw so many cars we had never heard of before.
Our favorites? It was hard to choose, but for Max it was the 1991 Lancia Delta Integrale, because of its rally history. It is a rare car that you never see in the U.S. For Cotton, it was the 1947 Tatra T-87 saloon, because it opened a new realm of information about the importance of this Czechoslovakian company to automotive history.
We are joined on this trip by the Maine Classic Car Museum General Manager, Tim Stentiford, and longtime museum volunteer, Bram Starr. We also want to give a big shout out to the RPM Foundation. Nick Ellis and his team provided us with a generous scholarship that allowed us to take part in the X-Cup Challenge, the journey of our lives. We’re making our way towards the starting line in Kentucky and will have lots more to report to you in the coming days. Meanwhile, put the Lane Motor Museum on your bucket list of must-see museums. We loved it.
Stay tuned for part two.
Good luck, boys! A cool experience.