We Toured America's Greatest Roads in Our Inaugural Smoky 600
I don't know if we've ever had an Experiences tour sell out as fast as our inaugural Smoky 600—crossing Kentucky and Tennessee from the National Corvette Museum race track to the mountain passes of the Tail of the Dragon and beyond. Maybe it was the bourbon tasting. Maybe it was the promise that our guests would hit the best driving roads in the country.
Day 1: National Corvette Museum to Louisville, Kentucky
The wise move, if you're ever planning a road trip plus track day, is get the track day out of the way first and do the road driving second. It saves you the jitters of anticipation. Nobody over-drives on the street trying to prep themselves. Everyone drives as hard as they want, for as long as they want, and then they are free to enjoy the view from there.
We ran full track laps on NCM's surprisingly undulating road course, we tortured tires on the autocross, and then we watched as none other than IndyCar legend James Hinchcliffe made us all look slow with some demonstration laps and ride-alongs. Our sponsor for the track day, McLaren, also brought out three Arturas along. Our guests got a chance to test-drive these hybrid super sports cars and see what they're about. They're more car than most people will ever experience.
We also got a tour of the National Corvette Museum itself, just across the road. This is the site of the infamous Corvette Sinkhole, when the earth of Kentucky opened up and tried to swallow the pride of Bowling Green, America's sports car. But the Corvette cannot be defeated. The museum was rebuilt, and is once again stocked with the most incredible pieces of Corvette history you can find. I'd never seen any of the prototype Wankel rotary Corvettes before, and it was a treat to see a cutaway model of a first-year 'Vette. We talk about the C8 as being a sea change for the Corvette, going mid-engine and taking on a kind of European style, but the original Corvette was a straight six with triple carbs!
Our drive from there to Louisville was quick and easy, rounding out with dinner and a fireside chat at the combination museum/hotel 21c with the mayor of Hinchtown, talking about the demands and danger of being a top driver in IndyCar, and what life is like beyond that horizon.
Day 2 - Louisville to Lexington
So many people signed up for the Smoky 600 that we had to split our drivers into three groups. I was in charge of leading the third, a quirky collection of some of the most desirable cars on the planet. I was in charge of guiding everything from an Aston Martin DBS Volante, to a father-son duo in a VF-supercharged E92 M3, to a very gung-ho pair in a Panamera Turbo, to a Shelby GT350, to a Mercedes SLS. Corvettes—a Callaway and a handful of Z06s from various years—rounded out most of the rest. Other groups had Ferraris, a 600+ horsepower Dinan E39 M5, a vintage racing couple in a Jag XKR, and a host of Porsches, including another father and son in a 550 Spyder 50th Anniversary Edition Porsche Boxster S from 2004.
Editor-in-chief Mike Guy led his group in a McLaren Artura, editor-at-large Matt Farah led his group in a new Panamera Turbo S E-Hybrid (he was gunning to average 30 mpg across the whole 500-odd mile route), and editor-at-large AJ Baime played caboose in a new turbo manual Nissan Z. I was in a frankly stunning Lexus IS 500 F Sport Performance, deep water blue over a blood red leather interior. The car is rated at 472 hp, pushing around 3900 pounds. It felt lighter, though, with an engine that prioritized high revs more than low-end torque. More like 300 hp against 3000 lbs, or something like it on these twisting, rising, falling back roads. We followed the ridges of the low mountains here, farms and fields and forests falling away to our either side. To say it was good driving would be to underplay its beauty. To say it was beautiful would be to underplay how good these roads were to drive.
In Lexington, our guests parked their cars and hopped on a bus we'd chartered, taking them to three of the best bourbon distilleries a person can view. They went to Woodford Reserve, they went to Whiskey Thief, and they went to Buffalo Trace. Hinchcliffe, as it turns out, is something of a bourbon aficionado, and was more than a little jealous that he had to leave the trip before getting a chance to hit up Buffalo Trace with us. I think it was his favorite.
Day 3: Lexington to Knoxville
I'll take this moment to explain the fundamental logistics of this trip. Every car got its own route book, with printed turn-by-turn directions and illustrated maps for every leg of our journey. In the past, this would have been all that our groups would have been able to use to stay together. Now, however, we used Rallista, a navigation app that lets you plot custom routes and share them with a group of drivers. Google maps lets you put together a complicated route, but it only allows you ten custom points, and if you try and share it among multiple people, it reverts back to the fastest possible route, not the one you actually wanted. We were looking for joy, not speed.
Rallista lets you make a perfect driving route and lets you share it along. It's invaluable, and there'd be no other way to guide all of our cars the long way round to Durham's Pit BBQ outside the Daniel Boone National Forest, out in the mountains just above the Tennessee border. These are the southern reaches of the Appalachians, mountains so old that they predate the Atlantic Ocean itself. Their northern reaches are in Scotland. Once higher than the Himalayas, now they are worn down and low, their passes old and tight and twisting along rivers, not wide glacier valleys like you find in the Sierras, for instance. The driving we did that day will stay in my mind for a good long time, nothing short of magical.
Our lunch spot for barbecue was divine. We bought out the whole place and cleared out their smokers, which run low and slow over the whole night. I had the smoked chicken, the best I have ever had. To find Durham's Pit BBQ you have to find your way down a long, industrial side road. I spoke with the owner, who explained it. If we were on a major intersection, he said, we'd sell out a day's BBQ before the morning was over.
Our guests arrived at The Oliver Hotel in Knoxville and ate at the Oliver Royale downstairs, maybe the best place to eat in a town not short of good restaurants. We all liked Knoxville, and could have stayed longer, but something was looming in our windshield: the Tail.
Day 4: Knoxville to the Tail of the Dragon, and On
Matt Farah is not short of experience with group riding on the road, going back to the Gumball Rallies of days past. (His facial hair of the time is also worth a view.) He may have slightly put the fear of god into our group at our dinner the night before, stressing Canyon Etiquette. Pull off if you see a car approaching in your rear view. Wait patiently if you come across a slow car ahead. Do not cross the double yellow. Do not cross the double yellow. Do not cross the double yellow, you will get someone killed.
If the Tail of the Dragon has a sister road, it's the Nürburgring Nordschleife in Germany. Both were set up, built, and paved in the Twenties and Thirties. Both are situated in rural, green mountains. But the Nordschleife is a closed toll road. You pay to enter, and you find yourself on what's realistically a race track, with corner workers, signals, and safety staff. The Tail of the Dragon? There are a couple cops who hang out along the route and the safety is up to you. Don't crash!
We staggered our more eager drivers at one-minute intervals so that they wouldn't catch up with anyone ahead or behind, and the rest of us formed a conga line, touring the views of the road, twistier than any other you might find. The Tail is next to a national park, and there's little development along it. No mailboxes, no driveways. There are just oaks and pines and cliffs and streams, off-camber turns and hairpins. It is stunning. I mean that—if you have never driven it, you will be stunned.
We had a relaxed lunch at Tapoco Tavern, one of the few places one even can stop near the Tail, a beautiful and rustic lodge built over river rapids. For most of our group, this was their end. Those with early flights left from here.
But for those of us with a minute to spare, we continued on, Farah leading the way, up the Cherohala Skyway. Where the Tail is tight, the Skyway is open. For drivers (as opposed to motorcycle riders) it is a better road than the Tail, and its sweeping vistas even more breathtaking. To drive this road, a Mercedes SLS in my rear view, Matt Farah ahead, is not something I will soon forget.
This year's Smoky 600 may be over, but there are plenty of other Road & Track Experiences coming up. Check out our other opportunities, like our upcoming Hudson Quattrocento rally in New York and Connecticut, here.
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