La Carrera Panamericana Is the Experience of a Racing Lifetime

• La Carrera Panamericana is a historic race across Mexico open to all manner of sports and GT cars. It runs this year from October 14-20.

• There are timed stages run at full speed on great roads, connected by transit stages.

• It's truly one of the great motorsports events you can run.

Seventy years ago, as the rest of the world still crawled out of the shambles of WWII and urbanization was just starting to replace agrarian lifestyles for much of the world’s population, Mexico completed the Panamerican Highway. The engineering edifice ran the entire length of the country, 2135 miles from Tuxtla Gutierrez at the Guatemalan border in the south to the Rio Grande in Nuevo Laredo in the north where Mexico becomes Texas. It is difficult to underestimate the great satisfaction Mexicans took in the completion of this engineering feat. The whole country swelled with pride from the achievement, and so they held a race. Not just parts of the road, or tribute parades in various cities through which the road ran, but an actual pedal-to-the-metal race that ran the entire 2135 miles, all up the country from south to north. The race was called La Carrera Panamericana, and it ran from 1950 to 1954.

The world's great automakers scrambled to participate and threw everything they had at it in hopes of winning. Ferrari and Mercedes sent their best F1 drivers and their fastest cars. Porsche still calls its best cars “Carreras” in honor of the Panamericana. The greatest drivers of the day participated: Americans Dan Gurney, Phil Hill, Carroll Shelby, and Bobby Unser; European pilotes Alberto Ascari, Louis Chiron, Juan Manuel Fangio, and Hans Hermann all drove.

Imagine doing something like that today. It would be impossible, wouldn’t it? But back then they did it, with the help of the army for crowd control and with the support of seemingly the entire country—there were no web commenters or NIMBY screamers then, it was seen as one’s patriotic duty to support this great celebration to show the world that Mexico had joined the rest of the developed nations with a transportation infrastructure that would allow commerce, tourism, and just simply road trips for everyone.

Like all great things, that original race eventually came to an end, not the least because it was so dangerous. Spectators and drivers had been killed in this and other great open-road races around the globe in Argentina, Cuba, and even the great Mille Miglia in Italy. Plus, a change of administrations in Mexico found a new presidente whose enthusiasm for racing was just not the same as the previous leader.

The event sat dormant for 34 years until a racer named Eduardo “Lalo” Leon, who had been racing off-road in the Baja 1000 and other desert stomps, decided to try to revive it. Leon’s father had taken him to the original race as a boy, and an uncle had actually participated in La Carrera. It had a profound effect on the young Leon. So, together with some racer friends, they revived it.

“Everyone said, ‘You’re crazy. That doesn’t make sense. You can’t do it,” said Eduardo’s daughter Karen Leon, who runs the race today.