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.