THE CLASSIC CAR OUTING

The Classic Car Outing is a morning in mid to late September, a drive out from Bridgehampton in members’ own cars: the route given only at the start, the cars sent off at intervals, anyone without a car put in a passenger seat, and lunch at the end of it.

It exists because Bridgehampton raced on its own roads before it raced on a circuit, and the roads are still there.

The Road Races

Road races were run on the public roads round the hamlet from 1915, over a rectangle of about three miles: along Montauk Highway, left onto Halsey Lane, left onto Pauls Lane, left onto Ocean Boulevard and left again onto Montauk Highway. The first was won by Maynard Parsons, driving a Pope-Toledo.

The races were revived in 1949 on a new course, run clockwise from Ocean Road, right onto Sagaponack Road, right onto Sagaponack Main Street and right onto Bridge Lane. George Huntoon won the first in an Alfa Romeo 8C; Tom Cole won in 1950 and again in 1951, in an Allard, and Bill Spear in 1953, in a Ferrari 340MM. Some years drew more than 180 entrants and forty thousand spectators. They ended in 1953, when a driver, Bob Wilder, was killed in practice and three spectators were hurt in the race; with a boy killed among the crowd at Watkins Glen the year before, it led the State of New York to ban racing on public roads.

In 1957 a permanent road course opened, 2.850 miles with thirteen turns, designed by Grumman engineers on more than five hundred acres of sandy hills and dales above Peconic Bay; Stirling Moss called its first combination of turns the most challenging in North America. It held the World Sportscar Championship, NASCAR’s Grand National and the Trans-Am, and in 1966 the first race of the Can-Am. Paul Newman first went round it in 1967, as Mario Andretti’s passenger in a Mustang 427. The last major professional race there was a Trans-Am, in June 1970, in a driving rainstorm. The neighbours complained of the noise, the town limited it in 1983, the races ended in 1997 and the club meets in 1998. Bob Rubin, who had taken the circuit over in 1981, made it a golf course, The Bridge, where the Millstone Turn and the Chevron Bridge survive and chequered flags mark each of the eighteen holes.

The history is kept on the roads. The Bridgehampton Road Rally was begun by a local enthusiast, Jeffrey Vogel, with the Bridgehampton Historical Society, now the Bridgehampton Museum, to “commemorate and keep alive the hamlet’s racing history”: some sixty miles in about three hours, starting and finishing at the museum’s Corwith grounds, for cars of 1960 and before.

The Morning

A morning drive out from Bridgehampton, in members’ own cars.

The route is given only at the start, and the cars leave at intervals.

Anyone without a car is put in a passenger seat.

The drive ends at lunch.

What Is Asked

Country attire. Nothing is published for a morning on country roads, and the Court dresses to the register of the drive and the lunch after it.

Nobody is pitched at lunch.

The Places

The number of places and the sum are stated in the invitation.

The Bridge Concours is held on the old circuit in the same weeks.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.