Great Race to make stop June 25 in Cape

Steve Hedke, who lives north of Los Angeles, and his wife, Janet, first took part in The Great Race in 1999 and have been back every year since. Hedke said the precision race that includes about 100 vintage cars requires great concentration and teamwork. That precision can pay off. The winner takes home $50,000.

This year's Great Race will follow the Mississippi River from St. Paul, Minn., to Mobile, Ala. Drivers will arrive in Cape Girardeau on June 25 for the fourth leg of the nine-day event. Hedke said cars start the race at one-minute intervals. He said the trick is to perform required maneuvers during the course of the race and maintain that interval. Each car has a speedometer but no odometer. No computers or calculators are allowed. Navigators make all calculations with a pencil and paper.

The Hedkes, with Steve driving and Janet navigating, were named rookies of the year in 1999 when they entered with their 1957 Triumph TR-3. Because older cars receive a larger handicap, giving teams a better chance at a higher score, the couple soon switched to a 1929 Ford hot rod. This year, for the first time, the husband-and-wife team will be in different cars. Steve Hedke will drive a yellow, 1916 Hudson Speedster, while his wife will be the navigator in a 1940 Cadillac.

Steve Hedke provided an example of a required maneuver: coming upon a rural stop sign at 30 mph.

"You have to calculate how much time you lose through that stop," he said. "This is the navigator's job. The navigator knows how much time it takes to go from 30 to zero and from zero to 30."

Hedke said the time is made up by driving faster.

"If you're going down a straight road and doing 35 mph, the next instruction may be to slow to 25 mph at the 30 mph sign," he said. "It's the drivers job to make each maneuver -- acceleration, stops and turns -- exactly the same every time. The driver has no mental capacity for anything other than driving the car, staring at the speedometer, [keeping the speed] exactly as it should be."

Hedke said the speedometers are so precise the navigator may tell him to slow down one-half mph.

There are all manner of unplanned obstacles.

"Once you master the basics, there will be a tractor in the road. You're going 30 mph and the tractor is going 10 mph," he said. "It can be a school bus with its lights on," even a funeral procession or spectators in the road who want to talk to drivers.

The challenge, each time, is to get back to the one-minute interval. Because the obstacles are not planned, a funeral procession may only affect three cars of the 100 in the race. Hedke said even rain may only affect 15 to 20 cars.

"We're driving a car with no fenders and half a top. It's the worst when it rains," he laughed. "I guess you have to be kind of a strange person to find something like that fun."

Hedke said the camaraderie among the drivers, as well as blocks of smiling, waving people when drivers pull into a town, makes it all worthwhile. While drivers come from all parts of the country and walks of life, he said they're all of a like mind. He called the drivers part of a "subset of a subset" of vintage car hobbyists.

"Some of these folks are pretty up there in age," Hedke said. "A lot of these people have their own collections. Rather than just sit and look at it, they get out there in the heat and the mud and drive the cars the way they're supposed to be."

He said the majority of drivers and navigators are between 50 and 70 years old, although some are in their 80s.

"But there are kids, high school kids, who enter a car. We have kids from parents who have run the rally," Hedke said.

There are at least three Missouri drivers entered. Mark Hyman of St. Louis will be driving a green 1931 Bentley; veteran driver Guy Mace of Springfield, Mo., will again take part; and rookie Brad Epple, 57, of Jefferson City, Mo., will be driving a 1965 Corvette.

"It's something we've always wanted to do," Epple said, on his way back from a motorcycle trip to New Mexico. "One of our bucket list items was to run The Great Race."

Epple's brother, Tracy, son, Daniel, and a friend, James Goode, all of Jefferson City, will help him. He said The Great Race sent an instructional video. As rookies, he'll go to St. Paul a day early for a daylong class.

Epple said he's looking forward to it. He said the other three members of his team will take turns as drivers and navigators.

"It is a challenge," he said, speaking by phone from Greensburg, Kan. "The navigator's going to be working very hard."

Hedke said he and his wife are a rare breed.

"When you talk about teams, we're a husband and wife team," he said. "There are not a lot of husband-wife teams, because not a lot of husband-wife teams can stand the tension. What makes a team work, there has to be a chemistry between them; you can screw up and make a mistake, but you can suck it up and go on."

The stories from the road are part of the fun. Hedke said they've seen drivers became so angry, navigators have been left in the field, the driver parks the car somewhere and flies home. Other times, months of work ends in minutes when an axle or some other important part breaks and the team's race is over. But Hedke said it's all worth it.

"We have seen more of America than many Americans get a chance to, and we get to see it from an old car," he said. "We get to see parts of the country the average American doesn't -- flyover country. All these great people, all these great cities. That's great fun. We love this. I like hearing and seeing these cars out on the road."

Danny Essner, a member of River City Rodders, helped bring The Great Race to Cape Girardeau. At Friday's Cape Girardeau Area Chamber of Commerce's First Friday Coffee, he described what race day will be like here. He said cars will begin coming down North Kingshighway shortly before 5 p.m., turning onto Broadway to head downtown. When all the cars get downtown, "there will be somewhere between 90 and 95 cars parked on Main Street, all the way to William Street."

In addition, 120 to 125 local classic cars will be downtown.

"What's amazing, they'll take a 100-year-old car and keep it running from St. Paul to Mobile," Essner said. "We want to roll out the red carpet for these guys."

jpulliam@semissourian.com

388-3646

Pertinent address:

Main Street, Cape Girardeau, Mo.