1985 Porsche 911 Carrera: Find Your Private Road

If you’re going the quick way to Monterey from Los Angeles, you pretty much take the same route that actor James Dean did in 1955, when he decided to break-in his new Porsche 550 Spyder on the road while headed to the sports car races in Salinas. You just head up the Central Valley, then turn left on CA Highway 46.

You can even find yourself at Blackwell’s Corner, the very spot where Dean made his last stop before he crashed at an intersection just on the far side of the hills to the west. A brand-new gas station/market/restaurant has been built and there are large figures of James Dean painted by artist John Cerney to mark the spot.

Once you make it to Paso Robles, now more noted for wineries than cattle, you head north on U.S. 101 toward Monterey. If you’re just going right to Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, you keep going until you hit CA Hwy 68 in Salinas and then go left. But if you’re looking for a 45-mile reward for 300 miles of transportation hell, you turn off long before this at Greenfield. Take the exit for El Camino Real and head west on Elm Avenue/County Road 16. It takes you west through vineyards, although these were sugar beets a hundred years ago when writer John Steinbeck worked in the fields.

A one-lane bridge takes you across the Arroyo Seco River and you bear west on Arroyo Seco Road/County Road 16. There are more cattle ranches turned into vineyards until you bear right onto County Road 16, which shortly becomes Carmel Valley Road.

This is really just a narrow ranch road flanked by hills covered in grass and coastal oaks. The locals use it to go to and from Monterey, so it’s best to be careful morning and evenings.

A Porsche 911 is about as much car as you can handle back here, and you need to have good hand discipline on the steering wheel even then (about which, more another time). There are plenty of crashes here on the weekends, and I once came around a corner to find a Mustang upside down on its roof next to the road, the engine stone cold, no one around and the birds twittering in the stillness.

There‘s hardly a straightaway in 30 miles, so the 911 gives you a serious workout. The tires skip across the neglected pavement and the car shivers so loudly across the cattle guards that you’re sure a weld will split. Since the engine revs so freely, the car will do most of the road in third gear, but there are some tight corners down along the creek where the lichen hangs from the overhanging oaks and you’ll be in second. It's not a road that's fast, particularly long, or even scenic in a conventionl sense, but I've been coming here for a long time with a lot of different cars and motorcycles. 

Finally you break out into Carmel Valley, which is far enough inland from Carmel to cut down on the riff-raff but still close enough to offer some trick places to eat or stay. To get to Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, you go over the ridge at Laureles Grade. Predictably enough, we found plenty of like-minded guys at the track in parking set aside for Porsches, where Porsche Cars North America had set up Porscheplatz, a tent with a big screen television tuned to the race broadcast.

PCNA hosted us at Bernardus Lodge, pretty much the nicest place to be in all of Monterey, and we discovered evdience of some like-minded enthusiasts in the parking lot as you can see. The valet guys were pretty taken with the Black Plague, maybe because Bernardus is owned by Ben (Bernardus) Pon, Jr., the son of the Dutchman who was instrumental in bringing the Volkswagen Beetle to America.

Pon Jr. was quite successful as a Porsche racer in the 1960s , and he recorded top finishes in his Porsche 904 GTS. You can see pictures from his racing career in Wickets, one of the restaurants at Bernardus. The locals say that if you meet a Porsche Panamera on Carmel Valley Road that seems in a particular hurry, it’s probably Ben Pon, who thinks of the road at his doorstep as his own private Targa Florio.

Not everybody has Carmel Valley Road at the doorstep, of course. But that’s exactly the point. When you’re driving the right car, some roads are worth the trouble to find. Just one drive on the right road in the right car can make a whole year of pock-marked city streets, commute hours without air-conditioning and expensive counseling sessions with your Porsche guy totally worth the trouble. It helps you remember who you are, why you like to drive, and the kind of car that makes it possible.

If a drive like this doesn’t do it for you, then maybe you should get something practical to drive. Probably you can find your own way when you drive to the grocery store.   

Michael Jordan, Executive Editor, Edmunds.com @ 120,086 miles