Recently, I had the opportunity to attend the Monaco Grand Prix Historics, and I took an old friend with me. Not a person, but a watch I received after winning the 25 Hours of Thunderhill three consecutive years. It’s more than a timepiece. It carries memories that go back even further, to sitting beside my father, watching early F1 races together on television.
Monaco has a way of giving you something in return.
I came home with new memories. Watching a good friend, Doug Mockett, race again, a man with whom I shared the road while racing in La Carrera Panamericana. Seeing historic cars from decades past run alongside machines that reflect where the sport is today. The sound of engines that don’t apologize, the crowds pressed tight to the circuit, the yachts in the harbor, and everything else that makes that place unlike anywhere else in racing.
There are faster races. There are louder races. There are certainly safer races.
But there is nothing, anywhere in the world, quite like watching history come alive at the Monaco Historics.
The first thing you notice isn’t the cars. It’s the setting. The same narrow ribbon of pavement that has tested the best drivers of the world for generations, the harbor on one side, stone walls on the other, and absolutely no room for error. You don’t ease into Monaco. You either respect it immediately, or it reminds you why you should.
At the Monaco Historic Grand Prix, the cars aren’t museum pieces. They’re alive. They move. They slide. They demand attention in a way modern machines rarely do. These are cars that require a driver’s hands, feet, and nerve to be fully engaged every second of every lap.
Standing trackside at Circuit de Monaco, you hear it before you see it. Not the muted whir of modern hybrid systems, but the raw, mechanical wail of engines designed solely to make lots of power. It’s sharp, it’s immediate, and it echoes off the buildings like a reminder that racing once lived a little closer to the edge.
What strikes you most is how little separates brilliance from disaster here. Monaco has never been forgiving, and it hasn’t softened with time. Watching these drivers hustle vintage machines through corners like Mirabeau or the exit of the tunnel, you realize quickly that this isn’t nostalgia. This is skill, right now, in real time.
The margin is still inches. The consequences are still real. And maybe that’s the difference.
Modern racing, for all its precision and advancement, has created space. Runoff areas, data systems, layers of safety that allow drivers to explore the limit with a margin for recovery. That’s not to diminish today’s drivers, because modern cars demand an entirely different level of precision, reflex, and technical understanding than the machines of earlier eras. At the Monaco Historics, that margin feels smaller. The cars move more. The drivers correct more. You can see it, not just in lap times, but in body language, in the way a car twitches under braking or dances slightly under throttle. It reminds you what driving used to demand.
There is also something quietly powerful about the continuity of it all. The same streets. The same corners. Different eras, but the same challenge. You begin to understand that Monaco isn’t just a race track. It’s a measuring stick, one that doesn’t change to accommodate the times. Drivers have to meet it where it is.
For someone who has spent a lifetime around racing, that’s what stays with me. Not just the cars, or the setting, or even the history, but the honesty of it. There’s no hiding here. No excess space, no second chances. Just a driver, a machine, and a strip of pavement that has never cared who you are.
I was fortunate to experience it in a way I never could have imagined years ago. Because I raced for years with NASA, I was able to fulfill a true appreciation of a long-held dream of being there in person. And the truth is, it meant more to me now than it ever could have back then. After years behind the wheel, after understanding what it really takes to drive at the limit, you don’t just watch Monaco, you feel it. Every correction, every decision, every inch of risk becomes real in a way it never does from a distance.
And maybe that’s why it matters. Because for a few laps, in a place that has seen everything, racing still looks exactly the way it did when it first captured all of us. Fast. Beautiful. And a bit dangerous.
