He pushes the race car to the limit at Laguna Seca.
Every year as part of Monterey Car Week, Laguna Seca plays host for the Rolex Monterey Motorsports Reunion. It’s a great way to see historic race cars navigating one of the more challenging tracks around. Organizers don’t let just any old vehicle in, but Paul Newman’s Porsche 935 is most definitely special, and so it was included this year. None other than Adam Carolla got to drive the car and he took it for a spin right into the dirt. Watch below.
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This incident was during the Group 5A Final Race, which is for 1973 to 1981 FIA, IMSA, GT, GTX, and AAGT cars. Carolla was going through Turn 4 on lap 7 when the back end got away from him, which is one of the challenging things about pushing a Porsche to its limits. From there the car spun a few times before coming to a rest in the dirt, thankfully without so much as brushing up against the wall.
You could say Carolla got lucky, but the onboard camera shows he did everything right. You can hear he let up off the accelerator and took his hands off the steering wheel, allowing the car to slow itself instead of fighting the motion. Sure, this put him behind other racers, but wrecking out in glorious fashion would have been far worse. Driving this classic air-cooled Porsche 911 like he stole it wouldn’t have ended well.
The value of Newman’s Porsche 935 is no doubt unbelievably high at this point, with estimates pointing at $7 million. Some even questioned the wisdom of racing it on the notorious tricky Laguna Seca racetrack. Thankfully, the car was in good hands and Carolla was able to finish the race without incident.
Carolla is yet another comedian who loves to collect cars. He also is obviously not half bad at racing them. Most notably, Carolla owns more of Paul Newman’s former race cars than anyone else, like this 935.
