The green flag dropped for the 2017 Great Race this past Saturday, June 24th in Jacksonville, FL, and our own Robert E. Knoer, Esq. was at the starting line to see them off.. Competitors are making their way north and will finish up in Traverse City, MI this Sunday. The goal of the race is accuracy; drivers try to make it from checkpoint to checkpoint in a precise time. All the cars are from before 1972, and so is the navigation: no cell phones or GPS allowed. Just ask the #RollingAnalog team, a pair of millennials who hadn’t even been born by the time the last car in the race was manufactured. We encourage you to follow the action online at the Great Race website.

But it won’t be long until the 2018 Great Race, which will start right here in Buffalo at the Buffalo Transportation Pierce-Arrow Museum. 2018 will be a very special running of the Great Race, because it will be the 110th anniversary of the original Great Race. In 1908, as the automobile industry was first picking up speed, drivers from Russia, France, Italy, and the United States met in Times Square. Over the next 169 days, they raced from New York City to San Francisco, then crossed the Pacific by ship and hit the road again in Siberia. They traversed all of Asia and most of Europe before arriving at the finish line in Paris. The winner was an American, George Schuster, who accomplished the feat behind the wheel of a 1907 Thomas Flyer built right here in Buffalo.

Buffalo has a proud history of automobile manufacturing, with both Thomas Motor Company and Pierce-Arrow Motor Car operating here at the turn of the 20th century. The Buffalo Transportation Pierce-Arrow Museum offers an expansive collection of cars and other memorabilia from Buffalo’s past as well as from the automobile industry generally. Mr. Knoer is a founding trustee of the museum, and The Knoer Group, PLLC has served as counsel to the museum since 1996.