West Chester’s Love Affair with Fast Cars
At sunset on a twisty road south of West Chester, Evan Wawrzyniak’s electric blue Porsche Cayman is carving turns so fast and so tight it takes my breath away. Safely and completely within the speed limit, of course, the car leaps over a small rise. My squeal causes Evan to interrupt his calm narrative about the inner workings of the car. “Don’t worry,” he reassures me, tapping the cover of the engine, which sits inches from my left elbow. “This is a mid-engine car. It was made for roads like this.”
Although Evan’s pedigree is impressive—his grandfather, “Cannonball” Yates, was a professional racer and his father spent a lifetime in the Detroit auto industry—that’s not the reason I’m in the car this evening. Since I began probing the depths of West Chester’s auto racing scene, I’ve discovered the town’s long love affair with fast cars. We’ve got a photography studio dedicated to documenting the stunning beauty of race cars, the engineer who designed a number of game-changing innovations that led to Indy 500 victories in the 1970s, and a service facility that keeps the local Porsche racing community safe and on the cutting edge of technology.
