The rumble of a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air mingled with applause Thursday morning as the lead car in the Great Race pulled into the Dillons parking lot at Sixth Street and Wakarusa Drive for a pit stop.

“We’ve been racing from Jacksonville, Florida. We’ll end in Monterey, California,” said Jon Burton, a driver for the Lawrence High School Auto Club’s team in the Great Race. “This is really just the half-way point.”

The race is a 4,000 mile cross-country vintage motorsports competition. Contestants are allowed to drive only automobiles manufactured in or before 1959. They began the race Saturday in Florida and are scheduled to reach the finish line July 3.

At the beginning of each day, drivers are given a set of detailed instructions to a specific destination. Travel time is pre-determined and each driver’s goal is to arrive at the destination in that exact amount of time. For each second a car is off schedule, one penalty point is added to its team score. A perfect score is zero.

No electronic devices are allowed in any Great Race car. Odometers are removed or covered. To keep track of their miles, drivers may only use a watch, clock, speedometer, and pencil and paper.

“You have to do a lot of math,” said Ruth Wortman, also a member of the Lawrence team. “That part is really tough.”

The race course consists of challenging back roads. Drivers travel on Interstate highways only when entering and leaving cities.

Drivers from across the country have taken part in the Great Race for the past 21 years. The Lawrence entry includes students from both of the city’s public high schools.

“We’re all team members from LHS and Free State. Some are graduates, and some are underclassmen,” Burton said. “We are all part of an automotive club. That’s how we got involved in this whole thing.”

Antique cars sit parked in a parking lot near Sixth Street and Wakarusa Drive. The cars were among those making a pit stop Thursday in Lawrence on their way to Monterey, Calif., in the cross-country Great Race.

The teenagers entered the competition under a division of the Great Race called the X Cup.

“It’s kind of a division for young people, like, high schools and youth groups. We compete for scholarship money,” said Dane Morris, a Lawrence team driver.

The team is one of only three student teams to enter the race. It is competing for $10,000 in scholarship funds.

“That’s what we want. There are a lot of colleges that we want to go to that are very expensive,” Wortman said. “I’m planning on pursuing automotive anything. I want to open up a shop here in Lawrence when I get out of college.”

Great Race participants Jeff Stumb (driver) and his wife, Karen, from Hampton Cove, Ala., speed down Sixth Street in their 1929 Ford Model A Speedster. The car is one of about 120 antique models participating in the transnational race from Florida to California. Racers early Thursday pulled into Lawrence for a pit stop at Sixth Street and Wakarusa Drive.

The Great Race has given Wortman the chance to network with a group of professionals in the field she wants to get into.

“There are a lot of opportunities out here,” Wortman said. “You meet people, and if they like you and if they want to hire you then — boom! — you’ve got a job.”

Wortman has a lot in common with her team members, but she is set apart from the rest as the group’s only female.

“It’s kind of tough because you have to yell at the boys all the time and keep them on track,” she said. “We’re going city to city, and they’re (checking out the girls), and I’m like, ‘Come on! We have work to do!'”

6News video: Great Race pit stop Students gear up for race across U.S. (6-10-04) Great Race Web site

And it is work.

“It’s difficult. Our speedometer likes to bounce around and it makes it a little bit harder for us,” Morris said. “But it’s a blast. It’s an experience you can’t get anywhere else.”

Teammate Brett Yulich agreed: “I’m having the time of my life.”