Riding the Dragon Tail
For three days each autumn, a quiet stretch of US 129 in the Great Smoky Mountains becomes the most concentrated gathering of Porsches in North America. The Rennsport Dragon Rally is not a Porsche-sponsored event — it has no official tie to Stuttgart — yet collectors fly in from Vancouver, Houston and Munich to be there.
The headline road, the Tail of the Dragon, is eleven miles of two-lane blacktop with three hundred and eighteen corners. There are no driveways, no cross-streets and very few places to get out of the way. The corners come at the rate of one every fifty-five metres for almost twenty minutes.
A weekend like this resets the calibration. Numbers on a spec sheet stop meaning anything when the road is this narrow.
My son Marvin and I drove a 1969 911S, the most modest car at the meet by a wide margin. The 911 was in its element here — patient with the road and unhurried with the steering. The Cayman GT4 ahead of us was visibly faster. The 2.7 RS three cars back was not.
The cars that win the day on a road like this are the ones the owner trusts — and the ones the owner does not mind throwing into a corner without thinking about resale. That filter eliminates a lot of cars in the modern market.
We will be back in 2027. The 911S will be back too. The list of cars I would rather drive on the Dragon, after this weekend, is short — and most of them live within a hundred miles of our studio.