What I Learned Renting An RV For A Weekend Adventure At The Race Track

Approaching the entrance to the first tunnel section of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, I was fully focused. With its narrow entrance and only a double yellow separating our southbound lane from the fast-moving 18-wheelers in the northbound lane, I knew the tunnel was going to be a snug fit for the 28-foot Winnebago motorhome I was piloting.

My traveling companions, drunk off their asses, were blissfully unaware of anything happening outside our motorized tin can. As we rolled out of the University of Bridgeport campus earlier that morning all those years ago, the beer keg in the shower stall was already tapped. Being that I was one of only two onboard legally old enough to drive the RV, the other eight dudes had no other responsibility beyond partying. I dropped the beast in drive, and slowly pulled away from the curb, accompanied by a semi-hearty send-off from a small group of well-wishers. These were friends, who I believe were seriously considering this might be the last time they would ever see us. The RV’s roof was stacked with our luggage, so there was ample space for the boys to hang out in the rear half and hopefully, not distract me.

If you are not familiar with a 1979 Winnebago Chieftain, just picture the Fleetwood Bounder from Breaking Bad and you won’t be far off. Ribbed flat sides with aluminum sandwich construction and a fiberglass roof. Very little styling or aero consideration, never mind even a hint of structural rigidity.

As we entered the tunnel entrance, there was a thunderously loud bang and the entire rig shook violently, throwing loose items from the various cubbies and surfaces, and knocking a couple of the guys off their feet. I looked over to the right thinking it was the outside mirror. But the mirror was still intact and in position. We quickly came to the realization that the last guy to get back in from our pit stop had left the folding step down. That metal step, ripped from our RV, was now resting at the entrance to the tunnel. As it turned out, that was only the beginning of the trauma and abuse our Winnie would experience over the next eight days on our Spring Break road trip to Fort Lauderdale. As you would expect, our hefty deposit wasn’t returned.

Over the ensuing years since I left college, I’ve driven a number of RVs, including an underpowered Class C rental unit built on a Fiat chassis that two friends and I took to the 2015 24 Hours of Le Mans. But my favorite was the 1977 GMC resto-mod motorhome built by AI Design. Not only did that rig look cool as hell inside and out, it drove like a dream. I want one so bad, but my recreational vehicle budget is lacking a couple of zeros.

Last winter, my son Ben and I came to the mutual decision that a summer road trip was in order to mark the milestone birthdays we were both celebrating in 2024. He loves motorsports, and had never been to Watkins Glen, so we picked the June IMSA Six-Hour weekend. Ben wanted to camp at the track, as we had done at Mid-Ohio a few years ago for INDYCAR. My job, in addition to paying the tab, was to find a suitable RV for rent.

The First Step Was Deciding What We Needed

My checklist was short: two beds, A/C, toilet and shower. With just the two of us, we didn’t need anything too large, so I was hoping to find a van-based unit. As you likely know from reading the great coverage Mercedes does, drivable RVs are categorized by class. The largest truck-based motorhomes, aka coaches, are Class A. Van conversions, or camper vans, are Class B. And those built on a cab and chassis, or heavy-duty van cutaway like a Ford E-350E-450, are Class C.

I began with a Google search for RV rentals near me. After quickly discounting those commercial rental units with massive graphics on the sides featuring southwest landscapes that scream “I am an amateur and have no fucking clue what I’m doing!,” I landed on Outdoorsy. Think of Outdoorsy as a cross between Turo and VRBO in that you rent an RV from a private owner. Co-founded by Jennifer Young and Jeff Cavins in 2015, Outdoorsy has clearly resonated with adventure seekers as the company topped $3 billion in gross revenue in 2024. According to Outdoorsy spokesperson Lydia Davey, Outdoorsy currently has over 50,000 unique rental units available across the US and Canada. Its biggest competitor is RVShare.

Fairfield County, Connecticut is not exactly the RV capital of America, so I figured my choices would be limited. After plugging in my dates, and my home address into the Outdoorsy site, I did find a reasonable number of options within an hour’s drive.

The choices covered a wide range of size and prices, with most units falling into the Class C category. I quickly zeroed in on a 2021 Winnebago (who says you can’t go home again) Solis 59PX Class B in Greenwich, only about 45 minutes away. The feature that intrigued me right from the start was the cool pop-up rooftop sleeping area, not dissimilar from a VW Vanagon Westfalia. The 59PX is based on the RAM Promaster 3500 extended chassis van, and sleeps four, with two in the conventional rear Murphy bed and two in the pop-up roof bed. With this setup, Ben and I would each have our own spacious sleeping quarters.

Powered by the Pentastar VVT 3.6, the RAM’s 280 horsepower seemed adequate, yet not too thirsty. Built on the longer wheelbase chassis, the Solis 59PX had a rear gear garage behind the main bed which can hold two bikes, or as we used it for, our 10×10 popup canopy and a cooler. Having logged dozens of miles walking around the Watkins Glen infield and outfield over the years, I knew we needed some wheels to get around the facility more easily. So, we added my Thule T2 Pro XT stand-up rack into the RAM’s 2-inch receiver hitch to bring a couple of bikes.

The reservation process on Outdoorsy is very simple. On their home page, you select the location you want to rent from, your dates, the number of guests, and the general type of RV you are looking for (drive, tow or set-up) and hit search. The next page will give you photos of the range of RVs within your search criteria and most helpfully, a map of locations. Click on a listing and you’ll get a full description, photos, amenities, rules and policies, and any available add-ons. Every rental comes with mandatory insurance and 24/7 roadside assistance and support.

Less than ten minutes after I filled in all my info and pushed send on my request for the Solis, I received a confirmation from Bruno, the RV’s owner, that my request was accepted. Easy peasy. Leading up to the rental dates, I had a few questions and Bruno was always very responsive. He even said I could leave my car in his driveway during the rental. Nice guy.

The agreed-upon rate was $290 a night for four nights, to which was added a $25 prep fee and a $224.75 vehicle protection package/insurance, which was non-negotiable. With the extra miles I was planning to put on the RV there was also an added mileage fee of $31.85.

As with anything you book online, see if there’s a discount code somewhere. In our case we got almost $100 off, bringing the grand total to $1,576.39 for four doors or a little under $400 a night.

Going from Connecticut to Watkins Glen and back we used about $155.78 worth of fuel.

Picking Up The RV And The Art Of Overpacking

When the morning of the pickup arrived, Bruno took Ben and me through the basics, including how to open the roof, turn on the generator, drain the grey water tank, and empty the cassette toilet.
Having gotten the general gist of how things work we did an exterior walk around, signed some papers and hit the road.

Our first stop was back home to load up all our crap. What seemed like a spacious interior, soon seemed very cramped. But we stored everything as best we could, said goodbye to Ben’s mom (aka my better half), and headed north to Watkins Glen.

The drive was uneventful at first, but a weird vibration popped up at anything above 58 mph. It felt like a rear wheel out of balance and was uncomfortable enough that I mostly kept the speed under that mark. After a couple of hours, we made a pit stop for a restroom break and a bite to eat.

Back on the road, the vibration was mysteriously, and thankfully, gone and I was able to keep pace with traffic. We finally arrived at the track and pulled into our designated entrance. After a quick inspection of our rig by the Glen security staff, we were sent on our way to find our spot.

Using An RV And The One Thing I Wish We’d Remembered

Watkins Glen makes it easy to book a camping spot with their online reservation system, which we did months before the race weekend to have ample choices. Choosing tranquility and a great vantage point over all-night partying, I selected a spot in the outfield adjacent to The Boot. After driving around a bit, we finally located our spot, angled the van with its nose toward the track, and settled in for the weekend. We were well-stocked with food, but I wanted Ben to get the full Watkins Glen experience, so we headed over to the historic Seneca Lodge.

For more than half a century, racers and hunters alike have been frequenting this iconic watering hole and restaurant. The lively bar features decades of racing memorabilia and arrows shot into the back wall by championship archers. As always, the food was excellent and we paired our burgers and fries with some really good beers from the Lodge’s own brewery. That would be our last proper meal for the next four days.

Since we were camped near the public showers, Ben decided he would take advantage of those proper facilities. I on the other hand, wanted to get my money’s worth. Once we figured out how to turn on the water heater (probably should have paid more attention to Bruno’s walk-through), I gave it a go. With a shower stall barely larger than the toilet, it was an exercise in gymnastics trying to hose off and lather up within the tight confines. Especially with the fairly steep grade we were parked on. Which brings me to the one thing I would do differently. Watkins Glen’s camping areas are undulating and our van was not equipped with anything to level it out. The tilt caused things to slide off counters, and the shower water to escape out the bathroom door. On my next RV rental, I’ll make sure we have jacks and/or ramps.

Over the course of the very hot weekend, we met some great people, both fans and racers, saw some top shelf racing and most importantly, had some very cherished father/son time. We even managed to get in a hike up the falls at Watkins Glen State Park. Sunday afternoon finally rolled around, we took down our pop-up, lowered the roof, packed everything away as best as possible, loaded the bikes, and set out to find the onsite RV septic dump.

Dumping the grey water was relatively easy so I tackled that first. You attach one end of the included hose to the RV, stick the other end into the ground dump opening, and then open the valve. When it came to the cassette toilet, we had wisely limited its use to pee only, so the dumping was drama and odor-free.

On the five-hour drive home, we were exhausted and grimy, yet also happy… glad to have shared another memorable weekend with each other. The racing was great, but my favorite times were the evenings, after the track went cold, peddling our bikes through the campground and meeting fellow motorsports fans. Life moves pretty fast. But it’s possible to slow it down and enjoy the company of your loved ones. I’m lucky to have kids who still want to hang out with their dad.

A Quick Word From Ben, AKA The Guy Who Slept Up Top

As much as motorsport is in my blood (my first trip to a race was when my mom was seven months pregnant with me), the scope of my in-real-life track experience is relatively limited. Outside of frequent day trips to Lime Rock, the only other track I’d been to was Mid-Ohio for INDYCAR a few years ago. For that trip, rather than staying at a hotel nearby and trekking in each day, we made a weekend of it and rented an RV trackside on the back straight. And this is not the first time we’d done this kind of camping experience together either; we’d gone to Bonnaroo a decade ago and camped out in the Tennessee heat. My dad and I love doing this kind of stuff together, roughing it in the name of immersion.

In planning our trip this year, Watkins Glen was an obvious choice for me: I had never been in person but was intimately familiar with the track from my time in Forza Motorsport; Dad knew the facilities well from his time attending and working races there; it wasn’t that far a drive; and we both wanted to go to IMSA during its current golden age of prototype racing.

I deferred to his considerable experience in picking a camping spot. He suggested the outside of the Boot – plenty of track action while being slightly afield from the all-night partiers. He turned out to be right. Our lot was in between the Heel and the Toe, a few rows back from the track edge and on a slight rise, with a perfect view of Turn 6 as it goes downhill in the background. And since I was sleeping in the pop-up area, that was my view each morning out the front zip-up window.

Walking the paddock and exploring the behind-the-scenes is always my favorite part of a race weekend, seeing the logistics and choreography of a race team operating at peak speed and efficiency, crews taking cars apart piece by piece and putting them back together. You’re really confronted with how immensely complicated and finely tuned a race car is, and simultaneously how simple and brutal it is. All that complex aero, up close, is just bodywork, metal and carbon fiber that’s been worked to hell, beaten back into place, and held together with duct tape and prayers.

The GTPs are somehow both bigger and smaller than you expect, low to the ground and narrow but stretching farther back than you think they should. They all sound so distinctive in real life, both up close and from a distance–it becomes easy to pick out the high-pitched turbo whine of the Porsche 963 vs the deeper BMW M Hybrid V8. (Much ink has been spilled about the Cadillac V-Series.R’s thunderous NA V8, but holy baloney does that thing sound like the devil himself. It makes your entire chest cavity vibrate.)

And there are plenty of different trackside vantage points to take in the sights and sounds at a track like Watkins Glen. As much as I’ve driven the track virtually, it’s hard to get a sense of just how dramatic the elevation changes are until you’re there in person–the sweeping downhill of the Chute, the sudden uphill into Turn 9. We spent plenty of time near our home base by the Boot (especially the Heel, a primo passing opportunity) but also ventured all around the track, to the Bus Stop and the grandstand at Turns 10 and 11 before the main straight. The experience of hunkering down just behind the iconic blue WGI Armco with 30 touring cars thundering up the Esses is one I won’t soon forget. I loved all our different viewing spots and felt like I could have soaked in the whole weekend from any one of them. But photojournalistic needs prevailed, and we hopped around from spot to spot.

All The Awesome Stuff In The Infield

At the end of the day, when on-track action was wrapped up, we wandered the campground. Our neck of the woods, the outfield, was a little quieter and more tame than the raucous infield, but still had plenty of activity as dusk turned into night.

Kids were running around and playing chicken with bikes. One guy was ripping down the dirt road with a tiny RC dirt bike, attracting a small crowd. People wrenching on their cars. Barbecues, string lights, beer coolers, bonfires.

In addition to plenty of modern vans, RVs, travel trailers, and truck campers, what struck me was how many vintage campers there were. Everything from old pickups with pop-up tents to RVs to campers to enormous motor homes.

A mid-80s Class C Lazy Daze built on a Chevy Van. A gargantuan 90s Class A Vogue coach with a custom paint job. These aren’t bandwagon IMSA fans, these are folks who come here annually, maybe even travel around from race to race. We had an immediate shared language with everyone at the campground, a common interest in watching fast cars go fast. Car spotting wasn’t bad either. (A modified 300ZX! Two C4 Vettes! And a couple of Lotus Esprits!)

I Wish My Dad, The Experienced RVer, Had Remembered The Ramps

As the weekend went on, we came to understand two challenges with our setup. For one, our site was not perfectly level, so our van leaned to the right and downhill in park. Everything slid off the countertop. I had to sleep at a diagonal to prevent myself from rolling into the interior side of the tent–or worse, down the hole. It was only after we started strolling around the campsite and saw RV after RV with jacks and planks for leveling that we realized we didn’t have either of those. Whether that was an oversight on the part of our rental agreement or something we should have prepared for ahead of time remains to be seen. We ended up just dealing with it all weekend. Sleeping diagonally let me stretch out my legs, at least.

[Mercedes’s note: Some people with camper vans just park on level ground. Others use plastic lift blocks that they drive onto for leveling. The van’s owner might have never needed leveling blocks if all the van does is go to manicured campgrounds. But I am deeply amused that our guys here committed to just dealing with everything being at an angle. – MS]

The second was the heat. It was wicked hot, stretching into the 90s during the day. The van was an oasis during downtime when we could crank the air conditioning, but nighttime was another story. The main level retained most of the cool air and stayed relatively comfortable overnight. Due to the laws of thermodynamics, my pop-up sleeping area got hot and stayed hot, inescapably so. Even unzipping the windows for cross-ventilation wasn’t enough. I had to sleep on top of the sheets, mostly nude.

Let me be clear: I wouldn’t call those issues good, but this is all part of the experience. If we wanted a perfect night’s sleep in a cushy (and flat) bed with flawless temperature control, we’d stay at a hotel in town. But then we’d need to drive in every morning with the other throngs of spectators, find parking, trek to the grandstands or wherever we were watching the action for the day, all the while knowing in the back of our minds that we’d need to make the whole journey in reverse at the end of the day. Do we really want to get there that early for the support series? Where do we go if we want some downtime? Should we skip out early to beat the traffic?

We didn’t have to deal with any of that because our home was the track. We woke up with the sounds of engines blaring in the distance, generators firing up around us, team flags rippling in the wind. We saw some of every session from every series–Mustang Challenge, Lamborghini Super Trofeo, Porsche Carrera Cup, both IMSA SportsCars and Michelin Pilot Challenge, all of it. We were there, living and breathing it all weekend long, getting dirty and sweaty with thousands of other people doing the exact same thing and knowing we were all there because we shared this passion. There’s something innocently romantic about the whole venture: loving a thing so much you want to spend as much time as possible in it and around it.

Of course, I’m writing this months later, when the experience has turned rose-colored in my memory and I’ve forgotten the visceral nature of the camping experience, the sleepless nights, and the sheer quantity of perspiration. Maybe that’s why it took us a half a decade to do another camping-at-a-race-weekend adventure, just enough time for us to forget the annoyances and feel the magnetic pull of the track again. As for the next one, I hope it doesn’t take another five years.

All photos Roger and Ben Garbow for The Autopian unless otherwise noted