AUBURN - Before cars took to the restored Circle M Ranch Speedway for laps at Saturday's 5th annual racing reunion, flagman Galen Koller stressed in the drivers' meeting that he would point a black flag at anyone who exceeded a safe speed and would eject anyone who got the flag twice.
Only one driver received a pass from that rule.
And that guy has one arm.
Hamburg's Craig Whitmoyer, a four-time sportsman champion at Big Diamond Speedway since 2000, turned up the rpms on car owner Dave Dissinger's sail-paneled modified because he was giving rides to selected people in the unique two-seated car.
Though Whitmoyer's own 2014 racing season has been derailed by three malfunctioning engines that have temporarily sidelined him, he was all business Saturday as he negotiated the sweeping turns of Circle M Ranch.
"I don't really go by a marker (to enter the turn). I never really did," Whitmoyer said. "I go by feel."
That feel is achieved by just one hand as his right arm was amputated more than two decades ago - before he began to race.
"That's what a lot of other people ask. 'How do you race with one hand'? I don't know. I didn't race with two," Whitmoyer said.
Yet, even without rivals Saturday, Whitmoyer still achieved truly competitive speed, continuing a pattern he began when the reunion started four years ago.
Others brought restored race cars to Circle M Ranch, but this year's event offered special moments.
Manheim's Brenda Steffy had not raced since she stopped her micro sprint career at Clyde Martin Memorial Speedway in Newmanstown three years ago.
Courtesy of a chance meeting with Auburn's Doug Dalton at an offseason racing show in Reading, she was a woman on a mission in Dalton's restored Studebaker early sprint car Saturday.
She said that, as she entered the first turn, she looked skyward to honor her late father Carl, the Mid-Season Championship race winner in 1965 at Grandview Speedway.
"He passed away in October, the most important person in my life," she said, "so I promised him on his deathbed at hospice that I'd get into a car ... at least one more time. And it would be dedicated to him. So this was it."
Reading's Tom Orth was attending his second Circle M Ranch reunion and said his laps in his 1936 restored modified fulfill a lifelong dream to drive at the Auburn track.
"This was something I always wanted to do when I was younger, and I never could afford it," he said about the sport. "Then I didn't have the time. Now I'm 60 years old, so I better do it now before it's too late."
Racing was always in Merlin Miller's blood. Saturday, the 61-year-old was driving laps on the track where his father Ray used to be the flagman and a driver when the track operated from 1955-58 as a speedway.
Saturday's event drew cars of several types.
One driver, Blandon's Bruce Young, was driving the actual chassis that he had competed 31 years earlier. After ending his career in 1983, he sold his equipment and learned years later someone had bought the chassis.
"I went down and looked at it and it was the last car that ran at Reading (Fairgrounds Speedway) that I had," Young said. "He said, 'I'll sell it for what I paid for it.'
"I had the nosepiece, the roof and the trunk, so I had to find everything else."
Young then acquired much of the remaining equipment from the man to whom he had sold it.
Learning such connections made one of the property's owners, Stacey Mates Corondi, smile.
Saturday's event, which also drew cars associated with the Eastern Museum of Motor Racing in Adams County, drew enough people that the Auburn Fire Company, which operated concessions, ran out of food.
Corondi said the reunion will remain an annual event to commemorate racing history, but any other plans for the facility are unlikely.
"We've had a lot of inquiries about trying to start it back up (as a speedway)," she said. "But it won't happen."