One of our readers favourite posts from the archives are the photos we took of Lightning McQueen and Sally Carrera when they visited the NASCAR Speed Park at Vaughan Mills Mall. We’ve taken these pics and added them to a nice new gallery, rather than the old Flickr page. Enjoy.

Edit: With the new version of Wordpress, we can now offer the gallery right here!

After a full three hours of running around yesterday afternoon, we arrived at the NASCAR Speedpark at Vaughan Mills. We actually reached the mall about 2 minutes after the display ended, which turned out to be a good thing, as we got to see a little bit more than most people did. Just like the Camaro concept that Alex wrote about, these things are runners!

Sally Carrera really is based on a Porsche chassis, with stock appearing brakes & rear end body work. The engine sounds like a stock flat six. Lightning Mcqueen is a “real” little cartoon race car, complete with that race car sound, or so the kids thought. In reality, it sounds like an untuned small block, breathing through mildly muffled side pipes, but at least it gets the idea across. If you look closely, you can even see a full roll cage inside. The racing slicks are cartoonishly large, so I’m not sure if it would be able to do much other than muddle around a parking lot.

We got to see both cars loaded into Mack the transport truck and the kids thought it was pretty cool that they travelled in a real race car hauler. The fact that my kids know what a real race car hauler looks like just shows how well I’ve corrupted them.

The lady who was representing the Toronto based promo company heard that we had driven a while to get there and graciously offered to mail us a set of free movie passes. When she asked how we heard about the display, I told her about The Garage and that I had seen it on the Pixar blog. She then said she would also be sending off some swag for the kids. The Garage is hardly a media outlet, but we’re not proud…bring on the payola!! Besides, it’s all for the kids right?

See more pics of Lightning, Sally and Mac in the gallery

The Cars Tour is coming to the Nascar Speedpark at Vaughn Mills Mall in the Toronto area today from 3 till 7. It looks like we’ll leave work a bit early & load the kids into the car to check out the cool little beasts. The stupid thing is that I’m probably more excited than the kids will be!

I’ll post more pics tonight.