What a sight it was. Seven Model A Fords, wheezy icons of the American road of 80 years ago, putt-putted round and round the otherwise empty track at Infineon Raceway in Sonoma a week ago.

Diving the lead Model A at a zippy 35 mph, Napa’s Howard Goines, age 88, clutched the steering wheel as if he might never let go.

Goines, a Model A buff extraordinaire, had restored four of the cars and helped with the reconstruction of the other three.

“He’s the guru,” Randy Stegman, a fellow Model A hobbyist, said.

Goines drove a 1929 Model A pickup that he had whipped together from rusty parts. Riding shotgun, his grandson, Jordan Heath, was ready to steer or brake if Goines’ extremities failed him.

On a track more used to NASCAR racing machines roaring at 125 mph, Goines tootled around once, twice, then a third time before pulling into the pit.

“Honey, you did good,” Elsie Goines, his wife of 67 years, said. Turning to an onlooker, she repeated her praise. “He did a good job, didn’t he?”

Looking thoroughly exhausted, Goines rested in the driver’s seat. The first lap had been “a little awkward,” he said. All those twists and turns. He wasn’t sure he could maintain control.

Once or twice, grandson Heath had reached for the emergency brake — “just in case,” Goines said — but his help wasn’t needed. Goines had managed to power through Infineon’s road course all by himself.

On the A team

The inspiration for Howard Goines Day at Infineon was the grandson, who acquired his love of cars while hanging around his granddad’s garage in Alamo. Goines taught him how to drive a stick shift ... on a Model A, of course.

Goines, who moved to Napa 11 years ago to be near his daughter, Paula Belden, said he had been getting along decently until early last summer. His three-year effort to restore the Model A pickup was in the home stretch.

On the Fourth of July, he was clobbered by congestive heart failure, he said. Added to his prostate and bone cancer, the new health crisis was too much to handle. Work on the car stopped.

“I was working great on this and then it came to an end,” Goines said. “I’m just hanging in there,” he said of recent times.

Seeing his grandfather’s predicament, Heath recruited his granddad’s buddies to finish the restoration. Some 200 hours later, Goines’ dark red beauty was upholstered, equipped with wheels and ready to hit the road.

The car was ready, but Goines wasn’t. If he was going to drive the Model A, he needed a street with plenty of wiggle room.

Heath brainstormed for a place where his granddad could drive without red lights, stop signs or oncoming cars. The more he thought about it, all roads led to Infineon.

When he approached the raceway, the track immediately said ‘yes.’ Infineon had hosted more than one “Make-a-Wish” event where a dying child meets a racing driver, but never anything like this, raceway publicist Jennifer Imbimbo said.

Press releases went out. On Howard Goines’ big day, two newspapers and a TV station showed up.

Goines was kept in the dark. “Jordan said we’re going out and let you drive the pickup. I had no idea where,” he said.

When his grandson pulled into Infineon, “I was so stunned. I didn’t know what was going on,” he said.

Goines was surrounded by more than a dozen relatives and Model A friends. They beamed like kids on Christmas morning at the sight of Goines going into the driver’s seat.

The event was surely sentimental, but bantering was not left out of the equation. “He’s not a car nut. He’s the loose nut behind the wheel,” joked one of Goines’ car buddies.

Goines responded in kind. “I feel great sitting here. I feel like a 50-year-old,” he said.

Because his legs don’t work so well, Goines had help getting in and out of the Model A. When the ride was over, he conducted interviews and posed for five minutes of picture-taking.

“It means a lot to both of us just because we’ve been so close. I’ve spent so much of my life around him,” Heath said afterward. “He was emotional a couple of times, but I think he’s having a lot of fun.”

The afterglow didn’t last long. That weekend Goines passed out while standing up and spent two nights in the hospital.

Contacted after his return home, Goines spoke contentedly of the morning he put his Model A through its paces at Infineon.

The Model A was always the car for him, he said. Not the Model T that came before or the Model B that came after. All his car passion went into the Model A. Henry Ford made almost five million of them between 1927 and 1931, he said.

Why the Model A?

It all comes down to the year of his birth, 1921, he said. When he was young, the Model A was new. They bonded for a lifetime.