Comedian Jay Leno has found his way there. So has world champion driver Mario Andretti.
"We're really David among the Goliaths," says Simeone, who is competing against England's Jaguar Heritage Collection and National Motor Museum, Germany's Automuseum Prototyp, and the Peterson Automotive Museum in Los Angeles.
Compared with the others, Simeone's museum is an upstart, open only since 2008, in a no-frills former engine-remanufacturing plant on Norwitch Drive.
"We'd like to be on the Parkway," says museum spokesman Harry Hurst, a former racing photographer. "But they might object to the noise."
The fourth Saturday of each month, Simeone takes some of his 66 cars out for a run on the foundation's three acres of blacktop. Despite spanning nearly a century of racing history, these are working cars, not replicas. They're loud. They smell. They're gorgeous.
Just one family was touring the museum when I dropped by one afternoon last week to check out the collection. One way to appreciate its message is to stand along a wall of 10 cars that raced at LeMans, starting with the Howe blue 1933 Alfa Romeo and ending with the violet and green 1970 Porsche nicknamed "The Hippie."
To Simeone, the line of racers speaks to the evolutionary force of competition. "Wheels got smaller, but tires got fatter, the engine got smaller, but horsepower got greater," Simeone says. "The cars became streamlined while becoming much safer - all because they had to win, finish the race, do it better than they did it last year."
What drove Simeone was the desire to make his father proud. As a teen in the early 1950s, he'd go on house calls with his dad, a family doctor from Frankford and Allegheny. Then they'd root through junkyards looking for discarded automobiles.
