A brown-haired boy enters the special exhibits wing of the National Automobile Museum (The Harrah Collection) in Reno, Nev., and runs up to the sole car featured in the room, a 1907 red-and-white Thomas Flyer.

“It’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” he says with recognition in his eyes.

This Chitty Chitty Bang Bang look-alike sits on display to celebrate the anniversary of one of the greatest car races of all time.

Through February 2009, the National Automobile Museum in Reno will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the New York to Paris Automobile Race. The 22,000-mile competition holds the record as the longest car race ever completed. The museum’s exhibit highlights the colossal feat attempted by six international teams in 1908.

“The challenge was pretty incredible,” Denise Sins, museum curator, said. “Cars were just coming into fashion.

Tourist Gina Clear researched the exhibit before arriving in Reno and was surprised when she first heard about the particulars of the race.

“I couldn’t figure out how that could be done in 1908,” Clear said. “They took a brand new invention and basically drove it around the world. That’s amazing to me.”

The highlight of the Reno exhibit is the race’s American entry, the winning 1907 Thomas Flyer, restored in the 1960s by the Harrah’s Automobile Collection.

“[The Flyer] was the first car to travel from Paris to New York,” Sins said. “No other car had ever done that before.”

The four-man team aboard the Flyer spent 169 days crossing some of the most remote areas of the world. During the trip, the crew battled extreme weather, poorly maintained roads and fledgling technology. Lacking a roof, doors and windshield, the teams had little to protect them from the harsh elements.

Appearing in race-winning form at the museum, the Flyer reveals secrets of its journey through mud on its tires, initials carved into the car body and a broken left headlight.

To supplement the exhibit, the museum also commissioned multiple pieces of artwork inspired by the centennial celebration of the race. Reno artist Robert Cinkel created a series of paintings focused on photographs of featured stages of the race.

Truckee Meadows Quilters united art and history through a quilt entitled “1908 - The Start of the Race.” Thirty-eight women worked in teams to recreate one of Cinkel’s original paintings. The art depicted the competitors lined up in Times Square on Feb. 12, 1908, awaiting the race’s start.

“We did not want to make an exact replica [of the art],” quilting project chair Myra Long said. “The ingenuity of the ladies that worked on [the quilt] was phenomenal.”

Through their visions of historic images, the artists captured a historic moment in time and modernized the event for a contemporary audience.

Despite its notable place in history, the race is relatively unknown to many 21st century Americans. The story told through art, photographs and newspaper articles at the museum holds great interest for sports enthusiasts, lovers of travel and technology aficionados alike.

The exhibit brings together a myriad of resources to educate the public about a pivotal event in the formative stages of transportation technology.

“The race showed all of mankind how important the role of technology would be forever,” Sins said.