I had a chance yesterday to go through some of the pictures from this weekend's journey to the Rolex 24. Heck, just getting to it makes you feel like you're running some kind of endurance race (which makes having the right teammate important -- which, fortunately, I do). On the other hand, events like this are also neat because they give me a chance to shoot some photos and try to turn one thing into another. For me, auto races are more than just what they are; if you capture the right scene at the right moment, the resulting photograph can tell a really cool story.
These photos are in no particular sequence, and were taken over two days by the both of us. The weather was rainy on Saturday and bright on Sunday, so you'll see the conditions change between pictures. I'm taking the liberty of scrambling some of them in the name of narrative. It's my hope to give you a glimpse of what it's like to attend this race, and what it's like to be at this famous speedway.
This is a panorama (like the 8H deal from the other day, crudely assembled) from some pictures I took Saturday morning. Daytona International Speedway is one of the biggest things you'll ever see in your life -- 2.5 miles on the oval, 3.56 miles if you take the road course. That backstretch is 3,800 feet long. The turns are 3,000 feet long. The infield is 180 acres, and the whole complex is 480 acres. The place is as big (if not bigger) than the town in which I grew up. There are 168,000 seats in the grandstands. Fortunately, at this race, there's not that size crowd. I was grateful many times over that we weren't at the Daytona 500 or some other event where you're crammed into the stands next to other people and can't move. Here, at this race, you can relax.
Many of the races in the Rolex series involve two types of cars at the same time; sometimes, though, they split the two classes of cars up into separate events. One class, the GT class, features sports cars of the sort you usually think of -- Porsche 911s, Mazda RX-8s, Chevy Corvettes, Pontiac GXP-Rs, Ferrari 430s and so forth. The other class is the Daytona Prototype class, and these are goofy-looking purpose-built cars with Pontiac, Lexus, Ford, Porsche or other engines. They're goofy-looking, but fast. There are a few chassis manufacturers in the business, but the Riley chassis has been the most dominant the last few years. (Here's the #88 Porsche 911, illustrating the GT class; passing it is the #99 Pontiac Riley, one of the Daytona Prototypes.)
With the way so much of modern motorsports likes to pretend its past never happened, except when it's convenient for marketing purposes (such as what NA$CAR has done), what happens before the Rolex 24 is a real treat. There's a display of vintage race cars each year, and many of those cars take the track in an exhibition a couple hours before the race. You see everything from Porsche 962s to Lotus Cortinas, and it's so much fun. This year brought an unexpected surprise, an actual Howmet Turbine Car. (That's it to the left.) You could always tell when the Howmet screamed by: not only did it sound different, but the smell of burned JP-4 drifted up into the stands. Another throwback was the fact that the race's grand marshal was Dan Gurney, one of those guys who would race the wheels off anything -- stock cars, endurance racers, sports cars, you name it -- and usually win. (His son Alex is now a top driver in the prototypes and was a driver for last season's championship team.)
I made reference to how the tenor of the Rolex 24 is different from most other things you'll see at Daytona. True, you see your share of NA$CAR T-shirts and jackets and other stuff being worn by the fans. But you see a larger share of stuff being worn that reflects a world beyond NA$CAR. You see, for instance, a good many people wearing Formula One gear (like this guy wearing a Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro jacket, probably a Schumi fan). I've seen other folks wearing Renault Mild Seven gear, Jaguar pit shirts...heck, I even remember someone wearing a Benetton Formula One jacket, a couple others wearing Gulf Porsche jackets like Steve McQueen. You get a good many people in the stands who are there who aren't interested in motorsports (like some corporate ticketholders we came across), but you also come across a good many people who know that racing is about more than American stock car racing, and that's refreshing.
Here's something else you get to see a lot of, and that's the security guys on motorscooters. Among other functions, they patrol the fences along the frontstretch and tell people to move along when they disobey the posted notices not to stop or stand along the fence. We've taken to calling them the "fence fuzz." Sometimes these guys drive their scooters with a little gusto, too; I saw one of them drive his scooter over a handicapped-access ramp like he thought he was Steve McQueen. (Maybe he thought he was.)
We usually sit in a section that's a straight shot down pit road; from there, we can see most of the infield road course, get a good view (enhanced with binoculars) of what's going on in the pits, and also get some good pictures with the long lens. Sometimes, though, there's an extra treat. Not long before the race began, we got to see A.J. Allmendinger (in the blue) and [on edit] Oswaldo Negri (in orange) out limbering up and having a chat about the track conditions. You could get pictures like this down on the track if you had the proper credentials, access or passes, but we don't (and, honestly, I don't see the need for us to, not now anyhow). Things like this make you really happy you have a good camera and a long lens (and Photoshop to enhance it when you get back home!).
Here's another example of why we keep coming back to the seats we do each year. You can see straight down pit road and watch just about everything. This is fun pretty much during the whole thing: before the race begins, you can watch everybody mill around and try to see who you can pick out (I was able to find my guy Scott Dixon easily enough, but couldn't find some others I was looking for...still, it's always fun seeing who you can see). And you get to see the cars get rolled out and line up...then comes the start, and the cars are coming right at you. That's the prototypes in front, behind the pace car; the GT field is being lined up behind them.
So the race gets going, and over the course of 24 hours, you're going to see a little of everything. Some cars last; some don't (like this 911 giving up the ghost on Sunday). There's accidents. Some cars make it 23 hours and then wreck or just croak. Early on Saturday afternoon Scott Dixon was peeling off 1:44 laps, which for the entire course is nothing short of achieving escape velocity. He was leading the field. It was absolutely beautiful, and completely meaningless. The race doesn't go to who leads early on; it goes to who lasts the longest. It's racing that, to some, seems counterintuitive: finding the line between driving your equipment as hard as you can and conserving it. (As it turned out, the car Dixon was co-driving went down Saturday night with lots of mechanical issues that came about after it went on an off-course adventure Saturday afternoon.)
It's not just cars that break at Daytona, unfortunately; sometimes the drivers get hurt. Fortunately, we've been spared races where there's been serious injury, but the history of Daytona International Speedway is also a history of serious injury and death (including, most notably, a certain NA$CAR champion who met his fate in the turn in this picture). Eerily enough, looming over that turn is the distant Halifax Medical Center. The landscape around the speedway has changed a great deal, but Halifax Medical Center is unmistakable on the horizon.
Throughout the race you get to see the action in the pits. Here's a cross-section from Sunday morning, as three cars come in for service. These aren't always NA$CAR or F1-style pit stops, where it's all hurry-hurry; depending on where the car is in the field, and knowing that it's better to double-check, sometimes these stops are a little more deliberate. Yes, speed is important, but sometimes a car will take a little longer. There's endurance to think about, and you want to make sure you've done everything. Sometimes, there will also be a driver change, and those are fun to watch through the field glasses -- though sometimes frustrating because you don't find out who gets in the car until a few laps in. (That gets really interesting when there's a team with three drivers you like and one you don't...is one of your guys in or not?)
On both Saturday and Sunday those of us at the race were bombarded with marketing from above. Early in the race on Saturday the DirecTV blimp crept into view from the south and spent the rest of the day orbiting overhead, and it returned Sunday. Coupled with our house being buzzed a few weeks back by the Ron Paul Campaign Zeppelin, it shook me up and all I could think about was Black Sunday. This got even weirder when a couple of small planes towing banners began to orbit overhead. Many times we saw the blimp make sudden altitude adjustments to maintain separation from the towplanes. Oh, the humanity! (And, yes, I know the difference between a "blimp" and a "Zeppelin." But "Zeppelin" is a funnier word for purposes of this post.)
Over the course of the 24 hours, those cars that do survive to the finish are wounded in various ways. Some remain pretty much intact and have nothing more than the usual grit damage, smashed bugs and the occasional tire rub mark from close racing. Others, though, endure much more. Some go out and run with smashed bodies. (Some run without body panels, such as a Banner Pontiac that finished the race with no hood.) It's common for the prototypes to have at least a spare nose and spare rear section per car, but when those run out, they run out, and sometimes you'll see a car run with a missing nose section. It's really something...yesterday, those cars had fresh paint and were in peak condition. At the end of the race, they look like they've endured a world war.
And, after 24 hours and 695 laps, here's how it ended. Chip Ganassi's #01 Lexus Riley team with drivers Scott Pruett (behind the wheel at the end), Memo Rojas, Dario Franchitti and Juan Pablo Montoya took the checkered flag, bringing Ganassi his third consecutive Rolex 24 title. (By the way, Chip, if you're reading this...how about sending me and hubby a couple watches for the effort? Especially since I was pulling like mad for the #02 in 2006, despite my own injuries. Doesn't have to be a Rolex. Heck, I'll settle for a couple of Armitrons by this point. Just sayin', is all.)
After the race, the survivors gather in the pits for team photos. Winning is nice, but in some ways finishing the 24 hours with your car still going is its own accomplishment. As we walked down the frontstretch on the way out, we had occasion to take a lot of nice photos of what was going on after the race. Here's the Banner Pontiac team, for instance, celebrating the finish and lining up for team photos. I love the high-resolution shots from pit road, where you can see all the little mini-dramas in the background. Even though there was a swarm of people down on pit road, and though we had to wait a while for some of the shots to become clear before we could take photos, some of the pictures we got of the celebrations were pretty sweet.
So there you go...that's how we spent the weekend. As usual, it was a lot of fun. This is the one time we actually get to go to a race; most of the rest of the time we're usually too busy or can't make the schedule work (which is what's kept us from Sebring), or can't afford to get away for whatever reason. Since most of the racing we get to see takes place inside our television sets, it's nice to actually get to a race. It's something different, and fun.
The other driver with AJ was Oswaldo Negri, one of the drivers of the #60 Michael Shank Racing Ford Riley. He and AJ were walking the pit out to Turn #1 to see just how wet the track was going to be at the start of the race.
One of the interesting post-race scenes was at the #52 MasterCar Ferrari pit--this is the first time in recent memory that a Ferrari actually finished the race! The last hour or so they had an off (the car went off course) and probably damaged something, but they drivers nursed the car home. In celebration, we went to the nearby Pizzeria Uno to celebrate....
:)
Posted by: Ralph | February 01, 2008 at 11:44 AM