Postcard from Daytona Motor Speedway

Which is why I am here. You can still drive on the beach, but as the limit is now 10mph and rigorously enforced by the local constabulary, I couldn’t quite see the point. The invite came from Rolex, one of whose watches was on Campbell’s wrist that day 91 years ago and whose partnership with Daytona is one of the most enduring in all of motorsport, Rolex having been a sponsor when it opened and Title Sponsor since 1992. I’ve wanted to see the Daytona 24 Hours for as long as I can remember because having been to the Sebring 12 Hours once and Le Mans more times than I can count, it was the last one of the sports car triple crown I’d yet to witness for myself.

So I duly toddled along last Friday wanting to get my bearings of course, but also to visit the Speedway museum, which is full of Daytona legends, including that Bluebird. Mickey Thompson’s Challenger 1 is there too whose 406mph average at Bonneville in 1960 was actually faster than Donald Campbell went on Lake Eyre in his turbine-powered Bluebird four years later, but was only recorded in one direction so was never an official Land Speed Record. I also spotted Bob Osiecki’s ‘Mad Dog IV’ which in 1961 lapped Daytona at over 181mph, setting a new closed circuit record thanks to the innovative use of a vertical stabiliser and two stubby aluminium wings shaped and located like those of an aircraft, except mounted upside down. Back then that was radical stuff.

I arrived at the track in time for the last practice session and the first thing you have to get your head around is just how small the place is, particularly if you are used to watching 24-hour races in France. Yes, the steeply banked tri-oval outer circuit is vast and imposing but is just 2.5 miles long, about the same length as Donington Park. True, the fiddly infield section used for the 24 hours does add another mile to the lap, but in its lengthiest configuration it’s still shorter than the Silverstone Grand Prix circuit and positively petite compared even to Spa, let alone the 8.5-mile lap at Le Mans.

And where were the epic corners? The banking looks cool but the infield section is comprised of slow corners and one kink that’s flat out even in a GTD (read GT3) car, let alone a GTP (read LMDh and LMh) prototype. Talking of which, where were they all? Yes the Porsches, Caddys, BMWs and one Aston Martin Valkyrie are on the entry list, along with a couple of Acuras, but of the Toyota, Alpine, Ferrari and Peugeot prototypes there was no sign, because they don’t race in the North American IMSA (International Motor Sports Association) series, whose first and biggest race of any season is always the Daytona 24 Hours. At least there was full representation in the LMP2 and GTD categories.

I wasn’t regretting coming, but I did rather wonder whether this might turn out to be an event I was glad to have attended but even more glad that I’d not be attending again in future. And then I got talking to some drivers, guys who know this place inside out, like Hurley Haywood and Scott Pruett who have won it outright five times each, and they wax lyrical about the occasion, the fans and just what it takes to be so successful here; but the track itself? Not so much. There is no Tertre Rouge equivalent here, nor an Indianapolis, let alone a Porsche Curves. I was beginning to wonder, just a little, what the fuss was all about.

On race day, I found out. For a start, everyone is lovely – fans, drivers and officials alike. It’s the first thing you notice. Staff actually want to help you enjoy yourself, not stop you. Of the whistle-blowing, jobsworth martinets that blight the spectator experience at Le Mans, there is no sign. At Daytona they genuinely want you to have the best possible time, and if what you’re asking for is technically not allowed but causes no harm, you’ll probably be greeted by a broad smile and a wink as they accidentally on purpose look the other way. The vibe is as relaxed as I’ve known at this level of racing.

And the access! The teams essentially have two pits per car, one tiny and trackside where refuelling, tyre changes and minor repairs take place, and a proper garage set back from the track where the cars live when they’re not racing and get worked on if it’s serious. And, no, you won’t get trackside, but you can wander around the garages and get almost as close to the cars as you might at a club meeting at Castle Combe. There are people manning the entry points, but no one ever asked to look at my credentials – I just wandered in.

But it’s the viewing that is most extraordinary. Le Mans-goers among you will know the deal: you go to one corner, hang out there for a while then either trudge or, if you’re lucky, catch a shuttle to the next one, rinse and repeat. Or simply don’t bother. And you’ll always be a considerable distance back from the track and often behind a fence. Not at Daytona. Go into the main grandstand on the start-finish straight and I reckon you can see 90 per cent of the circuit, possibly more. You can certainly follow a single car around an entire lap, mentally predicting where and when it will pop out on those rare few seconds when it’s obscured from view. Go down into the infield and you can walk from corner to corner in minutes, sit in (free) grandstands and be as close to the action as you’d be at a club meeting at your local circuit in Britain. But these are not Slick 50s going around, but factory prototypes lapping at well over 130mph despite all the slow turns on the infield. The sounds are the same as you hear at Le Mans – the thunder of the Caddys, the ripping howl of the 911s and the scream of the Valkyrie – but here you’re just that much closer to it. Everywhere.

As for the racing, I wasn’t sure at first. The fact is that in the seven 24-hour races held here so far this decade – I’ve not looked further back – the average winning margin after 24 hours of racing has been 2.5sec, approximately the same as the closest ever non-staged finish at Le Mans in 1969. I also tried calculating the average at Le Mans in the 2020s to date, but as some races have been won by a number of very long laps, it was a meaningless exercise. Which on the one hand makes Daytona sound terribly exciting but, on the other, a bit more than a coincidence. So I asked around.

And the view was it’s a race you treat more like the Bathurst 12 Hours than Le Mans. McLaren’s Rob Bell, who’s raced multiple times both here, at Le Mans and most other places you can think of told me ‘it’s all about staying on the lead lap until the last couple of hours, because even if you fall a bit behind you know it’s never going to be long until the next Full Course Yellow, and everyone will bunch up again. At Le Mans you go like hell from the off because you can really build a gap.’

So are the drivers actually racing for the first 22 hours of Daytona? ‘Absolutely,’ Rob said, ‘but they’re also managing the machine and not taking unnecessary risks. Or at least they should be…’ A reasonable amount of carnage in the first hour suggested not everyone took so enlightened a view.

But here’s the thing: the spectacle is still amazing. I defy anyone to get that close to a pair of prototypes blasting around the 31-degree banking like a couple of fighter planes coming in to attack and then go either side of an unsuspecting GT3 car at better than three miles a minute and tell me it’s not exciting. As in to the core of your being exciting. And it’s happening all the time. Also when you have the same number of cars as race at Le Mans, with the same spread of performance, driver experience and talent, but on a circuit much less than half as long, you’re never going to be far away from an incident or accident. Hence all those FCYs. I had a chat with Jenson Button who was on the podium here in 2024 and asked how often you got a completely clear lap, to which he replied, ‘basically never.’

Others talk about those who run the event actively managing the racing, fortuitously spotting a bit of debris requiring an FCY just as the field is starting to get strung out a bit, but I saw no evidence of it and, even if I did, I’m not sure I’d mind. We accept active management of the cars before the event in terms of Balance of Performance as a necessary evil to keep the racing interesting, and this is just a natural extension of that.

Besides, as the clock starts to get near to the 1.40pm finishing time and they’re still duking it out in every class, flat out to the flag, with so much going on both before your eyes and on the screens that you barely know which way to look, you won’t question the way they go racing here. I got a seat directly opposite the finishing line and watched as Jack Aitken’s Cadillac tried to get past Felipe Nasr’s Porsche for the outright win and Aston Martin’s Nicki Thiim tried to wrest GTD honours from Philip Ellis’s Mercedes. It was some of the most exciting racing I have seen anywhere, including the Merc slewing across the track at maximum speed on the banking after what appeared to be some contact with the Aston and Ellis pulling off the save of his career and still somehow maintaining position. With less than five minutes to go, there was less than 0.5sec between the two outright leaders, the gasps of the crowd audible above even the roar of the engines as Aitken briefly got alongside the Porsche, forcing Nasr into a defence sufficiently robust for there to be contact between the two. It was only on the last lap that Aitken conceded defeat. It tells you all you need to know about this race that the winning margin was just 1.5sec, after the second-placed driver had backed off…

Since my return I’ve been asked a few times whether Daytona is better than Le Mans and whether all those hundreds of thousands of Brits who cross the channel would not in fact be better off booking a cheap flight to Orlando and crossing the Atlantic instead. But in fact the events are incomparable: even though I’ve only done a couple of laps of Daytona in a passenger seat (albeit with Rob Bell driving at maximum attack) I can tell you that, from a driving point of view, Daytona cannot hold a candle to Le Mans. Then again I’d say the reverse was true from a spectator’s point of view: with over double the density of cars on track, how close you can get and the fact you can see vast tracts of the lap almost wherever you decide to stand, there is action everywhere, all the time.

I love Le Mans for its history and there are few places I am happier than when camped out at the Porsche Curves at sun up; I love the drive down too. But I hate the queues, the occasional drunken loutishness (though much diminished in recent years) and the officials who won’t even let you decide when to cross the road and who think they’re now in charge of local law enforcement just because someone’s given them a hi-viz and a whistle. Daytona is friendlier by a margin I’d not have believed before I got there and the racing, while as different as can be within the same genre, is more visible, much closer and more exciting. And I’ll not hide that breaking free of filthy British winter weather for 30 deg C in Florida for a few days has its benefits too.

If I could go to only one more top level 24-hour race, I’d perhaps stupidly still go back to France, despite the fact I’ve been at least 30 times and to Daytona just once. From the public’s point of view Daytona is actually a better motor race, but I have a history with Le Mans, both as a spectator and, a few times in the Classic, a very lucky competitor that connects me to it in a way that will never be true of Daytona. But if you’ve never been, I could not recommend it more highly. And while you’re there, don’t forget to find time to go to the beach and imagine what it’d be like driving along its length in some vast behemoth on skinny tyres at over 200mph. If the racing doesn’t take your breath away, that surely will.

Keeping Time

This could have been a difficult panel to write, and you’d all wonder whether I was writing it only because I’d been invited to Daytona by Rolex. And I was indeed invited by Rolex, but so too have I worn one or other of its products most days for almost 40 years; and as I know every last one of you knows fine engineering when you see it, it gives me no qualms whatever to pen a few relevant lines now.

My first was an Air King, the most affordable Rolex in the early 1980s, given to me as my 21^st birthday present by my parent. I loved that watch and would wear it today had a bunch of young scamps one sunny afternoon in Notting Hill 30 years ago not wondered if it wouldn’t be a better idea if they had it instead. Having some quite understandable reservations about the plan, I put across my point of view in what I considered fairly unambiguous terms, but it’s amazing what the repeated application of a steel-capped boot to one’s cranium can do to weaken the resolve. And that was that. It was replaced by a Datejust which I didn’t really get along with – nothing wrong with it, but it was just too similar to the watch I’d lost and served as a constant reminder of the manner of its forfeiture, so I very rarely wore it. Instead I went through a phase of wearing cheap tat which kept getting damaged, usually on the way into, departing from or driving road and racing cars.

Then one evening about 20 years ago Chris Harris and I were having a quiet pint when the subject of watches came up. In short he told me to stop messing about and get a Rolex Sea Dweller because it was the most robust watch money could buy, about which he was entirely correct. So I sold the Datejust, found a few additional pennies down the back of a sofa and bought the Dweller that’s sitting on my wrist as I type this. To me it is the G-series 911 of timepieces – I take it entirely for granted and it is bombproof. It came with me to the top of Kilimanjaro, it’s been diving, surfing and tobogganing, and I have no idea how many dozens of races it’s done. It’s never been serviced, never gone wrong, it keeps perfect time and you’d need a keen eye or, more likely, a magnifying glass to see the smallest scratch on it.

I’ll wear it while gardening, splitting wood, going to the pub or the theatre. There is no activity to which it is not innately well suited. To me it is not an ostentatious wealth statement but a working tool, supremely fit for purpose and one of very few possessions from which I would be genuinely heartbroken to be parted. A 911 on your wrist, in other words.