It was late enough to be dark when I arrived at Daytona Beach, even this far south in Florida. I’d wanted to come all my conscious life, not in fact to see the Daytona 24 Hours or NASCAR’s Daytona 500, but to see where my childhood heroes did on the sand what made them famous not just at home, but around the world. But after 10 hours on an aircraft and four in cars, I needed a walk.
I’d intended to be out for an hour or so, but there are only so many tattoo parlours, dilapidated surf shops and empty pizza joints you can walk past, and looks you can get that those of a nervous disposition might interpret as showing a more than healthy interest, before you turn around, scuttle back to the hotel and go to bed.
I woke to one of the most beautiful sunrises I have seen, and there, below me, was not a parade of grotty shops and empty parking lots, but 23 miles of pristine beach, a now apparently orange Atlantic gently lapping at its shores. Never have I known a greater contrast between one side of a hotel and the other. Peering along the sand I saw Daytona Beach pier and, being just to the north of it, that meant only one thing: it was exactly here, outside my hotel window, that 100 years ago Sir Henry Segrave became the first man on earth to exceed 200mph and where, in 1935, Sir Malcolm Campbell took the last Land Speed Record set on that beach where he streaked up and down in his Bluebird V at 276mph. There’s a fantastic clip of it on YouTube, filmed from a biplane, and the speed at which car overtakes aircraft has to be seen to be believed.
