This Is Daytona

DAYTONA BEACH – (02 Jan., 2014) – Simply known for decades as an unimaginative but highly descriptive “Test Days,” it was a long time before someone from marketing conjured “The Roar Before The 24.”

Whatever the name, it is the one annual event when racers from around the world gather: racers who may or may not be actually racing; racers who are looking to see and be seen; still other racers who hope more than anything else to rekindle friendships once broken by racing’s vagaries and demands with still others hoping for one more paycheck of the kind that once came as easily and as steadily as the sun’s rising in the east but which have gone away as quickly when the lifestyle sunk like the sun in the western horizon.

It is a place where someone like 2012 Indy 500 and 2008 Rolex 24 winner Dario Franchitti, forcibly retired before 2013’s end by a broken body doctors said they could no more mend, tottered (the latter part of "teeter") on crutches supporting healing limbs as he made his way through the paddock Thursday, yet again speaking and laughing with those against whom he formerly wished no worse than to embarrassingly best at the end of a contest of men and machines.

With Daytona International Speedway’s Sprint Cup and Nationwide garages as full of sports cars as any can recently recall, 66 Rolex 24 cars are on hand at the monster track through Sunday, all hoping to find that fastest line through a once bedeviling turn or establish a fastest speed for the entire 3.56-mile track.

Still others are hoping to capture enough drivers, thus perhaps money, too, to offset 24 hours of gas and tire bills, the latter's cost for some alone approaching a small house’s value.

Five-time Rolex 24 At Daytona winning driver Scott Pruett has reached a point where awaiting the Jan. 25-26 race “is darn near unbearable,” said he.

“I can’t wait to get this show on the road,” the driver said during Thursday’s “move-in” day, during which team haulers disgorge a seemingly unending stream of still-smaller, usually people-powered trailers that carry everything from basic supplies to complex tools used during the two days and one evening of testing undertaken by the teams. A test session, by the way, which will not remotely come close to duplicating the number of miles - something on the order of 2,500-or-more - that the race itself will see come its checker-flagged end on Sunday, Jan. 26.

Yet at this Rolex 24 At Daytona, the 52nd such example, much will rest upon the new shoulders of the Tudor United Sports Car Championship (“tusk,” phonetically speaking) as gone this year is the race’s sanctioning body of the past 14 years, the Grand American Road Racing Association, and a nemesis as well, the American Le Mans Series which, of course, looked upon the former with the same alacrity as did it see the latter ("Will the circle be unbroken, bye and bye, Lord, bye and bye . . ."

Working in its stead is the newly forged United SportsCar Championship - a name derived from a fan-naming contest whose submitter focused upon what has not been since deep into the preceding century: a split sports car racing series that apparently to all concerned was doing no good at all.

Getting rarer now are those who once wished to grow up and be a “race car driver” but who could only be such because there are, probably always will be race teams willing to trade souls for money. Besides, a race team absent of a race car is no race team at all, for ‘tis better to at least partly pretend one is a race team and eat than not a race team at all.

Also gone with the stroke of a pen and massive money transfers are the long-distance squabbles and snipes as to which race organization was the “real” sports car racing authority and which possessed the better racing real estate, replaced now by the usual petty envy and quarrels as to who has the better office and who proudly best sucks up to those holding the supreme authority.

Remembering that it takes two to tango or, as was the case in this matter, not dancing at all, the former other member in this affair was the American Le Mans Series, whose aging founding father, Dr. Don Panoz was rumored to be the last in his family to be remotely interested in owning a sports car racing series that at times so struggled to field enough cars that even a “run whatever you brung” class was once given serious consideration.

Arising yet again as would a phoenix (no, Darren, not the city) from the ruins is yet another International Motor Sports Association that in the grand scheme, if not precise practice, is The Third and therefore distilled becomes IMSA v. 3.o.

Would-be detractors howl at the indignity of what has become of what had been before, whether unwittingly or ignorantly, all the while conveniently perpetuating an incorrect history that all too often entirely omits IMSA as actually having come home, for it was Big Bill France who in the late 1960's telephoned John Bishop and said, "The time is right in America for professional sports car racing" and then made certain the newborn was funded.

This one race, this Rolex 24 At Daytona, is unique in a world of racing that in Daytona Beach began over 100 years ago in the simplest of fashion: One kid, in heart if not of age, challenging yet another of similar constitution, to determine the fleetest of foot or fastest self upon beach sand not too far removed from the 3.56-mile asphalt ribbon that is as much a part of sports car racing heritage as is a once-unique Trioval to stock cars and beneath which the whole of Florida was one day long, long ago built.

No matter who when first seeing this hallowed ground, and it truly is that, the most talented of fender benders speak in reverent hushed tones no different than the best of those whose feigns and fakes leave a competitor dumbfounded and tongue tied.

This is Daytona.