In a month, the speedway will be turned over to the rollicking, proudly redneck bacchanal that is the Daytona 500. But for the twenty-four-hour race, in addition to the impressive Ferrari presence, there’s also an abundance of Rolex. The watchmaker, founded in the early twentieth century, sells the world’s most widely coveted luxury timepieces. Indeed, there are finer watches that you can strap on your wrist—Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin, Audemars Piguet—but Rolex has heft and the wherewithal to sponsor motorsport. It also has the investment-grade status. A Rolex is money in the bank, backed by credibility in the paddock. In this respect, it’s rivaled only by TAG Heuer, with its longtime Formula One association.
The country-club atmosphere at Daytona for the endurance race is the ideal environment for Rolex, and the Swiss firm knows it. Enormous green and gold signage rules the speedway, creating a branded vibe amid the roar and thrust, the sonic dissonance, that’s as soothing as what one might encounter at another sporting event synonymous with Rolex and class: the Wimbledon tennis tournament in England.
The Rolex 24 winners enjoy perhaps the best reward in the world of speedway competition. The members of each team to win its division are given a Rolex Daytona chronograph, probably the sexiest timepiece on the planet these days. Rolex is legendary for such automatic timepieces as the Submariner divers’ watch and the Datejust, a dress watch favored by several U.S. presidents, but for some time now its most collectible watch has been the Daytona, named for the speedway and the endurance race. It was famously worn by Paul Newman, a semipro racer, and Daytonas that evoke the timekeeping tool Newman favored for his talented wrist, from the proper vintage, bring in the most money of any contemporary Rolexes at auctions. A new Daytona will run you $15,000. Some drivers at the Rolex 24 own several. One driver has seven; he wears the piece from his first win and has distributed the rest to friends and family. Chip Ganassi wears a gold and stainless-steel model.
The funny thing about the drivers at the Rolex 24 is that although many have run in other racing categories, driving vehicles ranging from open-wheel Indy cars to snarling NASCAR beasts, most perceive how prestigious the Daytona race is and what a cosmopolitan contrast endurance racing in general presents to more provincial brands of competition.
“NASCAR is Walmart,” Scott Atherton, the president of IMSA, told me. “And I mean that in the most admiring way. But sports-car racing is Nordstrom.”
In after-race interviews, for example, you can tell that the guys who won watches are psyched, while the ones who didn’t are, well, disappointed, like kids who missed out on a primo toy at Christmas. This prestige is one of the more distinctive elements of the Rolex 24. It reminds you that endurance racing, with Le Mans as the crown jewel, has lodged itself in the collective aspirations of professional drivers everywhere; only Formula One and the Indy 500 carry the same cognitive heft.
Not that glistening stainless-steel Swiss chronographs, Ferrari’s ad hoc spectators’ Parthenon, Ford’s own hospitality party just a few hundred feet away, and a steady parade of handsome, risk-taking drivers can overcome the blood, sweat, grime, smoke, and sometimes even fire that define the Rolex 24 race itself. A driver can spend a couple of hours in the car, or he could be in it for fourteen, depending on how his team parcels out the stints. (Although total drive time is capped, the IMSA rules are more focused on ensuring that a driver spends a minimum amount of time behind the wheel in a stint, typically about an hour.) Each car that finishes, of course, stays on the track for the duration, limited only by the amount of fuel it can take on—each team is given a defined amount of fuel that has to last for the whole race—and the necessity of replacing mechanical components, such as brakes, or switching tires. The racing authorities’ rules aim to bring the cars from each team into some kind of competitive parity. Fuel capacity for each type of car, for example, is controlled so that in a given class all the competitors will be able to turn the same number of laps before refueling—more or less, because a driver can always push his luck.
There’s a classical dimension to endurance racing. Remember that the first marathon, run in ancient Greece in 490 BC, when the Greek messenger Pheidippides brought Athens news of a victory over the Persians at the Battle of Marathon, was undertaken not for athletic glory but to inform a civilization that it wouldn’t be conquered. The runner’s journey ended right before his own death, with a single word, “victory.”
Endurance racing, at a vital strategic level, is all about breaking your competitors’ cars and, by association, their will. But at its base level, a race like Daytona presents a simple racing objective: complete as many official laps as possible in the time frame of the event. But we’re not talking about flipping on the cars and letting them run. An endurance race is an improvisational undertaking. As in warfare, no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.
The best place to take this in at the speedway is from pit lane, long after night has fallen, when the cars have been running for over twelve hours. Everyone’s soul is tested during this treacherous period. This is when mistakes, big mistakes, are made, after the fans have dropped off to sleep in the RVs in the infield or, if well heeled, have headed back to hotels by the beach.
The drivers, racing teams’ majordomos, and most important, the pit and garage crews get few breaks. Sure, off their stints the drivers can duck into their own rock-star-style RVs for a shower, food, some shut-eye. But the crews go all day and all night and into the next day. If you ask, most drivers will tell you that at the twenty-four-hour races in particular, it’s hard to sleep and tough to eat properly. Many drivers concentrate on staying hydrated, because drinking fluids is easy. And they have to be constantly prepared to jump back into the car.
The images from pit lane are, for the uninitiated, borderline hellish. Shattered things are everywhere, space is tight, and the endless drone of engines being pushed to their limit is oppressive. You wear earplugs or sound-canceling headphones when you wander amid the carnage and dodge the carts and negotiate the narrow lane behind the pits that holds loads of fresh tires.
You watch your step, because there are hoses everywhere. You stay out of the way. You could be grievously injured: pit crashes aren’t unheard of, and the crews wear full fire-protection suits and racing helmets for a reason. The explosive wail of a 600-horsepower engine being revved as a car drops off its hydraulic jacks after receiving four new tires and a fresh tank of fuel is enough to make your eardrums detonate and spurt blood. The first time I ever experienced this—stupidly, without earplugs—I thought I’d never be able to listen to music again. I pictured future conversations with my kids punctuated by an elderly, “Huh?”
A car race takes arena rock and turns it up well beyond eleven. And although it is noise, not music, it creates a kind of crude symphony that does something music can’t do. It grabs you in the gut. Pete Townshend of The Who—who had his hearing obliterated in the 1970s by the violent decibels of gigantic Marshall amplifier stacks—wasn’t going to windmill his arm off against the strings of his guitar. But a GTLM car, despite its multitude of safety features, when out of control could shred a person and then incinerate what was left. Drivers know this. In motorsport the possibility of death—horrible, mutilating death—is a given. Doctors who have examined killed racers have expressed grim wonder at how the human body could be so gruesomely traumatized.
In the hours just before dawn, everything starts to break: machinery, bodies, the will to go on. Much like soldiers at war, the drivers and crew have to fall back on their training. The adrenaline rush takes you only so far. Sixteen hours into the race, beat drivers are sleeping where they fall, some using stacks of tires as rude mattresses and pillows. They don’t shed the fireproof racing suits; they don’t even lose the helmets. The ones who are awake steal smoke breaks far from the fuel canisters. It will probably take two or three showers to wash off the race and a week or more to physically recover from an entire day in the pit-l
ane trenches.
The work of fixing what’s broken never ends. During one of my late-night strolls through pit lane, I saw two guys devoutly focused on using a blowtorch to rid a tire of debris it had picked up on the racetrack. Blobs of molten rubber had dried on the tarmac, forming a morass of black shapes. Cars that had utterly failed were wheeled back to the paddock by packs of men bent in concern and humiliation; the cars then disappeared into a garishly lit repair bay to be ripped apart by mechanics.
But even in this stygian context, the pride of profession is evident. Another crew member polished the filth from wheels. At least a small part of the car should look shiny and new. Amid the marathon of insanity, while the roaring peloton of cars made its way around the track, again and again, professionalism was never forgotten. Everyone here does this for a living.
On the brilliantly sunny start day of the Rolex 24 in January 2016, the Ford GTs attracted more attention prerace, when the fans get to mass onto the track for a walk-around, than anything else in competition. With their pleasing angles and new red-white-and-blue racing livery, the GTs stood out, even alongside the exotic prototype cars.
The motorsports world had been salivating for months. The website Sportscar365 called the upcoming racing season “a five-way factory fight between Porsche, Corvette, BMW, Ferrari and newcomers Ford,” heralding “a potential new golden age for GT racing in North America.”
“The GT Le Mans category has been the most competitive, most intriguing category I’ve been in, in the last seven, eight, nine years,” BMW Team RLL co-owner Bobby Rahal told the publication.
And Ford was ready. Or thought it was ready, after months of testing, of taking the prototype GTs and making them into track-ready race cars. There had been few problems, and the verdict from the drivers was that the GT was fantastic. Even the funkier elements of the new turbo V-6 EcoBoost—the blats and burps and whirs that had struck some early obsessives watching guerrilla video of testing on YouTube—seemed to be winning everyone over as the engine was tuned.
“We don’t want to be overconfident,” said Raj Nair, Ford’s chief technical officer and overseer of both this new GT program and the previous generation from the mid-2000s, in a video Ford posted online.
“We’re almost kind of worried about how good it’s going,” he added. That would turn out to be an ominous statement.
The race started at precisely 2:40 p.m., but the lead-up consumed the entire morning and early afternoon, as fans were given the chance to walk the starting grid, check out the cars, and meet the drivers in person. The Ford GTs were the undisputed stars of the show, but the yellow Corvettes and red Ferraris drew their share of attention. Under the calm winter sun of central Florida, the machines glistened, pristine in their prerace preparation. By roughly this time tomorrow, they’d be encrusted with tire fragments sucked up from the track. Some would be gouged and dented from battle. A few would have their carbon-fiber fronts and flanks shredded by collisions with walls and other cars.
Half of Ford’s team and half of its race cars were on hand. (The rest were preparing for the FIA World Endurance Championship in Europe.) Like the cars, the drivers looked luminous in their racing suits. One thing almost everyone notices about pro drivers right away is they aren’t big guys. Some are tall, but none are really tall. And most are wiry and short, five foot six, five seven, five eight. This is self-selection and the Darwinism of racing. Big dudes don’t fit in the cars, and they add weight.
Joey Hand, thirty-six at the time, was in the number 66 car. I got to know him a bit during the season and had grown accustomed to his bent nose, which reminded me of the poet Frank O’Hara’s. But Hand has no poetic brooding in him; he’s a driver who’s cool and cheerful when not in the seat. He was joined in the 66 car by forty-year-old German driver Dirk Müller, a Le Mans veteran who won at Daytona in 2011 when racing for BMW; and Sébastien Bourdais, a bespectacled Frenchman, like Hand thirty-six years old, with half a dozen Indy 500s and three second-place Le Mans results in the top prototype class with Peugeot.
Thirty-four-year-old Australian Ryan Briscoe and forty-year-old Englishman Richard Westbrook were in the number 67 car, as was thirty-four-year-old German driver Stefan Mücke. Briscoe had come over to Ganassi’s team after a win at Daytona with Corvette Racing in 2015. Westbrook had run Daytona and Le Mans numerous times with Corvette, and joined Briscoe in defecting from the General Motors factory team to the new Ford factory team. Mücke’s last four runs at Le Mans in a GT car had been with Aston Martin.
All these GT drivers were in the Platinum category, the highest designation in competitive racing, and within each car they’d split the driving between them more or less equally.
In the pits, Chip Ganassi paced inside the Ford Performance tent, while his guys monitored data on screens and stayed on the radio with the drivers. It took me almost the entire spring and early summer racing seasons to nail Ganassi down long enough to chat about the pressure, but when we got our chance, he came through.
Ganassi is a native of Pittsburgh, still lives there, and has that taciturn steelworkers’ town in his blood. He has a reputation for chewing up journalists and spitting them out. He’s solidly built, even a bit paunchy, and his default expression is flinty. After fooling around with motorcycle racing, he started driving race cars professionally in his late teens and had some good results in his five outings at the Indy 500, including an eighth-place finish in 1983. A wreck a year later would send him into retirement, however, and into what in retrospect is clearly his true calling: founder, owner, and CEO of Chip Ganassi Racing.
In that role he’s raced in the IndyCar Series and captured four Indy 500 victories. He has also run in NASCAR, in addition to endurance racing. In person, he alternates between a calculating taciturnity and what might best be described as sudden jollity. Ganassi has figured out, it seems, all the moving parts of what it takes to be a successful racing-team owner. And there are many moving parts. But even he was taken aback by what he’d gotten himself into with the Ford Le Mans campaign.
“I had no idea the amount of passion that this program stirred in people,” he told me. “A lot of people remember the Ferrari-Ford battle. But I gotta be honest, if Ford had come back to Le Mans with a car that had a different shape to it, I don’t think it would be as interesting.” Then he laughed, loudly and freely.
“If they’d come back with something different—oh, I don’t know, a Mustang or something—I don’t think it would be as exciting! Call me crazy, but that’s what I think.”
This is how Chip Ganassi deals with his anxiety. He brings out his secretly wicked sense of humor, which combines with the pressures of the moment to reveal small truths, along with what he thinks about those truths. Talking to him, I was reminded of a great poker player, who stares you down through bet after bet on a big pot, with the chips piling up, never much changing that expression, making you think there’s nothing going on in that head, no possibility of a bluff.
And then when he has you, when you abruptly realize he had held the good cards all along and was just reeling you in, free of emotion, he cuts loose with the broad smile and the big guffaws as he throws down his winning hand and rakes in your chips. Thanks for playing the game, kid. Thanks for playing my game.
At Daytona, Ganassi’s big issue with the GTs had nothing to do with the cars. The problem was that he hadn’t been able to assert his usual control over the effort, and that this caused some chafing. He probably expected it, given the scale of Ford’s ambition. But he didn’t like it.
Henry Ford III, only thirty-three, hung back behind the racing professionals, expressionless but probably nervous as hell. Yet the burden of Ford’s 1966 achievement really wasn’t on him alone—the road to Le Mans was far more than a one-man show this time around.
The Audi R8 safety car led the field around for a few laps, the green flag was waved, and they were off. The 2016 IMSA WeatherTech Spor
tsCar Championship had begun.
The GTs came out with guns blazing. Both the number 66 car, with Hand at the wheel, and the number 67, driven by Briscoe, turned fast laps. In short order, they were in the lead pack. But just as Ford fans were settling into that situation, disaster struck—not after hours of racing, but right away.
Briscoe’s number 67 car developed a gearbox problem—it was slipping from fifth to sixth gear. In his 2016 debut with Ganassi, in the hottest ride to hit endurance racing in a decade, Briscoe found himself unable to downshift after only about twenty-five laps. This meant he had no power when he needed it, to get out of the corners or to take it to the straights. For an agonizing half hour, the car sat on pit lane. But it couldn’t be repaired there and had to be pushed back to the garage.
Henry Ford III looked on pensively, a tinge of concern playing across his features, but he continued to greet reporters warmly. Ganassi, by contrast, was grim-faced. He had lots of work to do on the track. Not only was his organization handling the GTs, now in crisis, but he also had a car in the next class up, the so-called prototypes. That car would be his last in that dance, which he had already won six times at Daytona, most recently in 2015. He wouldn’t be back in that class in 2017. So he wanted to go out with a bang, repeating victory in 2016. That meant he had to manage the GT situation, while also keeping one eye on the prototype race happening on the track at the same time.
Return to Glory Page 10