In 1985, at the age of 50, Anthony Joseph Foyt, Jr., won the 24 Hours of Daytona for the second time. He’d garnered his first victory in the race two years prior, when the Aston Martin-Nimrod prototype that Foyt had been racing with NASCAR great Darrell Waltrip took a dirt nap 121 laps in. Car owner Preston Henn, campaigning a monstrous Porsche 935 favored to take the race, saw an opportunity. Much to the consternation of his hottest shoe, Bob Wollek, Henn put the dismounted Foyt in the Porsche as a PR stunt. Foyt acquitted himself well, won the respect of the French sports-car ace, and re-upped for a Daytona stint with Henn’s Swap Shop team two years later.
At some point in elementary school, probably around 1986, I acquired a poster of two Porsche 962s racing at night: Henn’s and Al Holbert’s in Löwenbräu livery. The Valvoline/Swap Shop car was spitting fire, and the poster noted that the driver was A.J. Foyt. I wasn’t yet aware of Brilliant Bob Wollek or Belgian Thierry Boutsen, a late addition to the Swap Shop squad after his own car broke. I didn’t even know that then three-time Indy winner Al Unser, Sr. was on the team. But Foyt, I cared about. One of my earliest toy cars was a cheap plastic Foyt Coyote knockoff of ’70s vintage, a genericized replica of the car that won Super Tex his fourth Indy 500. In my jumble of toddler-age motorsports memories, Foyt, like Don Prudhomme, is of paramount import. And while I most associate A.J. with open-wheel Memorial Day weekends at my grandparents’ house, I went to sleep every night well into puberty looking at those two 962s; Henn’s janky Swap Shop logo plastered on the tail of Foyt’s Porsche was a Floridian thumb in the eye of the tidy, professional-looking Holbert car.
For better or for worse, I am not A.J. Foyt. Noting that the two of us are made of very different stuff would be first-order understatement. But I thought of him on my 41st birthday, while standing in the pits at Daytona and staring up the empty, impossibly-high checkerboard grandstands. The Specials’ “A Message to You, Rudy” spun softly, insistently, in the back of my mind. Out in the garages, the teams who’d come out for Ferrari’s Finali Mondiali were largely packed up and gone. The 488 GTBs parked along the pit wall? Those were for our little group of journalists. I was utterly daunted.
This mighty 661-hp Italian wonder sitting idle off to my right was a car with more power and less downforce than the bewinged 458 Challenge cars that had spent the weekend racing here, boasting a mid-’80s IROC-Z’s worth more power than the Ferrari P3/4 that spearheaded Maranello’s 1-2-3 Daytona victory in 1967. It’s the fourth-fastest car we’ve ever clocked around VIR in a decade of Lightning Lap testing.
This storied track—the place that killed Earnhardt and lent its name to Ferrari’s last great GT car of the 1960s—turned out to be more humbling than Laguna Seca and far more frightening than the Circuit de la Sarthe. I’ve had a couple of scary moments at Laguna, but I know the place. The Le Mans course, frankly, isn’t particularly troublesome. It’s just very long and very fast. Daytona, on the other hand, carries the portent of a circuit like the Isle of Man’s Snaefell Mountain Course. The dark spiritual heft of the France family’s monument to speed hangs thick in the Florida air.
Adult supervision was on hand in the form of Rafaelle De Simone, Ferrari’s chief test driver. His presence was both soothing and further unnerving. De Simone is my kind of instructor, preternaturally calm, only speaks when the words genuinely seem necessary. He’s also the man who tuned this car via umpteen laps around Fiorano, and I did not want to befoul his automobile. I also did not want to prove myself an abject pantywaist in his presence.
I left the 488’s dual-clutch transmission in automatic and snicked the right paddle into first gear, the engine gargling behind us as we motored down pit lane, hung a left at the hairpin, and merged onto the track. Nick Ienatsch‘s voice nagged in my head, “First, work on hitting your apexes, then work on speed.” A spurt of gas, and then onto the carbon-ceramic stoppers for a hard right-hander, another blast down to a fast left muddled by a sea of cones that deny entry to the track’s motorcycle configuration, a hard right at five that I tended to trail-brake into a bit too much, then on to turn six, at the end of which comes the somewhat awkward and quite abrupt transition up onto the banking.
The banking! The 31-degree angled slab that, along with its tri-oval layout, defines Daytona. It’s an abjectly surreal place. Under the lights, it’s a midnight Belgian motorway rethought by Hieronymus Bosch, a fascinating gray wall of night-terror wrongness. A veritable caricature of a racing surface. I found myself wishing I was on the Yamaha FZ-10 sitting in my driveway back home. Up to its top speed of 150 mph or so, the four-cylinder motorcycle is roughly the Ferrari’s performance equal. But the Yamaha has no windshield frame to obstruct visibility. In the Ferrari, I felt like the optimal sightline down the track must exist somewhere on the other side of the headliner.
I stopped thinking about bikes and what I couldn’t see and settled for peering through the upper left corner of the windshield. My hands were light on the wheel, but nerves had my upper arms as stiff as Tutankhamen’s. Earlier in the day, I’d had a vision in my mind of a twin-turbo Italian eight screaming behind my head as I ripped around the superspeedway portions of the track; a sixth-grade F40 daydream writ modern. The reality was more prosaic. The Ferrari’s engine, bolstered by forced-induction torque, pleasantly hummed along in seventh gear as we clipped down the track as quickly as I dared.
The Bus Stop is a weird and jarring aberration, its entrance an unceremonious gap between orange bollards dotting the left side of the long back straight. Looking for it at night is akin to hunting down a black hole by scanning the vastness of space for extra darkness, but tearing through the brief left-right-left deviation is actually rather fun. Then it’s a return to the banking and a blast across the finish line, those checkerboard grandstands peripherally flickering by, and we’re back around into the infield. I turned four laps of the course, and by the end of it, I was beginning to understand just what it might feel like to run the joint at real speed. It also left me with a whole new respect for the racers who do just that, holding wide-open throttle inches from the upper guardrail at 200 mph. That’s scroto-ovarian fortitude of a maximum degree. Daytona’s scary, but it’s not a hateful track. It wants you to go faster, a concrete siren on the edge of the Atlantic, singing from rocks disguised as urgent-care clinics, subpar resorts, and the lowest-brow chain restaurants.
As our group walked away from pit lane, our backs to the start/finish line, the massive lighting array shut down. We found our way back to the parking lot in darkness. In 1983 and 1985, Foyt left this track during the light of day, a winner. He later called the ’83 race, which he’d entered at the behest of his dying father, the most meaningful victory of his career. Three decades after I tacked that poster from the 1985 race onto my closet door, I walked away from Daytona as a rank schmoe who drove around the track four times, earning only a quiet “Very good,” in passing from De Simone. He was no doubt being unreasonably kind. But I’ve had a taste of the place, and that taste wasn’t enough. I want to go back.
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