A long ago Daytona 24
An article for the Keystone Motor Club newsletter
In 1968 I went to the Daytona 24 in my Bertone Simca Coupe.
It had a great heater and we slept in it behind the timing/scoring trailer with the rest of the workers.
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There was a tiny building just outside the infield tunnel where we signed in as
Timers/scorers and we had an SCCA logbook to list our races. It was in the days before SCCA insisted on selling memberships to volunteer workers. Everyone I knew did it for fun for free, as being part of the car scene.
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I got my first jacket patch that time from Daytona.
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Later on when jackets went on sale at JM Fields, I bought a variety of Navy Blue jackets for the official MacDill Sports Car Club jacket...and I bought out ALL of them at every JM Fields that had any.......a coincidence that they had just gone on sale after I did the artwork for "The Prototype", the newsletter of MacDill Sports Car Club........which was coincidentally the identical collar and pocket style. Over time I acquired plenty of patches and sewed them on by hand close together with "invisible stitching"........and added a bunch more over the years for every track and every race I went to. Later I became a corner worker with Flagging and communications.
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The year I was voted outstanding member, MSCC agreed to let me to buy my own trophy, which placed me in Brown's Trophies on MacDill Avenue, where I met the sweetest girl ever, and who became my wife. She went with me to the races and everywhere else. All our friends were racers. I have a picture of her sitting in infield turn one...... looking bored.......but she never complained.........and she could drive! When you find a woman who can really drive, they are usually a LOT faster than the guys. We had also gone together to SCCA race driver's school together.......which did not hurt...... lol
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On vacation one year she out drove two cars on the same day on the Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolinas unofficial road course....in my championship-winning Datsun autocross car. I still have the car in my garage.
I still have the jacket.......and a pocket full of race patches I never had time to sew on. I have a drawer of non-race patches of places we went to on our vacations......
I still have our Coleman race cooler.......and her? She found a better deal on a husband.
I knew him and he was not a racer.
But she will always drive performance cars.........and never get ripped off on a car repair.
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Infield turn one, Daytona, had the timing/scoring trailer, with a flip clock placed inside the guard rail,
and we wrote down the numbers as our assigned car passed it. I arrived early and the guy I was relieving handed me three cards, and said: "Here. You can time mine. They are leading the race." And he ran out the door!
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Holy poot!
He handed me the three leading porsches! The same ones in this video. I was under pressure now. After a few laps you knew when to expect them to come around and could watch the flip clock for them to appear. In your spare time you could calculate and write down what their lap time had been. After awhile, it became a little boring.
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We had 3 or 4 hour shifts and the passes we got allowed us to go into the pits, and anywhere around the speedway. Some years it was cold, some years it was hot but It was always fun.
Dave and Sheila Haskard (also of MacDill Sports Car Club) kept a continuously running strip of car numbers as they went by the finish line.
I have no idea how they stayed awake for 24 hours. I did not have that much dedication. We went into the pits and other places, exploring every part of the pits and paddock in our off time. Looking at cars making pit stops, collecting press releases............. which I later used to write articles for The Prototype, MacDill Sports Car Club's newsletter.
And sometimes we would sleep...in the reclining seats of my Bertone Simca, My AMC Gremlin, rented a tent
eventually....snugged up together in a sleeping bag.....
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I read Autoweek and stories by Brock Yates in Car and Driver magazine and learned to be a writer.....I think that I have been a newsletter writer ever since I bought a car.....
whether anyone else thinks that or not....... lol
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