By The Commish

The silver-haired lady behind the window at Daytona USA grins at me conspiratorially. An hour ago I confessed I was playing hooky from a professional meeting to sneak over here, and she gave me some tips about seeing as much as possible in two hours’ time. But that plan has gone out the window in light of some new information I got while taking the tram tour of the infield…the Petty Experience is doing ride-alongs today and I’ve got my chance, finally, to ride on a restrictor plate track. I’ve done this before on mile-and-a-half tracks, but Daytona is the Big Kahuna, and I can’t resist its siren call.

I pay my fee, sign the waivers, and stand out in the sun waiting for the shuttle to pick me up. When the driver shows up he laughs at me and says, “That grin on your face—it’s going to be a lot bigger in a few minutes.” I laugh and tell him I’m looking to compare this to the ride-along at Charlotte and he says, “Well, we’ll have to see if we can step it up for you today.”

When we pull into the infield, I get a pleasant surprise-- one of the Petty drivers is Rick, my ride-along driver from Lowe’s last summer. He grins, pleased to be recognized, shakes my hand and chats animatedly with me about how his career has been going, while his fellow driver joins in the teasing. When asked by the second driver how fast Rick claimed we went in Charlotte, I say “165,” and he laughs, saying, “Well, Brent over there will get you going a lot better than that.”

Suiting up takes a lot less time when you’ve done it before, and I have time to talk to the coordinator about the Pettys’ new sprint car series and how excited they all are about it. Then Brent, the driver handling the ride-along car, pulls back in and discharges his rider, and it’s time to go out on those high banks. I clamber into the car (a challenge with a Hutchens device already hooked up) and am introduced to Brent, who sounds surprised that I’ve done this before. We pose quickly for the Petty photographer and Brent asks if I have any requests. “Just as fast as you can and as close to the wall as you’re allowed to go,” I say, and he fires the engine.

Pulling out at Daytona is like... well, it’s like nothing else in the world. The groove is 30 feet wide and the drop from SAFER barrier to the yellow line is 44 feet vertically. The car has to go at least 90 mph just to stay up on those banks. As we pull into Turn 1 the first time, I’m astonished at the lack of G-force—there’s much less sense of being pulled to the outside of the car than I felt before. At the same time, the nose bucks in the wind and I get a sense of why it is so hard to control a car in a pack with a restrictor plate on the motor.

As we swing into Turn 2, my excitement turns to astonishment, because we are going straight uphill at full throttle. I realize I can read the numbers on the seat rails in the stands, the label on the bottle of Sun Drop abandoned on the infield grass—even as quickly as we are going, my eyes are able to focus on little details like that. We pull down the long back straightaway and I am able to see a fish splash in the infield lake. I feel Brent lift just a little as we go into Turn 3, a little higher than we did going into Turn 1, and again I am astonished by the lack of G-forces pulling me. We pass the flagpole where Dale Earnhardt lost his life, climb up the hill into Turn 4, and enter the tri-oval with the engine getting close to its full strength.

Lap 2 starts with more bucking of the nose of the car, and the car dives even harder into the corner. Brent has taken a higher line this time, and the sensation of going up the hill into Turn 2 isn’t as strong. The wind is strong across my face and I know I’m grinning like a banshee, but this feels so smooth it hardly feels like we are at speed. Brent lifts a little on the backstretch again—I’m astonished that I can feel that—but he floors it again going into Turn 3 and this time the car really bucks. As we come up into Turn 4 it almost feels like the car could launch itself, as if from a motocross jump, but gravity inexorably pulls us back, and we enter the tri-oval for the last time.

The third lap is the best—Brent’s line is perfect, the cross-breeze drops off, and the car absolutely flies through the turns. By the time we get to the end of the backstretch, we are at full speed on this de-tuned, restricted engine—175 mph and loving it. But as we come out of Turn 4, alas, Brent downshifts and pulls us down to pit road, slowing the car as the ride comes to an end. We pull back across the start/finish line, slide into the pit stall, and Brent shuts the engine down. My three minutes of magic are over.

The Petty team reaches in to unhook me as I thank Brent for the ride; they agree with me that nothing you can see on TV can simulate that “uphill” feeling in the Daytona turns. As I crawl awkwardly from the car (and there is no way to do that gracefully), they start encouraging me to come back on Saturday for the on-track racing school. I laugh and confess that I never learned to drive a stick shift. They say quickly that I will only have to shift three times and they’ll show me how, but I tell them they have better things to do then to spend their day replacing a transmission.

As I pull off my Hutchens, helmet and firesuit, I’m filled with exhilaration and some other emotion I can’t even name. There’s something so primal, so wild, about flying at that speed that I can’t even describe it. The Petty guys are all asking me if this was better than Charlotte, as if this were a competition between tracks, and I assure them that this was faster and better. I mention how the front end bucked in the wind and they tell me that it’s even more obvious in the draft, that that’s why it’s so hard for Chevys to draft as close as they have to in plate races and why they spin out so easily. Now so many things I didn’t understand in plate races are much clearer to me—and I can’t imagine how the drivers do this for four hours, inches apart, and still survive.

After Brent autographs my ticket and I pick up my souvenir plaque and photo from the trailer, I shake hands one more time with the Petty staff, promise to come back to take a driving class sometime, and hop back on the tram to head back to Daytona USA. I talk to a couple from Minnesota and we share our astonishment at how much detail we were able to see. And then the truck stops in front of the cashier’s booth, we climb off, and my Daytona adventure comes to an end.

I cross back to the cashiers’ booth to tell her how much I enjoyed the ride. All the women insist on seeing my picture, tell me that I am lucky to have had Brent drive me since he goes the fastest, and grin as we share the sisterhood of speed. Forty-five minutes and a quick shower later, I am back in a conference room, notepad in hand, listening to a presentation on fourteenth-century literature, and grinning quietly. I savor the moment. I have flown on the high banks of Daytona... and it doesn’t even matter that I was in the 8 car.

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