Fire Ants, Boxing Rings and Race Cars
2009 12 Hours of Sebring
By Gary Becker
You can get the actual 2009, 12 Hours of Sebring race report in any number of other publications so I’m going to give you my perspective of the goings on at this year’s running of the event. It’s not the perspective from behind the pits scene, or behind the teams scene or even behind the drivers scene, but rather an up close and personal look at what really makes Sebring so special, a behind the fan’s scene.
When you work for a small publication like Sports Car Illustrated.com and request press credentials it is not unlike Moses asking the Lord for an eleventh commandment only instead of being kicked off the mountain top your request is met with entire race staff bent over in laughter. Not to be denied, I packed up my aging Toyota and headed to Sebring on Thursday with 5 crisp twenty dollar bills stored in into my otherwise empty wallet all to be used to gain entry onto the race grounds for the Toyota and myself.
On arrival, (the police report also starts this way) I found Sebring to be just as the weather person had forecasted, hot and dry. It had not rained in weeks and was so dry that when a vehicle from one of the support races spun out in the hairpin, the heat from the car’s exhaust actually set the grass on fire. The offending driver and car motored off as corner workers tried to extinguish a grass fire with equipment designed to beat down the flames on a burning race car. Needless to say the brave corner workers soon discovered why most of Southern California goes up in flames every couple of years as a stiff breeze fanned the fire engulfing an ever larger piece of Sebring landscape. A fire crew soon arrived with the proper tools to fight a grass fire, water, and the fire was put out leaving a rather large area of scorched earth as a reminder of how easy it is to burn Central Florida during a drought.
As practice ended so did the drought, well at least temporarily, as a small rain shower parked itself over the grounds and deposited enough moisture to do two things, raise the humidity and wake up the fire ants.
Apparently when it gets very dry, fire ants go dormant. When it’s no longer dry, fire ants no longer sleep. Instead they feast on every human ankle they can find. This is exactly what happened after the brief shower. Billions upon billions of energized red fire ants zeroed in and attacked every race fan in the area. The motto for the weekend was no longer drink, watch race cars and eat, it became drink, watch for fire ants or be eaten.
The most bizarre happening of the weekend took place in the aptly named “Party Zone” where for reasons unknown to anyone with a brain the producers of an upcoming reality boxing show decided to tape the opening show at a race track filled with thousands of drunken race fans. That’s right, in the middle of the “Party Zone” for one of the most famous races in the world was a boxing ring filled with overly tattooed and energy drink charged spokes people yelling for the crowd to get ready for some rock’em - sock’em action. I knew that nothing good was going to come from promoting open brawling to a large crowd of drunken twenty something males with an over abundance of testosterone so I left the ring area and spent the rest of the evening in the Patron tent sampling their fine products.
Race day arrived with bright sunshine and a mild hangover as I along with every other race fan within a thousand miles and a large contingency of fire ants made our way to the pre-race grid. There were so many people on the grid that gaining access to the cars and drivers was impossible. Not all was lost, as I walked down the pit lane to return to my campsite I heard a metal on concrete clanking sound behind me. As I continued to walk the sound grew ever louder. I finally turned around to find out what was making such a racket and to my horror and astonishment a team of Budweiser Clydesdales were about to turn me into a former Miller Lite drinker. I quickly moved out of the way and enjoyed the rare treat of being so close to such magnificent animals.
The great thing about long races is that you can wonder around and enjoy the race from many locations which is exactly what I did once the race started. As I did my best to fill up the memory card in my camera and thanked God I no longer had to pay for camera film, I spent time watching the race from nearly every perspective a four mile long track offers. Even though the economy had limited the number of cars racing that day, I still basked in the smells, sound and feel only an auto race can produce.
As the race ended I was in the paddock standing behind the winning Audi pits marveling at all the video monitors and digital readouts that have helped make racing no longer affordable even for the manufacturers, I thought of the days of Phil Hill, Dan Gurney, Cobras, Chaparrals and chalk pit boards that forty five years ago as a teenager in Wisconsin I read about in Road and Track. There I was standing where so much history had been made and was now witnessing history as it happened. Even with the fire ants and boxing ring, there is nothing better than a weekend at Sebring or any other race track.
