Racing drivers receive all the glory but winning is a team effort. I was thinking about this recently as I drove to Caribbean Jack’s, a seafood restaurant at Daytona Beach. It was a bit of a hike – probably a 400-mile round trip, not that the distance really entered into it. The point is, I was wondering what to expect as I made for the seventh running of the Road Racing Veteran Crew Club dinner during the run-up to the 24 Hours of Daytona.
Thing is, the mechanics are the real heroes in motor racing. Good grease-monkeys are worth their weight in gold. They work long, unsociable hours away from the limelight, but they are racers to the core. They are in it because they love the sport as much as I do.
This wonderful organisation is closely linked with the Road Racing Drivers’ Club, which is chaired by Indy 500 winner, Bobby Rahal. I have attended quite a few of its get-togethers in the past, and written about them here. They are delightfully informal, a chance to catch up with old mates and rivals; to claim bragging rights. The older I get, the faster I was and all that.
The Crew Club dinner was much the same. It was laid on by Gary Cummings, who wrote to ask me if I would attend. There would be no regaling an audience with tales of derring-do from a stage. I would simply be there dining among a bunch of guys who once wielded spanners, many during my era of sports car racing, as it were.
As you all know by rote, I raced in the USA a lot, the IMSA GTP championship being my happy place during much of the 1980s. I knew some of the guys at the ‘do’ from my time in sports-prototypes, and got to know a great many others before the evening was over. What struck me was how eager everyone was to be there. There was one former mechanic who had been ravaged by a ghastly illness that meant he was confined to a wheelchair. He and his wife drove to Florida from their home in Tennessee, such was their determination to attend. That rather put my journey into perspective. I thoroughly enjoyed an evening full of laughter and an endless supply of anecdotes, a number of which were most enlightening!
As for the 24 Hours of Daytona itself, I wasn’t really sure what to make of the race other than that it provided plenty of battles spanning five c
