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CUP: Daytona – The Need For Speed
Since 1959, Daytona International Speedway has been a magnet for all things fast…
Mike Hembree  |  Posted January 10, 2013   Daytona Beach, FL
Daytona International Speedway is unique among NASCAR Sprint Cup Series tracks. (Photo: Getty Images)
The fan, having survived the intricacies of Jacksonville traffic 100 miles north, circles down off Interstate 95 and onto U.S. Highway 92, more popularly known as International Speedway Boulevard in this context.

First up are the typical inhabitants of interstate interchanges – service stations, restaurants, a tangle of traffic coming in from the south. But then, beyond the tree tops in the distance, it begins to come into view – the reason so many thousands exit I-95 at this spot (most from the north), looking anxiously for the flags and spires of the place every dirt-track racer and every dirt-track fan once saw in their dreams.

Daytona.

There it sprawls on the right, 2.5 miles of the best design – and still a wildly raceable one – Bill France Sr. could produce at that time, a very fast ribbon of racing that would quickly be judged as the place that would separate those who could drive at impossible speeds from those who simply thought they could.

The race to separate those two distinctions continues today.

Construction began in 1957 on swampy ground adjacent to the airport, and racing began less than two years later, in February 1959 with the first Daytona 500.

From that winter day to this, Daytona International Speedway has seen the absolute best and tragic worst of stock car racing, from landmark triumphs by champions like Richard Petty, David Pearson, Dale Earnhardt Sr. and Bobby Allison to the brutal deaths of dozens, from a little-known Midwestern dreamer named Ricky Knotts to The Man Himself, Earnhardt.

As surely as they haunt Lambeau and Fenway and Indy and the turf at Notre Dame, ghosts roam here. The death list approaches 30.

Still, like the snowbirds of Maine and Michigan, they arrive on the coast of Florida every mid-winter, their senses wanting from weeks of that ugliest of things to the race fan – silence.

It ends at Daytona, and here it is, barely recognizable as the track France Sr. unwrapped in 1959.

The course is the same; everything else is not. Even the prized twin tunnels under the fourth turn, marvels that so pleased France, are now mostly an afterthought, thanks to the wider turn-one tunnel structure that changed the approach to the infield for most. The dog track that once held ground tight along the outside of the first turn is no more, the speedway finally having gained enough control to watch its movement to a new location. Old taverns and watering holes, evening homes to drivers and mechanics for decades, also crumbled, and the area around the speedway now sparkles with restaurants and shops and a giant pedestrian bridge – the Dale Earnhardt Memorial Bridge – that carries fans across International Speedway Boulevard to the promised land.

Jimmie Johnson fan Robbie Wallace, in town from Tallahassee, stood near the bridge Wednesday and watched a mild winter breeze float the speedway flags. He was on his way to see the Dale Earnhardt statue outside the fourth turn, completing a pilgrimage made annually by thousands.

“It’s Daytona, it’s magic,” he said. “It gives you chill bumps to be around here even when nothing is going on. Just the history of the place and knowing all that’s gone on here. Just the word Daytona is enough to get you excited about racing.”

For Wallace and others, that excitement is likely to grow over the coming years as the speedway puts into play a grand plan that probably will consume decades, and ultimately will transform the northern side of the track and adjacent properties into a motorsports wonderland of sorts.

Approved by city officials last year, the plan would create a series of five fan entrance areas outside the frontstretch and turn one on a landscape now covered in alternating patches of asphalt and grass. The frontstretch grandstands would be reworked, and there would be new suite sections.

Speedway officials have been strangely quiet about any specifics of the project since submitting general plans to city officials, but those given to dreaming about the possibilities for the speedway property, which also includes space across International Speedway Boulevard from the track, envision hotels, restaurants, shops and even housing units, with room reserved for a casino operation if the state should approve that sort of activity.

It would be a new and very different Daytona, but still the same course burned by Petty, Pearson, Earnhardt and Allison.

Still Daytona.

Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 31 years. He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.
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