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Sleepless dispatches from America’s rip-roarin’ daylong exaltation of speed.

It’s a little past midnight, and a lone tire is rolling across pit road toward Team TGM (Ted Giovanis Motorsports) crew members. The Rolex 24 at Daytona endurance race is nearing its halfway point, and if full-blown loopiness has not quite settled over the entire affair, there are definitely some punchy pockets, and I’m in one now. The stray tire does not belong to Ted Giovanis’s GTD-class Porsche 911 GT3 R, and the crew members settle back into their camp chairs, huddling for warmth as best they can beneath layers of moving blankets and jackets draped over their fire suits.

This story originally appeared in Volume 10 of Road & Track.

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The dark, the lack of sleep, and the waves of the hypermanaged chaos of five classes competing on the same track at the same time make the Day-tona 24-hour race a twice-round-the-clock whirl-wind. But this year is special: It’s the event’s 60thanniversary, boasting a larger field of cars than has been seen in many years—and most exciting of all, it’s accompanied by an intense cold front, complete with a howling wind that is, scientifically speaking, like being stabbed with knives made of ice.

Welcome to the Sunshine State!

A gaggle of Navy ROTC kids from nearby Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University are running tram services as a fundraiser for their unit, ferrying visitors from the vast parking lots along the backstretch to the infield via grassy embankments and a dip through an underground tunnel. The tram drivers are occasionally possessed with the spirit of the track themselves, whipping in and out of the tunnel with a little too much flair to be entirely practical. On most Daytona race days, the increased breeze at top speeds is a welcome balm; tonight it’s an additional cruelty. The benches are aluminum, and the cold, which will dip into the low 30s, rapidly leaches into any part of your body that touches them. Every attendee swears they’d prefer sweltering on the blacktop.

May whatever deities you hold in your heart bless and keep forever the DaytonaInternational Speedway’s beautiful, blithe indifference to any vehicle brought in for nonracing purposes. If it can roll you across the vast grounds, it’s allowed, from little red wagons to Rollerbladesto ATVs tricked out at trim levels I didn’t know existed (and I’m from East Tennessee; this is a meaningful statement). These zip and weave between dozens of staged and impromptu auto-motive reunion parties. A fleet of lovingly pre-served VW buses is surrounded by cottage core housewares. An actual London black cab painted British racing green ambles by to reveal a stunning robin’s-egg-blue 911. A Datsun truck with a giant“4” decal on the door sits nose to nose with a sleek camper that probably costs more than your house.

The one exception to the benevolently loose grip of Daytona management is the carefully barricaded ponds on the property. Any body of water larger than a hubcap is surrounded by a chain-link fence too high for even sober adventurers to leap over easily. As aesthetically displeasing as the overall effect is, this practice is probably for the best, for any number of valid reasons. But the ponds, for once, pose no danger to life or property in the plummeting temperatures and relentless winds.

The Bass Prop Shop next door to the track sells out of gloves before the sun is even down. We learn there is such a thing as archery mittens when our photographer, fresh off a plane from Southern California, snags the last pair. And in the infield, anything that can be used for warmth is being used for warmth. Blankets that have spent a decade or so moldering in truck beds are being worn as capes. Two enterprising dudes in Florida State gear have remembered that life jackets, by virtue of being nylon, are windproof, and they don the vests over their gray hoodies.

The Ferris wheel is alight but not moving; the operators lament that it worked at their last stop (in case you were harboring the opinion that a Ferris wheel in a racetrack infield could not be any more delightfully dangerous, a temporarily installed one might do the trick). Next to it, the Vortex ride does a brisk business, filling repeatedly with lunatics who somehow crave more of the cold knife wind. In perhaps the biggest upset of the night, the smell of cigars outpaces that of both cigarettes and homegrown weed.

The fans aren’t the only ones caught sideways by the weather. The cars, their tires, even the computer components—nothing has really been road-tested at these temperatures. The alarming scenarios this cold and humidity could pose are myriad: damp air coalescing into freezing mist and hardening into black ice on the track, slick tires the teams are not permitted to warm before setting them on freezing concrete and driving onto freezing asphalt, the cars not starting up again if they have to sit idle for long stretches. Most of these won’t manifest. But at the moment, nobody knows that or can safely assume anything will work the way it’s supposed to.

Dusk is a perennial danger zone in endurance racing, and when it arrives, every driver has a least favorite spot on the track. The worst is coming out of the infield’s Turn 4, when the sun goes down over the back of the stands and creates blind spots, and coming out of Turn 6 onto the banking. Tonight’sweather gives rise to a host of new trouble spots. At least one team is taking casual bets among themselves over which cars will hit the wall attempting to exit the pits.

The wind and the damp haven’t seriously affected the action on the track but are laying waste to all the makeshift warming mechanisms of the infield. Fires spring up all over. Some creative souls have fashioned their own chimneys or brought portable firepits to install alongside their RV setups. Some just dig holes in the ground.

It’s nearing full dark, and the running lights blaze to life atop the car roofs. One might think that bolting unnecessary components to the outside of race cars would be a hard sell to the folks in charge of making them aerodynamic. But multiple engineers profess to have loved the practice even a couple of decades ago, when these lights were heavier to mount, if only because it makes the cars easier to pick out in the field.

You might have to look at a map to appreciate just how directly Daytona Beach International Airport abuts the speedway. From a noise-ordinance perspective, it’s a tidy civic arrangement, and a half-remembered tale floats around of Dale Sr.’s ability to make it from the finish line to the comfort of his plane in seven minutes flat. As we round the backstretch to reenter the tunnel, a tall man in bright yellow cargo pants swings a can of Bud like a clutch purse, ambling toward the stretch of chain-link and barbed-wire fencing that separates raceway from runway. Confronted with a necessarily stern “THIS IS A WORKING AIRPORT” sign, he leans in, as if to absorb it a single letter at a time, then rears back and utters “Huh” in a tone that suggests he has finally met a worthy adversary after years of searching.

A celebratory fireworks display begins. It’s pretty, not excessively extravagant, and over fairly quickly by Central Florida standards, maybe by necessity. The drivers must be warned ahead of time (imagine being confronted, eight hours into an endurance race, with a series of colorful explosions in your peripheral vision). And if the weather’s just wrong, the smoke will settle onto the track and sit there. Which, like a lot of things at this racetrack, would probably look incredible, but nobody’s in a hurry to actually see it happen.

There’s a rapid post-fireworks fan exodus from the speedway, with a sense of purpose that’s kinda funny, in that only-in-Florida way. A young woman in the bleachers, part of the last group of stalwart holdouts braving the wind in the cheap seats, suggests offhandedly that Disney parks have programmed tourists to believe that any show is over immediately after the fireworks end. An air of suspicion settles over the group. Have Daytona officials wired visitors to stay up past their bedtime to increase nacho sales? Who can say? No one drops a “That’s how they get you,” but it’s on every nodding face.

Following a collision on the track, some youths have scavenged from a tow truck what must be $1000 worth of intact carbon-fiber panel. They pose for group photos, flexing in front of the bleachers. Many vendors are shuttering. Most of the remaining fans are retreating to their RVs to watch Royal Rumble or televised coverage of the race that’s happening all around them.

Back in the pits, crews assigned to cars now out of commission combine efforts with their sister cars’ crews. Off-duty crew members take sleeping shifts. In the narrow walkway behind the pit tents, a crewman smokes a cigarette with flagrant disregard for the fact that he is leaning on a fuel drum.

At 76, Ted Giovanis is competing at Daytona for the second time in his GT3 R, and he tries to take the long view of the dark hours ahead. “Basically, you gotta make it through the night,” he says. “And once the day comes, then you can start thinking about racing: who you’re gonna race with, who the competition might be.”

Ferdinand Zvonimir Maria BalthusKeith Michael Otto Antal Bahnam Leonhard von Habsburg-Lothringen, heir apparent to the Houseof Habsburg-Lorraine, is now leading. Please finish your champagne.

Between crewing for Vasser Sullivan’s Lexus GTD-class entries, Bozi Tatarevic is on something like his 16th straight hour of giving every fan who either retreated from the cold or couldn’t make it at all a front-row seat to the action. A prolific tweeter, he’s been posting from behind the scenes since before 8 a.m., creating a kind of all-access mobile show that covers everything from his gear bag (lots of charging cables, multiple flavors of Tic Tacs) to typical midrace refreshments (Pedialyte is unsurprisingly popular) to candid shots of team cars going through inspection and teammates at work.

As he’s explaining why concentration is trickiest during the 2–5 a.m. leg, a nearby bank of monitors shows Jimmie Johnson’s Cadillac and Dirk Müller’s Mercedes colliding and skidding into the grass. Midsentence, Bozi flips from show to business. His other earpiece goes in, and behind him crew members who had been dozing are fastening on helmets and securing neck gaiters. Even the possibility of an early pit stop is run like a fire drill. The crew’s next hurdle is to calm down and let the excitement and adrenaline dissipate so they can recharge.

Even in the calmer stretches of the race, if nothing and nobody is screwing up any-where, the drivers are fed a constant mantra of“Keep doing what you’re doing,” which can be maddening to hear for this long. It’s a nice problem to have, but can still feel faintly deranged as the clock stick toward 4 a.m.

Physical conditioning is of primary importance for this event, but on race day itself, the name of the game is focus and flexibility. The weather, again, is not helping. Along with all the usual aches and pains, and strains from long g-force exposure, prior joint injuries have a nasty tendency to act up in the cold. Multiple teams bring massage therapists to help combat stiffness and soreness.

Giovanis says that in the moment, endurance racing is more mentally taxing than physically demanding. “You think it’s a driving game, but it’s a thinking game,” he says. “It’s not strength-driven. You should’ve already done all of that. This is why you did all of that, so you shouldn’t be try- ing to exert yourself. It’s all about conserving.”

Back in the infield, most campers have gone dark, the bleachers and thoroughfares all but abandoned. Even the British radio announcers are openly bemoaning the cold that has driven the vast majority of the crowd to shelter. The near desertion of the infield serves to highlight just how sonically different the 24 is from the 500. If you stand in one place for long enough, you can pick out the sounds of individual cars. Surrounded on all sides by streaking glowing streams, and with the Ferris wheel as a glittering backdrop, you could easily imagine yourself in Hong Kong, or Rio de Janeiro, or the Mario Kart universe, with minimal extra Coors in your system. Does it completely defy credulity to report feeling a gathering sense of peace here? Not hypothermia, but a real sort of serenity?

Dawn is still two long hours out. The new hot spot, literally, is the Pie Daddy truck in the infield. The proprietors, scoffing at their neighbors who shuttered their vans at midnight, plan to stay open for the entire race. It’s the last remaining point of congregation in the night, the only warmth to be had. The heads of a dozen strangers gathered in twos and threes bend over cardboard boats of fried doughnuts and steaming hand pies as if in silent prayer.

Dusk has nothing on dawn in terms of looming traps. Giovanis is back behind the wheel for the early-morning stint, barreling straight into the sun on Turns 1 and 2. There’s a second—a second and a half maybe—when there’s nothing visible at all from inside the cockpit and nothing to do about it but damn the torpedoes.

The Porsche doesn’t have any side mirrors. During the night, Matt Plumb has knocked one off, Owen Trinkler the other. Nobody told Giovanisthis when he got in the car. “I found out in Turn 6when I had to come down low,” he later explained.“The spotter says I’m clear. I go to look, and there’s nothing there. I said, ‘Wait a minute.’ And I come down low and look over to the right, and there’s nothing there either.”

“What did you guys do last night?”