Repairing the Fender
Today would have been my Dad’s 88th birthday. He passed away Labor Day weekend, 2009, a month after a visit to see me at my home in North Carolina.
In early 2006 and again in 2007, we drove to Daytona, Florida, to celebrate his birthday (his 70th and 71st) at the Rolex 24 race.
My dad would fly into Greensboro from Tucson, and get a rental car, splurging on a Cadillac CT5. He would pick me up at my house after work and we would drive deep into South Carolina that first evening, to stay at the Comfort Inn in Hardeeville, leaving a short drive south on I-95 the next day.
He had been to the Rolex 24 several times previously, and really knew his way around. He would park our rental car in the infield the morning of the race, and immediately head over to the garages, where fans get to have a close-up look at the cars and meet any drivers who happened to be around.
He bought us infield and garage passes, and once the race started at noon, he would try to wheedle his way into the hot pits, but with no success.
Sometimes we would go over to the main bleachers, the cheap seats, and watch the race from above, but our favorite view was track-side, at eye level. The Daytona GT prototype cars can reach speeds of 180 mph on the straightaways, but it was more fun watching them navigate the infield turns and the chicane (from the French “to create difficulties,” the root of our word chicanery) on the backstretch.
Lunch and dinner came from an infield concession stand, cheeseburgers and fries, nothing too fancy. Daytona in early February can be cold, not topping 50 degrees, so I may have survived on hot chocolate one year.
As night fell, there were still 18 hours of racing remaining for the 55 Rolex 24 teams (three to five drivers per team, driving in shifts), and the race fans.
I would doze in the reclined passenger seat of the rental car in the infield during the all-night racing, but I was usually alone.
I once got up at 4 a.m., and went looking for my dad, the GT cars accelerating out the curves onto a banked section of Daytona track, a full 16 hours into the race.
The only place open was selling coffee in a styrofoam cup, a place where I would buy a biscuit for breakfast as the sun rose in Florida.
I eventually found my dad in a brightly-lit garage (behind the ropes, barely), fully enthralled, watching a crew repair a crumpled fender or a crumpled wing of one of the cars. It was meticulous work, repairing the car to get it back on the track, and I’m sure he would have loved to help out, if asked.
He was a free spirit, and he was in his element in that garage, and I will keep him there forever.
This memoir essay will appear in Migratory Patterns: Essays in late 2024
