I have to admit it: Automotive racing isn’t really one of my strong suits.
I have nothing against the sport. It’s just not something I’ve really kept tabs on, outside of NASCAR’s Chase for the Cup, in the same way most America gets curious about soccer once every four years. I’ve just never been able to commit to it, even when I was young and my dad brought me to watch my uncle race his sprint car.
Not long ago, I wrote about what is and isn’t considered a sport. I know that the general feeling about racing — especially NASCAR — down south is completely different from what I grew up with up north, but I consider it to be a sport. These men and women are putting their bodies through a torture test in those cars, often sweating profusely enough to shed pounds like a boxer before a weigh-in.
This is especially true of people who voluntarily compete in those all-day endurance races. I couldn’t bring myself to watch much of the 24 Hours of Sebring, just as I can’t commit to a regular NASCAR race right now, but that’s probably because I look at racing as something I’d rather do than watch. And because those drivers go out there and race for 24 hours, I can’t knock them at all.
I didn’t know much about those races before this weekend. (Though I did have some assumptions.) I wanted to know more, so when Durant High School senior Chris DeShong mentioned an endurance race he’d driven in, I pressed the subject.
Chris’ race team has raced in several of these events, and he himself has raced in one of the 14-hour events. Everything is split into two-hour shifts for every driver a team has on hand, as long as everything goes well with the car’s fuel levels. If it’s running low, they’ll switch earlier at the pit.
He remembers the race well: It was in October, and things really didn’t go as planned.
“It was so funny,” he says. “That weekend, the last time that that car had been raced was September of 2013. I did the 8-to-10 a.m. shift, which was when the race started, then got out of the car and let the car’s owner in. Within 15 minutes, he said he wasn’t feeling very good and brought the car back in.”
Chris ended up getting back in the car for another two hours. This is a rough deal for older drivers, who often elect to wear “cool suits” lined with tubing that pumps cold water throughout in order to prevent the person from baking into a human casserole. But, because teenagers have more stamina than they know what to do with, Chris got back in there in a regular fire suit.
No big deal, he says.
“It’s really the focus that we have in the car, and the exhilaration,” he says. “When we’re driving, we simply focus on driving and nothing else.
“Unless, of course, a spider starts crawling down here and you see it dangling. Then you’re like, ‘Oh, God, no!’ I had that happen once.”
Just after noon, Chris was able to get out of the car. He nearly passed out because of a combination of the intense heat and having sat in a car for nearly four hours straight.
“You’re sitting in there, and you can smell the heat coming from the engine,” he says. “‘Oh, yeah, this is pretty hot,’ but you’re not trying to focus on that. You get out of the car and you’re like, ‘I can’t believe I just did that!’”
After he walked it off, he drove back home, threw on a tux and drove to Tampa for Durant’s Homecoming dance that night.
Can’t knock an effort like that, no matter what your opinion of auto racing is.
Contact Justin Kline at jkline@plantcityobserver.com.