The apex was visible as I headed into Turn 5 and clipped past it, then everything went blank. The glare on the windscreen, a mix of pitted glass, fluids from other cars, and the nighttime lights from the Daytona International Speedway grandstands made going to full throttle as challenging as taking Turn One at Indy without lifting. Like burying the pedal in a bank of fog with your eyes closed. I was completely blind.
I felt a combination of fear and excitement merged with the worry of what others would think if I lifted. So, I didn’t.
This was one of the most thrilling and difficult things I’d done in my racing career (and an enormous learning experience): Driving blind at 3am during the Daytona 24-Hour race.
In 1993, I was racing in my first Daytona 24-Hour race, driving a Tiga-Mazda Camel Lights car, which is kind of equivalent to today’s LMP2. That year, I was scheduled to race the entire Indy Car season, driving for Dale Coyne Racing. A few weeks before Daytona, a friend asked if I wanted to co-drive with him and two others in the 24-Hour race. Well, duh! Plus, I had a strong feeling that it would be the ideal tune-up for my Indy car plans.
Like many of the cars I’d end up racing throughout most of my career, the Tiga-Mazda was not the sharpest tool in the shed. But it wasn’t the dullest, either. In a 24-hour race, a mediocre tool in the hands of a good carpenter can make some nice-looking pieces of furniture. That was my hope: nice-looking would mean a podium finish, at a minimum.
The first half of the race went pretty much according to plan, with the one exception of the driver’s-side door wanting to open while driving at top speed on the banking. The door hinged at the top and swung upward to provide access to the cockpit, which meant reaching across with the opposite hand/arm, grabbing a cable and pulling it down on both the front and back straightaways for something like an hour or more before the crew could give the latch some attention during a pit stop.
One section of track, from Turn 5—the almost 180-degree right hander that aims you back towards the oval,main grandstands, and tower—to the apex of Turn 6 taught me some big lessons that night.
In the 90s, the lighting at the Speedway was nowhere near as bright as it is now. It was actually dark in the infield at night. Depending on the year, you can have clear skies and a full moon to help light up your driving life; in ’93, we had no moonlight, and cloudy skies. It was dark.
Let me set the scene: My third stint started around 1am, and about 30 minutes into it, I followed a car that was leaking fluids, likely a bit of oil. It was just enough to cover the windscreen, which was already pitted and dirty. That took dark to a whole other level. A fuel stint was about an hour and thirty minutes—again, very different to today’s cars, which can only do less than an hour on fuel (energy). I was doing a double stint, which meant I’d be driving for over three hours, with one pit stop in the middle; that meant I had an hour before I had any chance of having the windscreen cleaned.
Exiting Turn 5, aiming back towards the lights on the outside of the track, they glared directly on the windscreen. I was driving blind. The first time through Turn 5 with the oily windscreen was terrifying. I wasn’t sure where the track was!
Three thoughts went through my head:
The first thought was the logical one, obviously, but I was definitely not thinking logically! At the time we were running in second place, and I didn’t want to sacrifice the position for self-preservation. As the fastest driver on the team, I felt I had a duty to keep the position and continue to be fast. Later in my career I might have made a better decision… nah, who am I trying to kid?! I would have done the same thing today as I did over thirty years ago.
For a number of laps, I tried to balance the need for speed with my fear of crashing, letting the team down, the expense (I would have had to pay for at least some of the costs, and at that point in my life and career, any amount would have bankrupted me), fear of hurting my reputation, fear of embarrassment. I really don’t think there was any fear of being injured, though. Being injured, or worse, was something that happened to other drivers. That’s the way I thought.
Within half a dozen laps, all the fear went away, replaced with joy. I’d found a rhythm. I went from fright to appreciating and enjoying the challenge. This was fun!
I drove by sense of feel, sound, and timing, because my visual sense was useless, non-existent.
So here I am. I clip past the T5 apex, feed in the throttle and release the steering. I track out to the left, feelingmy way out of the corner at full throttle, towards my blind target. In second gear, the Mazda rotary engine whines and then screams up through the revs, and then right on cue—like the previous hundred or so laps I’d driven—I feel the vibrations of the serrated exit curbing. Target Number One achieved.
Memory—mental programming—aims the Tiga from the left-side curbing to the right side of the track to set up for the turn-in to the left-hander, Turn 6. I flick the shifter from second to the third, hear the revs rise, and I literally count in my head, quickly upshift to fourth… one, two… BRAKE, down two gears to second… wait a millisecond to feel the slight dip in the track, and then turn in towards where I hope the apex is as I trail off the brakes. Viiippptthhh, the sound of the left-side tires running over the apex curb. Got it. And there’s the track again as I head towards the darkness, looking up the banking.
There was a slight sense of relief when the headlights of my Tiga lit up the usual darkness without any glare on the windscreen. There was also a sense of anticipation for the next lap. This really was fun, this driving blind, relying on my kinesthetic and auditory senses to drive the car, driving totally in rhythm.
We went on to finish second in the race, but it was what I learned from this experience that made my first Daytona 24-Hour race so rewarding.
I often talk about how vision is easily the most important sense we use when driving, in terms of getting around the track. While being hearing-impaired or not having any sense of feel would make it more difficult to drive, being blind would be make it impossible; but what we hear and feel is what allows us to sense and drive at the limit. Which sense really is the most important? Definitely vision for direction and placement of the car, but it’sthe kinesthetic and auditory senses that mostly drive the limit. And sometimes they’re what gets us to where we want to go when our vision is restricted—or eliminated, altogether.
What I learned that night at Daytona is that you can drive blind… for a short period of time, if you have the programming to do so, and you rely on your other senses to fill in the gaps. In fact, I’m pretty sure this experience influenced my thinking about the importance of kinesthetic and auditory senses, and why I focus so much on developing them in my coaching and training.