Night Practice at Daytona 24
An excerpt from the DEADLY DRIVER sequel, SWITCHBACK
The first daylight test session went very well as Bryce familiarized himself with the car, the team, and the track. The layout at Daytona for the endurance races would be new to him and incorporated the high-banked, high-speed corners of the superspeedway but also ran on the infield’s many left and right tight turns and the famous “bus stop” meant to slow cars on the backstretch. Getting acquainted with the white #55 Mercedes AMG he’d be racing in the GTD Pro class came quickly at 175 mph. It had to. With significantly different horsepower and handling than his F1 car, he had a blast getting used to the car. Frank Dini, the team’s lead engineer, a short and stocky New York Italian in his 70s who had wrenched on cars that had won the twenty-four-hour races at Daytona and LeMans a handful of times had given Bryce a smile and a high five after he brought the car back to the garage without a scratch.
“Now keep it that way, and we’ll win this thing,” Dini had said with a confident wink.
Many hours later, after Bryce had somehow continued to shelve Jack Madigan’s death until the end of the day when he’d be alone and let the tears flow, he buckled in for the first nighttime practice session. The temperature had dropped, and Bryce wanted to fire the engine, get back on track, focus on racing, and push everything down deeper inside. On the flight to Daytona, Bryce realized Madigan wouldn’t survive and had already begun to mourn the loss. It had been the abruptness of the news that had delivered the gut punch. Now, it was time to park that emotion, at least for now, and go fast again because that’s what racers do. This time, in the darkness and the rain. In Formula One, he had always done well in the wet, often attributing it to his experience growing up driving fast on and off the roads of Vermont and New Hampshire. As he sat quietly on pit road, buckled in, awaiting the direction to start the engine, Bryce thought about the field of international driving stars who surrounded him on the grid. He thought of his plight, a trained killer for the country he loved. He laughed to himself. I wonder how many of these people have ever done what I’ve done. Not just race but served their country in another type of uniform as a spy.
He thought of the film Ford versus Ferrari he had watched the night before, where two major brands, American and Italian, fought it out in endurance races just like this one. The fact that the actor Matt Damon had also been the star of the Jason Bourne spy films, something Bryce could also relate to, made him laugh. Maybe they’ll make a movie about me someday.
An hour later, while racing around the thirty-one-degree banking of turn four, just as a light rain began to taper off and he moved low to overtake a slower car, his right front tire exploded, which made the car turn right and crash hard and fast into the white retaining wall at the top of the track. Within seconds, the hard crash and collision with two other race cars left three smoldering piles of recycling strewn across the track apron. He stood with the two other drivers, a lanky Italian road racing star and an up-and-coming rookie from Brazil. He surveyed the damage as a small fire erupted in one of the cars but was quickly extinguished by the safety crew as they arrived. After a short ride and visit to the infield medical center, a requirement for any driver involved in a crash, all three were released to reunite with their teams and assess the damage. As Bryce’s destroyed Mercedes was brought back to the garage area on a flatbed, a crewmember had driven Bryce to his pearl white Prevost motor coach in a golf cart within seconds of leaving the infield hospital. The cause of the crash had yet to be discovered, but just after Bryce finished dressing back into street clothes, Danny knocked at the door and entered.
“Your crew chief wants to show you something in the garage,” Danny called out. “He said it was very serious and not to say anything to anyone.” The rain and late hour had sent most back to their hotels or into the warmth and dryness of the RVs and motor coaches that filled the infield and “Driver’s Only” parking lot, so Bryce’s quiet ride to the garage area went unnoticed, or so they hoped. Once inside the garage, the doors all closed for the night, Bryce began walking to Dini, who shook his head as he pulled the car cover off the nose of the Mercedes. Dini gestured for Bryce to come to the front of the car as he called out to Danny.
“Could you step outside and make sure nobody comes in and that nobody takes any photos through the windows?” Bryce shook Dini’s hand as he surveyed the garage.
“Other than a big repair bill, what did you want to show me?” Bryce asked.
Dini took a knee and pointed.
“Is that what I think it is?” Bryce asked, leaning in much closer to inspect the car.
“When I was in the Marines, I worked weapons and ballistics. Those marks, young man…
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