12 Hours at Sebring Makes
for a “Hard Day’s Night”
When the Beatles released their groundbreaking
album A Hard Day’s Night in July 1964, the Mobil
1 Twelve Hours of Sebring was already 12-years-old. So,
perhaps it is not out of the realm of possibility that the inspiration
for the record’s title track performed by the “Fab
Four”, including widely recognized auto racing fan George
Harrison, was the grueling daylight-to-dark, granddaddy
of all North American sports car races. Maybe the catchy
chorus just naturally fi ts with the race that is won or lost in
the darkness of central Florida?
A track map can tell you a lot of things: how many turns,
do they go left or right? You can even look at the radius of
a corner and help to determine some basic ideas of the
line you want to take to set the best time. Modern simulators
take that fl at image and go one step further, putting
the driver in near real-world conditions. Now each bump
can be built into the programming and setups can be devised
before ever unloading a race car at the track. But
what cannot be fully simulated is one of the greatest challenges
drivers face when they come to Sebring International
Raceway each spring: the transition from daylight to
darkness. While the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship
runs at two other tracks (Daytona International
Speedway and Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta) where the
cars charge headlong into the dark, nowhere puts more of
a premium on that shift than Sebring.
“Sebring is one of the oldest and darkest tracks in sports
car racing,” offered longtime Porsche factory driver and
two-time Sebring winner Patrick Long. “The bumps and
the curbs aren’t very visible once the sun drops, you have
to drive the track largely from muscle memory.”
While drivers at this level have become well accustomed
to piloting 200-mph rockets around the twists and turns of
the world’s greatest road courses, Sebring’s unique setup
as a former World War II bomber training base, its relative
lack of elevation change and the season of the 12-Hours,
creates challenges unseen elsewhere. By nature, the Sebring
race course is its own beast with surface changes
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