Sunrise Over Daytona

Okay, perhaps that title doesn't have quite the ring of "Sunrise Over Le Mans", but it's still pretty cool that the various stars and guest stars of the Grand Am series storm the beach for two full circuits around the clock to open the American racing season.

As I'm watching this long, long race with near-empty stands while there's snow on the ground outside my window, I find myself wondering, "Why do I like this race?"

It's a fair question. At Le Mans, you have ultra-sleek, ultra-advanced, realevant-to-the-real-world prototypes from Audi, Peugeot, and Aston Martin slugging it out at the head of the field with a bevvy of fantastic international drivers holding what amounts to a day-long touring car race in Ferraris, BMWs, and Porsches. You have the 108-year racing history of the city of Le Mans, the great European racing fans, and fast cars racing down public roads while thousands of people grill up their breakfasts just on the other side of the catch fence.

Daytona just doesn't come across the same on TV. There's never that classic camera shot of some guy wrapped in blankets laying across three seats in the grandstand, there are no quaint French villages and cafés along the backstretch at Daytona -- just a big, ugly grandstand, some parking lots, and an airport. Most importantly, instead of those sleek prototypes, Grand Am's Daytona Prototypes look like warts on TV and can barely corner faster than the GT cars.

Yet I still enjoy watching this race.

One thing I like is that the nature of this Daytona road course, which uses the entire length of the NASCAR oval, lends to some great racing. It easily offers as much close racing as the much more popular NASCAR races, but with some tight right turns thrown in. The slipstreaming one sees for all three hours of the Daytona 500 is in play during the 24, but the drivers also have to know how to properly use their brakes and drive through a corner. Oh, and the prototypers have to do that while trying to get past the 20-mph-slower GT cars.

Yes, the prototypes are not the prettiest things on the planet, but here's what they definitely are: cheap and tough. This lends to a lot of entries in the prototype class with a lot of celebrity drivers from NASCAR and IndyCar getting a ride. When someone like Juan Pablo Montoya stuffs their car into a tire barrier, there isn't some corporate bean counter facepalming over the expense that went into the car as there might be with a broken Le Mans car; there's just a team of regular guys with new parts ready to go in the pit lane. Plus, as I've said, the racing can be very close and there's no giving up if a team gets down by two laps, because your car is just as fast as the other guy's.

As with Le Mans, though, the main reason I enjoy this race is simple: it's a 24-hour race. People talk about how tough it is to get through the Indianapolis 500 or NASCAR's 600-miler, but those races are 3-4 (maybe 5) hours long. At Le Mans and Daytona, the cars and teams have to last a full day. It doesn't matter how ugly or slow a car might be; if it can constantly go around 180 m.p.h. for 24 hours, I'm impressed.