For all the turning of wrenches and passes for the lead, Big Bill France always focused on “the show.” He knew you couldn’t just sell fast cars and loud engines.
Marching bands, beauty queens, fireworks … Big Bill employed all methods of entertainment to supplement the on-track action.
He wasn’t just an organizer, but a promoter, which is why he would’ve loved Wednesday evening’s colorful prelude to the 2018 Rolex 24 At Daytona International Speedway.
The inaugural “Twenty-Four Premier” was hosted in the central area of One Daytona, the entertainment/retail complex across the street from the Speedway. The event showcased the France family's new business interest in One Daytona, but also an older business interest — sports-car racing — that's enjoying a modern-day surge.
Wednesday's affair included some of the cars that will race in this weekend’s 24-hour race, and some of the drivers who will drive those cars, along with accompanying pop music, ticket giveaways and much of the hullabaloo you’d associate with a promotional show, today and back in Big Bill’s heyday.
Today, nearly 56 years after Dan Gurney won Daytona's inaugural sports-car race in a tiny, open-cockpit Lotus, nearly 100 sports cars from two series — including 20 sleek prototypes and dozens of souped-up hotrods that look like they just recently left the showroom floor — will speed off the grid Thursday to begin the four-day weekend that puts the International in Daytona International Speedway.
After a day of practice and qualifying, the four-hour BMW Challenge is Friday and the 24-hour main event is Saturday-Sunday.
The Rolex 24 has four fewer decades of history and lacks the romantic backdrop of the French countryside, but Daytona’s annual endurance race has steadily made gains on its more famous Le Mans counterpart.
“Trust me, this is one of the biggest races that I could be thinking about wanting to win. It has been for years,” said a racer — Ryan Hunter-Reay — who has both an Indy 500 and IndyCar championship on his resume.
In recent years, the Rolex 24 has escaped the shadow of its more famous track mate — the Daytona 500 — to become something more than just the kickoff to Speedweeks. Veteran onlookers generally point to three reasons.
• Escaping Speedweeks: For starters, in a technical sense, it’s no longer actually part of Speedweeks. For most of its existence, the Rolex was run two weekends prior to the 500, which meant it always concluded on the first Sunday of February.
But in 2004, the NFL moved the Super Bowl back one week to the first Sunday in February. After two years in that mammoth shadow, the Rolex was wisely moved to the last full weekend of January in 2006.
And in 2012, the Daytona 500 was moved a week later, creating even more space between the Rolex and the Speedweeks’ finale. This year, the 500 is back to its former traditional date, the Sunday before Presidents Day (Feb. 18 this year).
"I do think that helped the Rolex," said Jim France, the youngest of Big Bill's two sons. "Before, it seemed that all of the pre-planning for Speedweeks was on the Daytona 500. Getting it moved away from the 500 changed that."
• Fantastic 50th: The 50th anniversary running of the Rolex, in 2012, enjoyed a massive blow-out by the Speedway. The celebration included a roundup of most of the past winning cars in the race’s history, including the little Lotus that carried the legendary Gurney to victory 50 years earlier.
“The 50th, for us, was a great moment to tell our story,” said Joie Chitwood III, who served as Speedway president from 2010-16 and is now an executive with the parent, International Speedway Corp. “We had a big gala, the great parade with all the old cars, it was just phenomenal.”
• Major merger: That momentum carried into the next chapter, which came later that year with the announced merger of the two major North American sports-car racing organizations — NASCAR’s Daytona-based Grand Am and the Georgia-based American Le Mans Series, which would combine interests starting with the 2014 season.
The new entity would be known by an old name: IMSA, the International Motor Sports Association. It combined the resources of NASCAR and the international manufacturer relationships nurtured by ALMS. Scott Atherton, who’d headed the ALMS, was tabbed to run IMSA, and he still does today.
Atherton said the label of the 50th anniversary event as turning point is “a fair comment and an accurate description.”
“With all respect to what happened during that era, the Rolex 24 had lost a bit of its luster, especially on a global scale,” he said of the years leading up to 2012. “It wasn’t attracting international teams and drivers, though it had a solid following and was still an event.
“With that 50th, it energized the Grand Am platform. But where you really saw the stature of the event reformulate was with the merger. With that first running in 2014, where we wind up a unique combination of ALMS prototypes and Daytona Grand Am prototypes, along with a full field of GT cars, and come forward to where we are today, it has truly escalated to what many would say is an unprecedented level.”
Attendance figures aren’t provided for racing events at Daytona, and estimates are difficult because it’s largely an “infield event.” The grandstands rarely have more than several thousand fans at any one time, with the biggest gathering normally at the race’s start.
It’s not uncommon in recent years for the infield to be deemed full of vehicles, shortly before or after Saturday’s start, and therefore only open to pedestrians.
More specific evidence of growth is seen on the organizational side, where IMSA is now a playing field for 17 different international auto manufacturers (many of whom set up consumer displays in the infield’s “midway” section). And it’s also evidenced by the increased television attention in recent years — Fox will carry the first two hours on its network before splitting the next 22 hours among its cable offerings.
If there’s an overriding reason for the Rolex 24’s growth, beyond the specifics and generalities listed above, it centers on an institutional desire. And it lands on the desk of Jim France.
“Big Bill,” back in the late 1950s, wanted his new track to attract an international audience. The way to do that was through sports-car racing. Jim France, just a middle-schooler when the Speedway was opened in 1959, apparently inherited that belief.
“I’ve been a sports-car racing fan my entire life. I thank my father Bill Sr. for that,” Jim France has said on several occasions. “He obviously loved stock-car racing but had a real affinity for sports-car racing as well.
"He named it the Daytona 'International' Speedway for a reason."
Robin Braig was the Speedway’s president from 2002-10. He doesn’t hesitate when asked about the Rolex’s modern star-turn.
“It was all driven by Jim France,” Braig said. “He said we’re gonna make this event really special.”
Braig put together a Rolex 24 “task force” that met twice a week. The Speedway’s operations folks were there, as were the Grand Am leadership, the Speedway’s marketing team … and Jim France.
“He came to every task-force meeting,” Braig said. “He told us to get creative. He wanted it to look like Le Mans.”
France, as is his nature, sidestepped any credit for the Rolex 24's modern evolution.
"They've had a great team over there at the Speedway, a lot of talented young people, and they came up with some great ideas," he said. "There were some things we tried, and if they worked, we kept them. If they didn't work, we didn't."
France and Braig had attended some big South Florida boat shows together, including the famed Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show, and that vibe was something France desired for his own international event.
“Also, we were renovating the infield at the time,” Braig said. “In came the Ferris wheel. We started the chili-cooking contest. Cocktail parties everywhere. We had the support of the teams, had drivers and cars whenever we needed them. Jim used his NASCAR leverage to get a TV deal. It was all him.”
Atherton also credits the timing of the race, given that the Rolex comes comfortably before any other worldwide racing series, which this year helped put it on the schedule of a worldwide racing superstar such as Fernando Alonso, a two-time champion in the most popular international form of racing, Formula One.
“We’re fortunate in the timing,” Atherton said. “It allows drivers from all parts to participate without interfering with their ‘day job.’”
Few epitomize that more than Hunter-Reay, who enthusiastically and without prompting, gave a huge thumbs-up to the current state of American sports-car racing in general, and the Rolex 24 in particular.
“This race and what IMSA has grown into, where this sport is going, is really special, and it’s a great time to be a part of it,” he said. “I love to see the energy growing in the right direction like this.”