Daytona International Speedway
Florida, USA
The high banks and the infield — where the Rolex 24 opens the sports-car year, twenty-four hours into the Florida night.
ReserveTwo Circuits, Spliced.
Daytona International Speedway stands on the north side of Daytona Beach, Florida, about an hour from Orlando. The sports-car road course is 5.729 kilometres over twelve turns, and it is two circuits spliced into one: the speedway’s banking — thirty-one degrees through the oval corners, eighteen through the tri-oval — joined to a flat infield section threaded between them. Very few circuits ask a GT car to do both jobs in the same lap.
Horseshoe, Chicane, Banking.
The infield hairpin is the International Horseshoe at Turn 3, the tight hairpin at the heart of the infield section. The chicane on the backstretch is the one most people still call the Bus Stop: in January 2022 Jim France and Pierre Fillon, president of the Automobile Club de l’Ouest, renamed it the LE MANS Chicane, with the first chicane on the Mulsanne Straight becoming the DAYTONA Chicane in exchange. And the banking counts as a corner in its own right — thirty-one degrees of it, taken flat, in the dark.
The Rolex 24.
Opened in 1959, Daytona’s thirty-one-degree banking and infield road course host the Rolex 24 At Daytona — the race that opens the global sports-car season and the American GT3 crown jewel. It would be the season’s roar: a true twenty-four-hour stage, the banking lit through the night, an hour from Orlando.
Into The Night.
A weekend where the GT3 year begins: the thirty-one-degree banking at full commitment, the infield bus stop, headlights through the Florida dark — bookended by the Atlantic and the warmth of a Daytona February.
Opened 1959. Re-Cut Ever Since.
The speedway opened on February 22, 1959 with the first Daytona 500, and a road course has been part of it from the beginning. The layout has been re-cut repeatedly: Turns 6 and 7 were rebuilt into a sharper double-apex corner in 1976, the backstretch chicane took its three-legged bus-stop shape in 1984, and the opening turns were modified with an esse and a repositioned International Horseshoe shortly afterwards — which is where today’s 3.56-mile distance comes from. The headline sports-car race began in 1962 as the three-hour Daytona Continental and went to a full twenty-four hours in 1966; it runs today as the Rolex 24 At Daytona under IMSA. Whatever else changes here, the banking does not.
The Founding Class Is Open — Once.
A circuit held in reserve for the long bet. The members who build it now write the first chapter.