Action at Sebring Raceway

(Avon Park, FL)  Hi 77 Lo 55 – Jim here, today we had a whole bunch of fun! They’ve been having testing sessions at Sebring Raceway all this week, so today Dee and I drove out to the track to check it out. The famous 12-Hours of Sebring is scheduled for mid-March, so there were many big name teams here to get their cars dialed in. The 3.7 mile track is about five miles east of downtown Sebring.
We’re not real experts on sports car racing. I know the car brands, and a lot of the drivers, but I don’t know enough to match the drivers with the cars. Besides, each car in a 12-hour race has at least three drivers. There was no actual racing today, but we got a chance to experience the sights and sounds of a new (to us) type of racing.
We got to the track at mid-morning and paid the $10 each to get in. It’s a huge facility, and we were allowed to drive just about anywhere we wanted. We first drove around to one of the turns and watched the action. (Click on photos to make them larger.)



Dee’s enjoying the action.

After watching for awhile, we drove to the paddock area to see how close we could get to the action.

We found out we would have been allowed in the pits if we weren’t wearing shorts. Sure wish we’d known that ahead of time. (Dang warm weather!) But we got pretty close. The yellow line on the right was our boundary. That’s the pit wall on the left side of the photo.

But we were still pretty close to the action.

We went upstairs to watch from the paddock. It stretches almost the entire length of the homestretch, with luxury suites and open seating looking down on the pits and the homestretch.


I was like a kid in a candy shop! :)

Great view of the pit action!




Team photo time. You’d think they would have waited until they painted the car.

It was pretty breezy in the shade of the paddock, and Dee was getting chilly, so we walked downstairs and out into the sun to check out the “cold pits” where the teams work on the cars. On the way we spotted this interview in progress. This poor driver was probably headed to the men’s room you see in the background and was ambushed for an interview. Sure wish I knew who he is.

Some work going on in a couple of the garages. The “garages” were basically tent roofs attached to the sides of the semi haulers.


At the end of the garage area we spotted an opening in the fence that allowed us to go right up to the backstretch wall (the backstretch is parallel to the homestretch, separated by the parking and garage area).

But we were busted! This lady corner worker shooed us back behind the chain link fence.

But not until I got one more shot, just to show how close we were to the track. All we had to do was walk through that opening in the wall….

On the way back through the garage area we were almost run over by this car. A mechanic drove it over from the “hot pits” inside the track to do some work on it.


He apparently didn’t like where he parked it, so he pulled it out and re-positioned it by himself!

We had a lot of fun, and we never thought we’d have as much freedom of movement as we did. The one thing that amazed me was the different sounds of the various brands of cars. The Chevy Corvettes had the typical American deep-throated roar, the Ferraris had a chilling high-pitched scream, and the smaller Porsches sounded like a street sports car with loud mufflers. The big cars (like the one in the photo directly above) surprised me how quiet they actually were. They had a low rumble, but really subdued sounding.
We finally had our fill of the action and headed home. But on the way out we passed this vendor selling driving suits and helmets for cheap.

We have more photos in an album that you can get to using the link on the right side of this page.

On the way home, after a stop in downtown Sebring at Dee’s Place (our favorite restaurant in town), we stopped at the Verizon store to get me a new smartphone. I’ve been wanting to upgrade from my Droid X for a while. After a lot of online research I had it narrowed down to the Motorola Droid Razr MAXX and the HTC Rezound. I finally decided on the Rezound. When we got home I spent the rest of the afternoon setting it up and getting all my apps on the new phone. So far I love it.

Another great day here in paradise!