Daytona legends recall good ol' days on beach

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- What began as a quest to go on a historical tour quickly became a hysterical tour played out on the stretch of road between a hotel in Orlando and a designated meeting place near Daytona International Speedway.

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I have no idea how fast Denny Hamlin will go in Sunday's Daytona 500, but it will have to be much faster than the FedEx truck that blocked the path of my rental car Friday on LPGA Blvd. The rental was a black Chevrolet Monte Carlo, by the way, and it just seemed to want to go fast. But with the FedEx guy apparently delivering a truckload of bricks, there was no place to go.

By the time the black Chevy arrived at its destination, the two tour buses already were pulling out on a historical racing tour of the Daytona Beach area. Following them seemed the only sensible option. It was only after the buses drove in circles for more than an hour that I realized that there must have been valuable audio I was missing from inside the coaches.

The only audio inside the Monte Carlo came from my own lips, and it wasn't pretty. Soon, though, I found myself enjoying the solitary drive that took us past the old Streamline Hotel, where "Big Bill" France and others helped create NASCAR in a smoke-filled room; and up the highway from the beach where years ago the first Daytona races were run. When the buses finally pulled up near the old Ponce Inlet Lighthouse, the payoff for going it alone quickly became apparent.

There, amid a bunch of classic old racecars, was a group of guys who used to work on and drive them. There was the No. 15 machine of "Wild Bill" Snowden, the "Florida Hurricane" and a couple of replicas of cars Fireball Roberts used to race. An old No. 42 Plymouth of Lee Petty was there, too, among others.

Having my own wheels meant I could stay as long as I pleased. So long after the last bus was loaded and gone, I sat with the likes of Marvin Panch and Raymond Parks and Ray Fox and Dick Fleck and listened to how it used to be.

"It was fun, a lot of fun," said Fox, who worked on a number of cars that won races on Daytona's beaches.

Parks, who is hard of hearing and smiles more than he speaks these days, had friends with him to interpret what he was feeling.

"He used to be Mr. Daytona," one of them said of the former car owner.

Panch, winner of the 1961 Daytona 500 after the race moved from the beach to the asphalt, fondly recalled running ocean-side before the current superspeedway opened, as did Fleck, who competed mostly in the Modified stock-car division and said he ran in the last three races ever staged on the sand. (Continued)