This event has been two years in the making for me. I had booked my flights to Orlando from New Jersey in March 2020 and then the Covid pandemic hit. Fast forward to this week and now I live in Florida only 3 hours drive from Sebring and thrilled to be finally able to work this race.
The extent of my participation was only limited to the WEC 1000 mile of Sebring support race so it felt a lot like being a tourist. I did not have to show up until a far more reasonable hour than the rest of the marshals and many track activities were already in progress. By Saturday we were finished with WEC so I returned to the track as a spectator to watch the IMSA part of the event the 12 hours of Sebring, which was amazing. Though I did not know what to do with myself most of that time and after walking along the perimeter of the track in the spectator area, I took a few selfies and left for Miami long before the race finished.
Working as a scrutineer was exciting though a bit challenging. Of the two car crews on the team I was watching one was behaving while the other were pushing their luck trying to sneak around. I focused on any egregious offences of which there weren’t any but the chief of pit lane on the ACO side busted my team for staging their crew on the white line during the pit stop. It was a lesson to me for sure and quite embarrassing that I was not the one that wrote them up.
Overall it was an exciting race with some major drama on track. Quiet in the pit lane. But interesting and my time on duty flew by quickly.
I used up all my leftover hotel points on this trip which was good and bad. Good because I didn’t let them expire but bad because I grossly overpaid for the caliber of the hotels I was staying at and had to drive long distances to get there. First two nights I stayed in Okeechobee and last night in Ft Myers Cape Coral area, one and two hour drives respectively. In the future I should focus on finding AirBnB’s in Sebring itself like everyone else on the team.
My next big event will be Miami Grand Prix.