Riding with NASCAR star Benny Parsons on a thundering tour of Daytona can be eye-opening -- if you have the nerve to look

By Sam Moses, Sports Illustrated

This story originally appeared in the Feb. 20, 1978 issue of Sports Illustrated

	Benny Parsons in a March, 2006 photo. Parsons died Tuesday from lung cancer. He was 65. AP
	RELATED • Ex-NASCAR champ Parsons dead at 65

I'd like to be able to thunder through life at 200 mph, on the edge of, but always under, control. The next best thing might be to go 200 mph in a stock car, because a speeding stock car is about as close as you can come to rolling thunder. So I asked Benny Parsons, the 1973 NASCAR points champion, if I could thunder around Daytona International Speedway with him in his 565-horsepower, 3,700-pound, red, white and blue Chevy Laguna, and would he please go 200, top the big two-oh-oh, and he said, more or less, "You a dumb sumbitch, ain't you?" But he agreed, although 190 would be the most he could deliver at Daytona. We arranged the ride for a day when Parsons' crew had rented the trioval to do aerodynamic testing on his 1978 race car, which will make its Super Speedway debut next week in the Daytona 500.

It was a beautiful clear December morning, about 65 degrees and cloudless. I arrived at the Speedway and stopped my rental car for a moment in the parking lot, at the entrance to the tunnel that goes under the track to the infield. Spilling over the massive dirt embankment in front of me was the solo roar of a big V-8 engine as Parsons, alone on the track, swooped through Turn 4, almost directly overhead. I looked up through the top of the rental car's windshield, into the tinted part, and about 50 feet above me I saw the tall steel-wire catch fence that rims the track's three-foot-high cement wall. The catch fence is there to keep the cars from hurtling over the wall, flying through the air and crash-landing in one of the parking lots, or maybe in a marsh, depending on the point at which the car departed the premises and how far it flew. The catch fence wasn't part of the track when it was built. It came two years later, after Lee Petty, Richard's father, launched his Plymouth into the swamp during the 1961 race.

When I was in the Navy and on a destroyer at sea, fighter jets would sometimes playfully buzz the ship's deck. The jets would come out of nowhere, shriek, and go back to nowhere in a matter of two seconds. The stock cars' thunder in the tunnel is very similar. The cars seem faster when you listen to them than when you watch them. If you want to get a real sense of the speed race cars travel, curl up inside the tunnel during a practice session.

You get an other-world feeling after you drive through the dark tunnel beneath the track and pop up into the infield. Because the last few yards of the tunnel are uphill and steep, you see nothing but sky out your windshield as you reenter daylight. You sort of feel like you're being shot out of a cannon in slow motion. (A few NASCAR drivers are fond of flooring their rental cars midway through the tunnel so they fly out like cannonballs in not-so-slow motion.) When your car levels, you give an instinctive where-am-I blink to get your bearings.

The tri-oval is 2.5 miles around, which gives the infield an area of 114 acres. The ground is so level and spacious it seems like a prairie, at least when there are not tens of thousands of spectators in there with you. During Speed Weeks, when there are fans, cars, vans, motorcycles and charcoal grills everywhere, the abrupt, semiblind exit from the tunnel leaves you with a far different impression; you sometimes feel as if you're being fed to the crowd.

On this quiet morning, however, Parsons' Chevy seemed to be the only other inhabitant of this closed world, and the sound of it echoed eerily all around me as it flattened itself against Turn 2's steep banking. Although it was going 180 mph. the car just seemed to be making steady progress onto the back straight and around the track. Watching a stock car from a distance is like watching it on TV; it doesn't seem to be going very fast and a lot of excitement is lost somewhere along the way between the car and your eye. You have to get close, right there in the grandstand in Turn 4 or along the front straight, to even begin to understand what a two-ton hunk of metal looks like noisily swallowing 264 feet of asphalt every second.