. Daytona: Anagram for "Nay, Toad!" ........

First, Let's Not Know Where We're Staying
First race of the AMA season. I was sent an email by Ducati North America that I�d be staying at the Hampton Inn in Daytona Beach. I looked it up on the internet, noted the address and located it on the map. The hotel wasn�t right next to the track so I reserved a rental car to get me back and forth.

On the plane heading into Daytona Beach I was seated next to a retired gentleman who lived there. He asked where I was staying and I told him at the Hampton Inn. He said it would be easy to get to the track. I asked him what freeway I should take and he looked a bit perplexed; he said I wouldn�t have to get on any freeways. I pull out my computer, fire it up, and show him the map of Daytona I had and where the Hampton Inn was located. He said, �Well, I don�t know about that one, but there�s a Hampton Inn right next to the race track.�

Uh oh.

DNA never gave me an address for the Hampton Inn. When I looked it up on the internet it didn�t occur to me that there might be another Hampton Inn even closer to the track; after all, the one I had found didn�t seem all that far away. At that point I realized that perhaps "Daytona Beach" and "Daytona Beach Shores" were not one in the same.

The hotel confusion wouldn�t have alarmed me that much except for the fact that my media credential was being express mailed to the other hotel in the morning. I needed it to get into the track and it was the first day of qualifying so I didn�t have the luxury of wasting a day to sort it all out. As soon as I got to the airport I picked up the courtesy phone for the Hampton Inn and when the person picked up I asked which Hampton Inn I had called and if there was a Zina Kelley staying there. Yes, I was staying at that one, the one next to the track.

I was chagrined. I would be in easy walking distance to the track so do I keep the rental car or bag it? Eff it. I cancelled my reservation and decided that it would be cheaper overall to take a round trip taxi ride to the other hotel to get my media pass. I was so lucky that serendipity placed me next to a chatty retiree who knew his hotels. Otherwise, I would�ve hopped in my rental and gone straight to The Wrong Hampton Inn and they would�ve looked at me blankly about a reservation while I inappropriately grew irate.

When I got to The Right Hampton Inn I immediately phoned The Wrong Hampton Inn and told them I was expecting express mail and not to reject it because they didn�t see me on the guest list. The woman said she�d make a note of it and I hung up the phone not feeling completely secure that it would be properly noted. I just had a bad feeling about my ju-ju for the weekend.

The next morning I called The Wrong Hampton Inn and asked about my mail. Nothing yet. It would show up anywhere between 10 and 2. Well fukc it all. 2:00? By the time I got it and made my way to the track and into the press room, I�d be humping to get a press release out. Rather than wait at my hotel, I called up a taxi and took a ride to the other one so I wouldn�t be wasting a half hour getting there when the mail showed up. While in transit, The Wrong Hampton Inn called me up and told me the mail had arrived and I told the woman it was the best news I�d heard in my life. Same for the taxi driver. Now instead of a one-way fair, I�d also be paying for the return trip.

Your Stinkin' Card Is No Good Here
The taxi driver dropped me off at the track and I eventually made my way to the press area with the help of various people. I showed the guards my AMA media card and they said it wasn�t enough to get into the press room, that I also had to have a specific press credential issued by the Daytona track. They made a few phone calls and told me to go to the opposite side of the track to the registration window to get my credentials.

If you�ve ever been to a Nascar circuit, you know that they�re pretty big and that walking from one side to the other is a sweaty commitment. Knowing I would be wasting precious time if I hiked, I went over to the Ducati Austin garage and asked if I could borrow the pit scooter. They said the track people wouldn�t allow the pit scooters anywhere so one of the guys drove me over to registration. I went up to the window that said something about Media. The woman told me to sign the sheet and she put a happy face sticker on my card. I went back to the media center and showed the sticker to the guards and they shook their heads. Nope, the sticker wasn�t enough to get in; it just mean I signed the waiver to get in. I put my head in my hands, the universal sign for defeat.

The guards had a bit of pity for me. With my team shirt on they could see that I wasn�t just blowing smoke up their skirts about being there to work. One woman called around to see what she could do and she was getting a bit of the run around so another guy called up to see what he could find out. He was getting conflicting messages about where I could get my press credential. Finally, after one conversation, he said �You tell her� and handed the phone to me. The guy on the other end asked me to clarify who I was and what my role was. I explained to him I was the press officer for Ducati. He said, �You write just for the manufacturer?� I answered in the affirmative. He then announced to me that I was not real media and that I was not allowed into the press room; that was the rule. There was an �outer� press area that was like the kitchen area in which I was allowed access, but there were no phone lines. I asked what his name was and what his title was in case I needed to refer back to him and hung up. I told the guards what I was told and even they were taken aback.

I sat down and thought about my plight. It started a few months back when I was told I had to write a letter to the Daytona credentials office. They never responded to my request so I called them up a week before the race and asked what was going on. The British guy on the other end (whom I would come to despise later) told me it wasn�t their responsibility to get me my credentials, but the AMA�s responsibility. So I contact the AMA and the pr woman says, �Didn�t I send you the forms?� No. Oops. She neglected to send me the forms so she fedexes them to me next day. When I get them I have to fill it out, get it notarized and send in a passport photo. You�d think I was opening a checking account with them. I UPS it back to them on Saturday so they get it Monday and that�s why they had to fedex the mail to me in Daytona on Wednesday; hence the taxi cab ride.

As I�m leaving voicemail on the AMA pr person�s voicemail about the clusterfukc (I get a true sense they don�t care anyways), the guard comes up to me and says, �Come with me.� I look at him curiously. He walks me into the press room and sits me down and says, �Just keep a low profile.� I am grateful. I tell him I will send him a Christmas card.

Time To Meet My Nemesis
Once I get situated, I go over to the Ducati Austin garage again and find Paolo. I tell him about the troubles I�ve had and he says, �Let�s go over to credentials.� So we hop in the car and drive over and we find the British guy who more or less told me to bugger off on the phone a while back.

He asks me exactly what I do again and I tell him I�m the press officer and I need to write my releases and send them out as soon as I can after the events. He says the media room is for �real� media, not for team media. I tell him that I send my work to publications like Roadracing World and AMA Superbike who in turn publish it when they get it and he interrupts me and says, �That�s a red herring. They already have people here covering the event.� I want to throttle the idiot. He�s acting like I�m trying to mislead him. I�m just telling him what I need to do. Paolo, ever the diplomat, asks very nicely about getting me a credential just this once. The guy relents, but not until he�s lectured me about how �if we let you in we have to let all the other manufacturer�s press in.� Yeah? So what? The press room isn�t even half full. Turns out their stinginess is a Nascar rule. Because there are so many teams with their entourage of press, they actually do have problems with occupancy in the media center. He says those are the rules and they can�t very well change it for different events. I�m thinking, �Why not?� Like it�s so damn hard to realize that a motorcycle event doesn�t have the same press needs as a Nascar event and to use a different set of rules? And the shit about not letting manufacturers in was just that: shit. He wanted me to remove my shirt when I went into the press room so those in there wouldn�t wonder why one manufacturer was allowed in. Well I�ve got news for him: a) the other guys in there don�t give a shit and b) there were many Honda and Suzuki-clad people in there already!

The guy overseeing the credentials also did part of the race commentary and I can tell you that every time I heard his voice coming out of the speakers my blood pressure kicked up quite a bit. There are people who uphold policy and can convey them in a fairly diplomatic fashion. He was not one of them. He was just a weirdly self-satisfied asshole.

Ironically, the AMA staff was having a hard enough time of their own with Daytona�s credentials department. They had denied one of their photographers a credential. The Brit eventually relented with him too. Daytona is the only track to have a separate credentials department from the AMA. At the rest of the tracks if you have the AMA press credential you can have access to the phone lines. Daytona is...special. And I don�t mean that in a unique way, I mean that in a single-cell, retarded way.

Fun With ISPs
After qualifying ends, I try to send my press release. I�ve got a list of about 150 people I have to send it to. I blind cc the list and try to send it when I get an error message about too many recipients. Well shit. I try smaller groups but it keeps giving me the error message. Finally, I find that limiting it to ten at a time lets me send them out. How irritating to have to repeat the process 15 times to get it sent out to everyone. I think this is a problem with my ISP provider as I suspect it hows they control spam. They probably think there�s no real valid reason a person would need to cc many people unless they were trying to spam. I am irritated after all the trials I�ve been through that day, but at least I got it sent.

Between the flight yesterday (Delta doesn�t serve food) and all the problems I had today, I haven�t eaten a meal in two days, just bagels I hoarded from the breakfast bar and energy bars I had packed from San Diego. I go back to the hotel defeated, semi-crushed. I�m not one for going to a restaurant alone and eating and there were no food stores in convenient walking distance so I return to my hotel room and eat the trail mix I had the good fortune of buying at the airport yesterday. I�m too tired to care so I fall asleep soon enough.

On the second day I had major problems sending out the press release. I was trying to send mail out through Outlook but AO-heLL was balking (upon return from Florida AOL would be canceled and replaced by AT&T; dial-up). However, when I tried it through Netscape, it let me send out one at a time, but not to multiple recipients. I was freaking a bit. I needed to get the pr out. It�s Daytona, the first major event for the newly backed factory effort and here I was in the press room with my mail client telling me to go stuff it. On top of that, we were getting kicked out of the press room and it was only 7:00 p.m. I had to hike it back to the hotel and continue the futility from there. I was not happy.

When I returned to the hotel I got a call from Vicki asking if I�d be able to make it out to Deland to visit with a gang of Ducati-loving Merry Pranksters. I told her I was having problems with my email and then later I got a call from Wegs who had heard from Vicki about my problems. He said they had found an area with an unencrypted wireless signal. My laptop is wireless-ready so, having picked up wayward signals before, I decided to go out there and give it a try.

As soon as I got there, Arch and I drove to the secret spot: a poorly lit parking area behind an establishment of what nature I could not remember. It was warm so he left the engine running with the a/c on. To say we looked nefarious would have been accurate. No other cars were around yet there we were loitering with the car running in case we had to make a break from the law.

Arch picked up a signal and was mainlining on the Internet. I, on the other hand, was still languishing. Nothing. We tried poking around at the various settings but nothing worked. Finally Arch calls Wegs and Wegs comes over on a Monster to see what he can do. Nothing. We came to the conclusion that I was out of luck so we went back to the B&B; so I could try the dial-up again. (In retrospect, my problem was probably due to the fact that my wireless card is one generation old.)

I connected on dial-up and was resigned to send out the press release to ten recipients at a time, the max number it would allow without returning an error message. It took me a while, but they all went and I could finally start drinking. Vicki is like me: she loves sweet white wine. And I learned something that night, that the cheapest wines are some of the sweetest wines. As Vicki so wisely said, �Why do I want that expensive stuff? It�s always dry. Give me the cheap stuff any day.� I drank until I couldn�t stop smiling. And the next day I woke up with cotton mouth and a headache. I also found out that the press releases I had so painfully sent out ten at a time the night before never made it to their destinations so my boss resent it from his machine.

Race Day
We all know what happened. Great race up to the point where Eric retired. I write up the press release and manage to get it sent out ten at time without the same drama as yesterday. Bonus: They allegedly reach their recipients.

The one good thing that came out of this trip was that I stayed an extra day and had a chance to walk down to the water. It took an hour and a half to make it there and it was really humid, but at least I had a chance to see something other than the track and my hotel.

The Love Was Shared
Fast forward to a few weeks later and I get our May issue of Motorcycle Consumer News in the mail. Much to my validation, here�s what Editor Dave Searle wrote about Daytona:

�For many years, I�ve set aside a whole week in the first part of March to attend Bike Week. More than a unique celebration of motorcycling, with upwards of half a million riders converging on Daytona Beach, it is also the first race of the AMA roadracing championship; the Big One. Because Daytona�s high banks make for eyeball-flattening high speeds, it�s odd as a racing venue. But, despite the fact that many racers will tell you there isn�t any place like it, and in fact they are glad there isn�t, and that what works at Daytona may not be the hot setup anywhere else � it has become America�s two-wheeled Indy 500, bestowing bragging rights on winning manufacturers like no other.

�Personally, I�ve always spent the majority of my week at the track, a coveted photo pass hung around my neck, shooting pictures in the hot pits, up close in the turns, and observing the attendant circus of mechanics and tire technicians they attempt to gain an advantage for their riders.

�But this year, track officials turned down my request for a photo pass, the same level of credentials we�d been given for a decade or more. I got the news just weeks before I was to arrive, my room and plane tickets long since paid for. When I questioned their decision and asked what I could possibly do to please them, they were indifferent, saying that I was lucky to get any credentials at all, and even boasted how they�d threatened other publications with the same treatment. Excuse me?�

(Searle goes on to talk about using his spare time to tour Florida.)

My Personal Goal
To never return to Daytona. It�s a fabulously big country and I don�t ever need to see that place again.

P.S. I burned myself ironing my work shirt while at Daytona. Months later, I still have the scar as a permanent keepsake...it's quite befitting of a memorable weekend.

But Wait, There's More
Since I wrote about Daytona, why not talk about some of the other tracks I've been to? Click here for the racing-related entries I've pulled out of my blog.   
 

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