Running Long

Unconventional ways to turn racing into a whole-day affair.

- JARED GALL

86,400 Eighty-six thousand four hundred seconds. One thousand four hundred forty minutes. Twenty-four hours. One day, one night. This is the basic building block of our weeks, months, years, and lives. Most days feel like the one immediately before and go pretty much how we expect the next one will. Sometimes it’s nice to burn one or a few doing as little as possible. That’s why humans invented beach resorts and umbrellas—big ones to shade us, little paper ones to dress up fruity drinks. But ever since the first 24-hour Grand Prix d’Endurance at the Circuit de la Sarthe in 1923, a tiny subset of humanity has fixated on doing a single thing for 24 hours at a time: racing as many times around a circuit as possible.

In most motorsports, competitive hurrying is prohibitively expensive, and the budget balloons in proportion to the duration of the race. But if you know where to look, opportunities to go spend a day going fast are more common, more affordable, and a lot weirder than you might expect.

The Slot Machine

JUST A TENTH OR TWO of a second; that's what Mike Stott says is the difference between his fastest and median laps in a typical 48-minute stint. As a percentage of a seven-second lap, that may be more deviation than Robert Kubica exhibited at this year's Le Mans, but maintaining that level of consistency for more than 400 consecutive laps is a remarkable feat.