Brap From The Past: Racing Beat At The 1983 Daytona 24

Racing Beat

With the 2020 Rolex 24 at Daytona right around the corner, we’ve been psyching ourselves up for all the action by looking back at Daytona 24s of yore. When we say yore, we really mean it, because this nice little piece of history goes back more than 35 years. Beyond The Checkered Flag is a short documentary about Southern California rotary tuning legends Racing Beat and their race-winning efforts in GTO at Daytona back in 1983. The very-much-of-the-era soundtrack and editing are reason enough to check out this blast from the past.

Sporting FB RX-7s with tiny, peripheral-port 13B engines under the hood (which probably out-decibel’d most of the prototypes of the era) they not only won at Daytona that year, but went on to become the overall GTO winners for the season. The footage is great, especially the clip of 2 crewmembers hoisting a little iron bees nest out of the front of one car with just a chain and a block of wood. A lot of the RX-7s’ on-track contemporaries are well documented, too; Porsches, Buicks, prototypes, and more. The one thing they all have in common: there’s a significant lack of safety equipment compared to what we’re used to seeing in our modern era.

Check it out!