Debauchery and Lamborghinis at the 2024 12 Hours of Sebring

Around 7 p.m., the PR guy from Lamborghini was doing pushups in the dirt near Turn 9. This was about an hour after Pipo Derani in the leading No. 31 Whelen Cadillac GTP car went upside down on the tire wall one turn away (he was okay, but their race was over) and maybe two hours before someone set a couch on fire farther infield. There truly is never a dull moment at the 12 Hours of Sebring.

Sebring Raceway in Sebring, Florida, has been hosting endurance races since it transitioned from an air base to a racetrack in 1950. Bruce McLaren won his first F1 race at Sebring. John Morton scammed his way into a Shelby Cobra drive there with just a handwritten note from Ken Miles and the confident declaration that he knew the track ("I had been there before," Morton says, if you ask about this. "I just hadn't ever driven there"). Steve McQueen (partnered with Peter Revson) nearly won there with a broken foot, coming in second to some guy named Mario Andretti. And every year, something gets set on fire in the infield.

Alligators and Espresso

The day started for me just after sunrise. It was already warm, and a low-hanging mist blanketed the neighborhoods around the track, making every dark spot on the grass into a possible alligator.

"There are definitely alligators here," said my driver, squeezing a Lamborghini Urus into the line of cars waiting for track entry. "Did you know they can climb fences?" I pulled my arm back inside and rolled up my window.

A C6 Corvette slipped into line behind us. A C8 Corvette was ahead of us. In fact, there were so many Corvettes attending the Sebring race, they really should have had their own entry lane. Once we were inside, reps from Lambo plied me with espresso. One thing about endurance racing: you can always count on the Italian teams for the best coffee.

Properly caffeinated and as yet uneaten by an alligator, I muscled my way through the crowds to join the grid walk before the green flag. Barring any disaster that might bring it in early, the grid walk would be my only chance to get a close look at the new Lamborghini SC63—Lambo's 2024 entry in the hybrid prototype GTP class—before it started its sunup-to-sundown race.

Like other entries in the GTP class, the SC63 pairs a gasoline engine (a 3.8-liter twin-turbo V-8 not shared with other Lamborghini models) and an electric motor over the rear axle. This car's World Endurance Championship (WEC) twin made its first appearance at Qatar in early March, but Sebring was the first showing in an American series. Most of Lamborghini's competitors in GTP (such as Porsche, Cadillac, Acura, and BMW) have a season under their belts already, so the SC63 team is figuratively, and possibly literally, playing catchup.

Lambo is at a disadvantage not just from the later start, but also because it is only campaigning one car in each series, which means less data and no teammates to share with. Adding to the pressure, Lamborghini's head of motorsport, Giorgio Sanna, left shortly before the WEC season opener. Taking over is CTO Rouven Mohr, who assured me that's he's up to the task technically, if somewhat overwhelmed by the logistics of it all.

Even with all of that, the Italian bull team seemed cheerful, and the car looked fantastic, combining flowing curves and broad shoulders in a recognizably Lamborghinish shape—a challenge for cars in the prototype class, which can fall victim to a simplified design more focused on downforce than brand identity. "In this car for sure, the aero was leading," Mohr told me. "Usually in a race car, you stop at this level. And then the shape is what the shape is. But you can fine-tune the surfaces without changing the aero concepts, and we put that extra effort into making the radiuses a little smaller, the whole design a bit more edgy. It's not usually what you do in a race car if the function is already there, but for us, it's important to be recognized."

I can never figure out how IMSA clears the mass of fans with all their signs and morning beers and inflatable dinosaur costumes from the narrow pit lane when it's time to start the race, but somehow it happens. At 9:41, the green flag dropped and the race began. At 9:42 there was the first spin as the No. 62 Ferrari took an off-road approach to Turn 3. After watching long enough to be sure the Lamborghini made it through the first lap, I headed off to the infield, in search of the soul of Sebring. For that, of course, I'd need a good view, which I found at the end of the front straight, at the top of a scissor-lift roofing truck parked along the fencing with a flimsy aluminum ladder leaned against its dump-truck bed.

I couldn't get the attention of anyone in the truck, so I asked the nearest ground dweller if I could go up. He looked at me doubtfully and said: "I dunno. How drunk are you?"

"It's not even 10 a.m.!" I answered, but he just shrugged and pointed to his companion, passed out on a grubby couch. "Well, he's drunk at 10 a.m.," he said. "Or dead." I assured him I was neither and that I'd be careful, and then made my way up the ladder where a bearded fellow sat atop the cab roof, drinking coffee out of a mug labeled "Russell." Russell, for indeed that was he, has been coming to Sebring every year since 1987. In a conversation punctuated by long pauses to let the field pass by beneath us in a cacophony of high-revving howls broken only by the Cadillac GTP cars' bass notes and the Mustang GTD's noticeable muscle rumble, he explained that his gang meets up every year, that one of the guys owns a roofing company, thus the truck, and that their loyalties to the teams change with whim, "It's not like NASCAR," he said, "where you always root for the same driver or car brand." Currently, they were all feeling favorable to Penske, because he'd seen their vintage bus in the pits and said, "Nice bus." It's as good a reason as any. I said my goodbyes and made my cautious way down the ladder and deeper into the campgrounds.