In at the deep end

Meet Derek, a 47-year-old father of two. An amateur racer who’s just crossed the finishing line in the Daytona 24hrs. This is how it all happened...

It’s raining, and Derek Johnston is standing under a red umbrella. Big rain drops shatter off the fabric and are whisked away by a cool Florida breeze. It’s possible that no one in the history of the sport has been in a situation quite like Derek’s. He shuffles a bit in his racing boots and looks down the straight,
waiting for the cars to come. He’s a long way from Nottingham.

A red Dallara-Ford Daytona Prototype (DP) adorned with McDonald’s golden arches spears into view and flashes by at 190mph, low and sleek and purposeful on the Daytona tri-oval banking, leaving a giant rooster-tail of spray in its wake. It’s the number 77 Doran Racing machine, and it’s being chased by 14 other DPs and 30 GT cars. Derek’s head is locked onto that car because it’s Derek’s own, being driven by his team-mate Memo Gidley, and it’s leading the race.

Gidley, 39, a former American karting champion and sometime Indycar racer, has just demonstrated that he is one of the most talented drivers on this or any other planet. Somebody give this man an F1 car to play with! He has hauled that Dallara-Ford from 11th on the grid – a true indicator of its ultimate dry pace – to the front in only 11 laps. If rain is the great equaliser, Gidley has no equal this day. It’s a display of wet-weather driving which probably won’t be matched all year, unless Schuey gets going at a wet Spa. When Gidley overtakes Ganassi driver and Indycar champion Scott Dixon for the lead, the Doran car-to-pit radio crackles.

"Now we’re where we should be," says Memo.
But it’s ramping up the pressure on Derek Johnston, as if he needed any extra pressure. Let’s put it into context. Gidley is leading the Daytona 24hrs, which, after Le Mans, is probably the most prestigious endurance race in the world. Other drivers in the field include Juan Pablo Montoya, Justin Wilson, Dario Franchitti and a host of world-class endurance racers. It is more demanding than Le Mans, because there are more hours of darkness – 13, in fact, compared with Le Mans’ six – and the circuit is tighter.

The speed difference between the DPs and GTs is significant, too – about six seconds a lap quicker in a DP, so you are constantly overtaking slower traffic. The race runs to well over 700 laps, and DP drivers will tend to make four or five overtakes per lap on average. Relentless. Derek is the fourth driver of the Doran car, along with Gidley, Brad Jaeger and FIA GT Champion Fabrizio Gollin. The Brit is due to take his first stint at 21:30 once Gollin has had his run. The forecast is for the rain to stop. It is scant compensation for Derek.

More context. Johnston is a 47-year-old Geordie, a father of two, and runs a steel decking company in Nottingham. He has only been racing cars for three years. Yep, three years of club racing – it was bikes before that, but “it started to hurt too much when I fell off,” says Derek. His two daughters and wife are in the back of the pit box right now, along with some friends and family who have flown in to Florida to see him race.

Derek is here because he won the 2009 Radical UK Cup, and by doing so won a separate championship called the ‘Sunoco Rolex 24 at Daytona Challenge’. The Sunoco Daytona Challenge ran across four British championships – the Radicals, British F3, British GT and the SPEED Prototype series – with its own points system. Derek won it, and now he’s standing here under that red umbrella. The longest single stint he’s ever done in a Radical is 25 minutes. He has never raced at night. Soon Kevin Doran will ask him to drive here at Daytona in the darkness for two hours. Then do two more stints later on.

A bit more context before we tell you what happens. The France family, which owns Daytona and NASCAR and the Grand-Am series these DPs run in, has placed Derek in this Doran machine. Kevin Doran, team boss, has been in the winning team at Daytona eight times, and his car is a dark horse. A DP is extremely quick, much faster than the Radical V8 Derek is used to – it has a 500bhp, 5.0-litre V8, is heavier and very difficult to drive. Derek has had to learn to left-foot brake it too, and to do that he needs to generate 1,000lbs of pressure on the pedal, compared with about 500 in the Radical.

He had a test at Virginia International Raceway in a DP, and one day of testing here at a damp Daytona in December (the second day was snowed off). He has done a few laps in practice here at the event, including some running at night. But that’s it. He’s been awake since 7am, and he’s due in the car 14.5 hours after that.

So. 47. Competing in the 48th running of the Daytona 24hrs. Three years’ racing experience. He’s about to be thrown right in at the deepest of deep ends. I ask him how he’s feeling, stupidly.
"Jelly," he says, then half turns away as if to indicate it’s the only word he can spit out. Then he grins and says, “I feel like jelly. This is when the pressure hits you. When Memo took the lead, I thought ‘I don’t want to get in that thing now!’"

Yes, he’s nervous, but not too nervous. Excitement beams from his eyes. I’d asked
Gidley about Derek earlier, and he told me the Geordie’s head was in the right place – quite calm, not too nervous, elated but aware of his responsibilities. One slip-up, and all the effort of this huge team is destroyed. It’s serious shit. Gidley also said he hoped Derek got enough laps to get closer to the ultimate pace. In practice, he was more than two seconds slower than Memo on a 100-ish second lap. But that’s still going some for a man with no experience in this extremely demanding racing car.

"You can go straight out onto the track, Derek,” says Kevin Doran over the radio. Derek’s in it just after midnight, following a delay of two hours for a gearbox change. It’s a shame, because it has shattered Doran’s chances of victory, but for once, the pressure on Derek has eased. He won’t be fighting for the lead. He fires her up and moves away smoothly from the pit garage in the paddock, white helmet steady in the cockpit beyond the car’s safety netting. 

"Careful of the tyres, Derek," says Doran. “Cold tyres. Cold tyres." We had already seen two other cars crash on the pit exit by ignoring the parlous state of their cool new tyres, but Derek doesn’t make that mistake. I see the throttle and brake traces on the telemetry screens start to dance as he gets a feel for what he’s doing.

This first stint is the story. He is due to do two more stints later in the race, but they won’t happen if he messes this one up. He is tentative, playing himself in by braking far earlier than he needs to. Gradually, gradually he starts to push harder, brake later.

If Memo Gidley’s early stint in the wet was the best of the race for sheer skill, Derek’s first stint between 12:08am and 2:08am matched it for pure guts. For a man with so little experience, he absolutely nailed it. He did 59 laps, with a best of 1:47.087 on his 34th. It was his only clean lap.

Watching him from the roof of the grandstand, you could see him constantly overtaking GT cars, letting faster DPs through, and working the car hard. He had two spins, both in places where he said he'd "spun before so I knew what was happening". So he was pushing.

After two long hours, he emerged from the cockpit bathed in sweat, eyes glowing behind his spectacles. The entire pit garage erupted in deafening applause. I’ll admit to having a significant lump in my throat. Through the blur, I watched him hugging his wife, Mandy.

He did it! At 47 going on 48, Derek Johnston lived the dream. He had that car mastered in the end, but did it with control and conservatism, with an eye on bringing it home. By the end of his last stint – he drove the Dallara over the line to finish the race at 3:30pm on Sunday – we were all a bit bored with Derek’s consistency and pace. He was just another superb racing driver in a big field of superb racing drivers.

For the record, his best lap was a 1:46.018, precisely three seconds slower than Gidley’s best. Less than three per cent, and he was only losing the time into and out of the two biggest and most dangerous braking zones. It goes to show that if you can run at or near the front of a British club racing championship, you can mix it with the best in the world. 

"All it is is laps,” Johnston said later. "Give me more laps in the car, and I’d be on the pace. But on Tuesday, I’m sacked. What do I do now?" I felt for him – a bit like an astronaut who’s gone to the moon and wonders what will ever match it, Derek Johnston knows that he may never reach such heights again. Relax, old son. You’re an inspiration to us all. Just revel in your time as one of the true heroes of British motorsport. It’s enough.