How Randy Lanier Went from Spectator to Driver at the 1982 24 Hours of Daytona

The Executone Communications March GTP that Randy Lanier raced at the 1983 24 Hours of Daytona, one year after a fateful encounter turned him into a professional racing driver.Photo: Courtesy Hachette Books

When South Florida-based racing driver Randy Lanier got out of prison in 2014, after nearly 27 years behind bars, reporters jumped on his saga. The Guardian in London: “His story is every bit as rollicking as anything you’d see on Miami Vice.” Maxim called it “the fastest rise and fall story ever told.” The 1982 IMSA Camel GT champion and 1986 Indy 500 Rookie of the Year had been sentenced to life in prison in 1988 for running a marijuana smuggling operation so huge, he earned enough cash to put together a juggernaut racing organization that defeated factory-backed Porsche and Jaguar teams. The chief prosecutor who put Lanier behind bars said of him, “I know one thing: If we see him, we don’t have a car fast enough to pull him over.”

Lanier got out for good behavior eight years ago. His entire story has never been told until now, with the recent release of his autobiography Survival of the Fastest: Weed, Speed, and the 1980s Drug Scandal that Shocked the Sports World, published by Hachette.

The book was written with veteran automotive journalist A.J. Baime, author of Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. A movie based on the autobiography is in the works. This excerpt tells the surprising story of how Lanier turned from club racer to pro at the 1982 24 Hours of Daytona.

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One winter day in Florida—another balmy, beautiful, blue-sky morning—Pam and I packed some beer and clothes and all our baby gear into the motor home and headed north with Brandie. We were going to the 24 Hours of Daytona, the biggest sports car endurance race in America.

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Teams from all over the world come to the Daytona International Speedway with their machinery every January for the kickoff race of the year. There are production GT cars (showroom sports cars like Corvettes and Porsche 911s, with performance and safety gear added) and prototype purpose-built race cars (which looked like spaceships with wheels). The prototype cars at that time topped out around 190 mph—three times the speed limit of the fastest highways in the country.

In endurance racing, a team of three to four drivers is assigned to one car, with one driver in it at a time, and the car that makes the most laps over the time period (in this case, 24 hours) wins. The Triple Crown of endurance racing is Daytona, Sebring, and, of course, Le Mans.

Randy and Pam’s wedding, Valentine’s Day 1976, Hollywood, FL.Photo: Courtesy Hachette Books

The 24 Hours of Daytona is run on the famed racetrack’s road course, which combined the banked oval that you see in NASCAR racing, along with a twisty course in the middle of the infield with lefts and rights and hyperfast straightaways. That’s the point of sports car racing: to challenge not just the driver’s speed and skill but also every part of the car—the front and rear suspension, the electricals, the engine, the windshield wipers (it rains sometimes at Daytona), and even the headlights (as you’re racing all night long). The car has to be bulletproof under absolutely brutal driving conditions to win, which makes endurance racing a team effort. The mechanics have to be as quick and smart as the driver. Meanwhile, the grandstands fill up with thousands of spectators and the TV cameras roll.

I was just a spectator that year at Daytona, though I hoped to come back soon as a driver. We took friends along with us, and we aimed to turn it into a party weekend. A few other friends met us there in their motor homes. I had a buddy who worked for the Preston Henn North American Racing Team. The day before the race start, during practice, I was hanging around the team’s garage. The team was running a Ferrari BB 512, racing in the GTO class with engines over 3.0 liters (the second-fastest class). The car was painted red with sponsorship decals all over it. It had a wide stance and a big wing on the back, a pure badass blood-red Ferrari race car. The team had three world-class pilots—Bob Wollek and Edgar Doren, both from France, and Janet Guthrie of the United States, who was at that time the only woman ever to compete in both the Indy 500 and the Daytona 500.

I overheard people talking in the garage that morning, and I could tell something was wrong. Janet Guthrie had gotten sick. They were going to need a replacement driver. I went up to my buddy who worked for the team.

“Hey,” I said, “can you tell Preston about me?”

This No. 57 Porsche Speedster was Randy’s first race car, seen here at Road Atlanta in 1980.Photo: Courtesy Hachette Books

That would be Preston Henn, who was in charge. Preston was a character, and he was there in the garage wearing cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, sporting a trimmed gray beard. He was a South Florida guy like me who’d made a fortune owning drive-in theaters. He held huge swap meets during the day and then showed movies at night. When my buddy introduced us, I told Preston that I was a friend of the Whittington brothers and that I’d won the SCCA Southeastern E Production championship with my Porsche speedster a year and a half earlier.

“Are you comfortable on this track?” Preston asked me. “Yes, indeed I am! Daytona is one of my home tracks. Ayyyight? I live three hours away, in Davie. Listen, man, I can get the job done.”

I could tell he was skeptical. He asked, “Can you get any sponsorship?” This was a normal question. Drivers were often chosen not just for their speed but their ability to bring sponsorship money to the team.

“Damn skippy,” I said. I told him that I ran a jet ski rental company out of Fort Lauderdale called Sun Coast Jet Ski Rental and that it could be a team sponsor. “I have $5,000 in cash in my motor home. I’ll give it to you right now.”

Preston stood a solid foot taller than me. He ran his eyes up and down, sizing me up. “Go get your helmet,” he said. “I’ll give you four laps. Let’s see what you can do.”

It is said that success occurs when preparation meets opportunity. I sensed that this was a moment that could change my life. If, that is, I didn’t fuck it up.

Because I used the motor home for my own racing, I had all my gear on board—helmet, race suit, and, of course, cash. When I got back to the Preston Henn team garage, I could tell that there was some friction. Wollek, the French endurance racer, wasn’t keen on giving me a tryout. I could hear him yelling at Preston. “Brilliant Bob” Wollek was a star endurance athlete. I was a nobody. I wasn’t even a professional. But the race was set to start the next day, and they needed a driver.

We had to mold a seat for me because I was shorter than Wollek and Doren. The team mechanics got out a regular kitchen garbage bag and filled it with some chemicals. Then they put the bag on the race car seat and sat me on top of it. The bag molded to my body, and the chemicals turned into a hard foam so that I could sit comfortably and my feet could reach the pedals.

While we were making the foam seat, I tried to hide how nervous I was. I’d never driven a Ferrari, let alone a full-on Ferrari race car. Out on the track, other teams were practicing, the cars ripping by with engines thundering. This track was about serious speed, hard braking, and precise cornering. One mistake and you could take out another car or hit a cement wall.

If I crashed the team’s car the day before the race? It would be a disaster. I’d be humiliated, my reputation permanently ruined.

I hit the ignition and dabbed the accelerator with my toe. There is no sound like a Ferrari race engine—angry, high-pitched, twelve cylinders, superhigh compression, the most exotic engine on earth. The power was so extreme, I felt like I could blow a hole in the atmosphere from the cockpit of that car. The gear shifter came through a gate that was unlike anything I’d seen, and I wasn’t comfortable. I motored out of the pits onto the track and decided to take my first two laps easy, to get a feel for the car. Slowly, I built my speed.

By the time I came around at the end of my second lap, down the pit straight past the grandstands, I’d settled down. It was go time. I hammered the throttle, and the car responded. I was motoring over 175 mph—the fastest I’d ever traveled—before braking hard into the left-hand turn one, through the fast kink on turn two, to the heavy g-forces of the turn-three switchback. I was in the zone: shifting up, shifting down, brake, clutch, throttle, the steering wheel light in my fingers. When I got up onto Daytona’s 33-degree banked turn, I floored the throttle, and the g-force acted like a slingshot, hurling me around the bend.

When I came back into the pits after my four laps, Preston was standing there, his eyes shaded under his cowboy hat. I unclipped my five-point harness, pulled myself from the car, and took off my helmet. The team crew chief, a guy named Al Roberts, showed me my lap times on a clipboard. On my last two laps, I was about one second off the pace of Wollek, one of the best endurance racers in the world.

Preston said, “Get yourself ready, Randy. You’re on the team.”

Pam couldn’t believe it. We’d come to watch the biggest endurance sports car race in America, but now, I was going to be in it. We stood in our motor home hugging each other. It was an awesome moment but also scary as all hell. People die racing at Daytona. Less than a year earlier, a stock car driver named Don Williams had been killed on this same track. I thought of my little brother Glen—how psyched he’d be if he were with me but, also, how his passion for motoring had ended his life.

The next day, I arrived early at the garage in my fireproof driving suit with my helmet under my arm. Each of the three drivers were to do three-hour stints, and I would go last. So, by the time I got in the car and fastened myself in tight, the race was already six hours old. We were somewhere in the middle of the pack. The grandstands were full of race fans, draining the Daytona International Speedway of its beer. When I pulled the Ferrari out of the pit straight and into that swift left-hand turn one, I was no longer Randy Lanier, club racer. I was a professional athlete.

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I put myself in the zone. My meditation training served me well again. Gear shifts happened automatically as if I were part of the machine. I hit the corner apexes time and again. The view from inside the cockpit became something like tunnel vision—total focus through every revolution of the engine, every spin of all four wheels. In a race car you can come to feel like you’re superhuman. The great Sir Stirling Moss once put it this way: “I believe that if a man wanted to walk on water, and was prepared to give up everything else in life, he could do it. He could walk on water. I’m serious.” When you reach that level of commitment, you feel that you can’t possibly make a mistake. That confidence ignites more speed on the track but also more risk. Even if you don’t make a mistake, someone else on the track could. And just like that: light’s out.

You’re hyperaware of everything around you, cars at speed sometimes inches away, but at the same time, you’re hyper-aware of what’s happening in the distance, in the next turn and the one after that.

Never mind the searing heat in the cockpit.

Never mind the furious noise and the spine-wrenching vibration.

None of that exists. You are in a flow state.

No two laps are ever the same. The car changes its behavior according to the track conditions or how much fuel is weighing you down. There’s so much going on, and you cannot let your focus slip. The race wears you down. It wears down your car. You see broken machinery around the track, where somebody made a mistake. Not going to be you! Not this time!

Five-time Le Mans champion Derek Bell tugs on Randy’s mustache at a race in 1984.Photo: Courtesy Hachette Books

Midway through my stint, I started to feel that the car was not shifting gears as smoothly as it had earlier. The more laps I drove, the more sure I was: something was wrong with the car. But I kept pushing. At the end of my three-hour drive, I pulled the car into the pit feeling very, very relieved. As I was getting out, Wollek was getting in. I yelled to him, “Watch the gearshift!” I don’t know if my words even registered. I was so exhausted it was all I could do to drag my body back to my motor home and lie down in a quiet place.

It was pitch dark when I had to report back to the pit for my second stint. We were doing well: I believe we were running fourth, so if we picked up one spot, we would make it to the podium. When Edgar Doren pulled into the pit, I took some quick deep breaths. Then I got in the cockpit. After a few laps—racing in the darkness, with the headlights trying to knife through fog—I was convinced the car wasn’t shifting gears well. I was flooring the throttle on the back straight, preparing to enter turn three of the embankment, when the gear box let go. I couldn’t get the car in any gear. It was stuck in neutral, totally undrivable.

I had enough speed to coast down to the entrance of pit road. When I pulled into our pit, even before I got out of the car, I made a hand motion, slicing my neck, to show the team that the car was dead. The crew chief came sprinting over, and I explained myself to him.

Immediately, I saw Wollek jump over the pit wall. He started screaming at me with that French accent. “You took the car off the track!” he was yelling. “You took the car off the track!” Meaning, I had busted the Ferrari, that it was my fault.

“Bullshit! The gearbox let go! I just happened to be the guy in the car when it blew.”

I climbed out of the cockpit. He was up in my face. “You broke the car!”

“Shut the fuck up, man!”

Preston was there, watching so see if any punches were about to get thrown. I walked away, Wollek still screaming at me over the sound of revving engines from out on the track. That was the end of my first pro race.

JLP Racing’s Porsche 935 took the checkered flag at the 1982 24 Hours of Daytona. The father-son duo John Paul Sr. and John Paul Jr. won, along with Rolf Stommelen, a German ace who would die a year later in a crash at the Los Angeles Grand Prix.

Photo: Courtesy Hachette Books

That Sunday night, as the teams were packing up their cars and gear, I went to Preston Henn’s motor home to thank him for the drive and tell him I was sorry for the way things turned out. He invited me in, and the next thing I knew, we were snorting cocaine, and although I never was a big drinker, we were moving quickly through a bottle of whiskey. Preston was a wild guy, turns out. He said something about John Paul Sr. and Jr., and I told him about the time, eighteen months earlier, when I’d nearly come to blows with John Paul Sr. at the SCCA runoffs at Road Atlanta.

Preston shot me a look that I didn’t quite understand. He said, “You know what? There’s somebody I’d like you to meet.”

“Not right now,” I said. “We’re sitting here snorting cocaine!”

“Don’t worry,” he said, “you’ll like this guy.”

He left and minutes later, when the door swung open, Preston had John Paul Sr. following him into the motor home. I jumped out of my seat because I knew that this man did not like me at all.

The two of them burst out in laughter, pointing at me and cackling. “Calm down, Randy,” Preston said. “John Paul here is my good friend.”

I felt the tension ease. I slid over and John Paul sat down. We started talking racing. We snorted some coke. We partied all night long. John Paul Sr. had just won the 24 Hours of Daytona, and let me tell you, that will put you in a good mood. Our friendship was sealed that night.

I was becoming part of this fraternity of South Florida professional sports car racers—Preston, John Paul and his son, the Whittingtons, Marty Hinze. We were all living for adrenaline, and we all had money. Crazy to think, in retrospect, every one of us except Preston Henn would end up in prison, on the front line of the War on Drugs. John Paul Sr., it would turn out, was a man fully capable of actual murder. He was a killer. At the time, I didn’t know any of that; we were just partying together, as we did after a hard-fought race.

In the morning, Pam and I packed up the baby and headed south for home, feeling happy and excited about our future together.

“Someday,” I told Pam, “I’m going to win the 24 Hours of Daytona.”

“Sure, Randy,” she said. “Maybe someday you will.” That’s my philosophy: believe and you will achieve.

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Excerpted from SURVIVAL OF THE FASTEST: Weed, Speed, and the 1980s Drug Scandal that Shocked the Sports World by Randy Lanier with A.J. Baime. Copyright © 2022. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.