Sebring's Last Stand

Since it was first run 22 years ago, the Sebring 12-hour endurance test has occupied a special place in U.S. auto racing. Despite its increasingly dilapidated, dead-flat track and spartan spectator facilities, it has invariably attracted top drivers and big crowds eager for a taste of European-style sports-car racing. But the event may finally have run its course--at least on its existing track around a World War II airport. TIME Correspondent Peter Range attended this year's race:

The road to Sebring is lined with dead armadillos crushed by hot-rods headed for the race, speeding through pungent clouds of orange-blossom fragrance. On either side are expansive, marshy pastures, dotted with browsing brahma bulls and heifers. There are other signs of the area's normal atmosphere --the Sebring without gears. On the town's outskirts sit neatly tended villages of mobile homes and shuffleboard courts. Sebring is middle Florida, where the air is clean and dry, and the main profession is retirement.

Many of the area's permanent residents regard the race as an intruder, a sort of raucously blasting road runner in their Garden of Eden. Indeed, the Sebring race milieu can be something of a shambles--Woodstock without music. But as U.S. auto-racing events go, the Sebring also has touches of Continental class. It is characterized more by ascots than bandannas; French, Italian and British accents mingle with the Southern drawl; in the parking lots, truck campers rest cheek by cowl with Lamborghinis and Maseratis.

"This race is more than a race," says

Chicagoan Carl Haas, manager of a Lola team. "It's a social event, just like Le Mans. It's a bit of a mecca. It's got its own sort of flavor." In fact it sometimes seems that the race is a secondary event, little more than a 100-decibel background for the real thing: drinking, talking and gawking, or in the long stretches of the night, cooking steaks over flickering grills and cracking yet another sixpack.

By day, it was 78DEG, and the gawking was good. Among the women in the crowd of 60,000, the braless look and tight pants predominated. The very beautiful and the very rich wandered in and out of the blue-and-white-striped "Members Only" tent. At $8 a head, families took seven-minute swoops over the track in helicopters. Others tooled up and down the old, cracked fighter-bomber runways of the airport in open M.G.s, yellow Jags and dune buggies.

But there was also a race. And even if its 60 entries included only two factory teams, the cherry red cars of Ferrari and the blood red cars of Alfa-Romeo, they provided more than a diverting show. Bouncing around the bumpy track's 5.2-mile course, with its twelve S's, hair-raising hairpin and assorted other curves, only 27 of the entries managed to finish. Mechanical mishaps took the biggest toll. Peter Revson, driving one of the four Alfa-Romeo Spyders, was eliminated for flourishing a finger obscenely at a track official who had chastised him for illegally passing another car under a yellow caution flag.

Revson's ejection did not help the Alfa-Romeo team's chances. As it turned out, they needed all the help they could get against a Ferrari team that combined the lightest and fastest cars on the track, a superbly efficient pit crew and a gung-ho gang of drivers. American Mario Andretti helped Ferrari to its ninth Sebring victory; it was his third win there. With his co-driver, Belgian Jacky Ickx, Andretti led for most of the race, setting a new course record of 259 laps, at an average speed of 111.508 m.p.h. Another Ferrari finished second, two laps back; an Alfa-Romeo was a distant third.

At the victory brunch the next day, white-haired Sebring Promoter Alex Ulmann declared: "This will be the last race run on this track." Ulmann has said it before, but everybody seemed to believe him this time. The international sanctioning body barely permitted the race to be run this year, and is insisting on significant improvements, mostly for safety. Upgrading the present track seems to be out of the question; the primary lease is held by a local civic group that has other plans for the property. So the search is on for a new site. Says Ulmann: "We already have a date in 1973, but where it will be, nobody knows."

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