Inside the 170-mph alarm clock of an Audi R8 race car at Daytona

Four o’clock in the morning sucks. It’s dark, often cold, and the only souls stupid enough to be awake are burglars and lousy radio hosts. So why, then, am I hopping with excitement at such an ungodly hour of the day?

Perhaps it’s the glorious howl of a 1988 Porsche 962 powering through the darkness? Or maybe it’s the gaggle of Ford GT40s racing so ferociously that one of them tore off the other’s left-rear fender in a desperate attempt to claim victory?

In all fairness, it may have a lot to do with the matte-black Audi R8 LMS Ultra sitting on pit lane. And the fact that a mechanic is ushering me to don my helmet and climb aboard.

The inaugural Classic 24 Hours at Daytona boasted every vintage race car you’ve ever dreamed of. Witnessing them all in the depth of the night, headlamps blazing a beam as striking as Vader’s lightsaber, is beyond evocative. It’s why I fell in love with the automobile as a child.

My R8 isn’t particularly “vintage.” It did, in fact, finish third at the proper 24 Hours of Daytona just 12 months earlier, and since then has finished second in the Pirelli World Challenge. But that’s OK, because the Classic 24 isn’t merely for old cars—everyone’s welcome, for the most part. The event is split into six groups; you don’t race for 24 hours straight, you run in four separate hour-long segments throughout the duration of the event.

This helps contain costs and allows the more aged machines a fighting chance at completing the distance. And for the spectators, well, there’s a constant flow of race cars navigating Daytona’s legendary banking, and each hour, a different era of machines take to the track.

Our group is filled with GT3-spec cars like the R8, but it also includes a handful of modern-day Daytona Prototypes and a few LMP1 racers as well, such as sports-car ace Andy Wallace in a 2005 Le Mans-winning Audi. We’re placed in classes within our group, so we’re all racing cars with similar performance (except for the Maserati MC12 GT1 that snuck its way into our class.) But after lapping 5 seconds faster than us in qualifying, they were quickly booted back out again.

I’m sharing the Hawk Performance R8 with Mike Skeen, the guy who damn-near won the Pirelli World Challenge GT title this year. The car, run by CRP Racing, is his baby, and my plan is to run as fast as I can and, most importantly, hand it over to him in one piece.