British race car driver Jamie Chadwick continued her American invasion last weekend with a history-making win in the Indy NXT Series, which used to be called Indy Lights. It’s the developmental feeder series for IndyCar, and many of its graduates have gone on to solid IndyCar careers, recently including Kyle Kirkwood and David Malukas, and in less recent history, Josef Newgarden, Scott Dixon, Helio Castroneves, Pato O’Ward, Marco Andretti, James Hinchcliffe, Colton Herta and Tony Kaanan.

Chadwick, who drives for Andretti Global, qualified on the pole for the Grand Prix of Road America, a 20-lap race on the tough Wisconsin road course. She is only the third female driver to win in the NXT/Indy Lights series, with the first being Ana Beatriz, who won in 2008 and 2009, and Pippa Mann, who was the most recent winner in 2010. Those wins were on oval tracks, so Chadwick becomes the first female driver to win on a road course.

“I have no words,” Chadwick said after her victory on Sunday. “Honestly, I’m a bit emotional. We’ve had an unbelievable car this year and just haven’t been able to do anything about it. I’m just so happy we held on there.”

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She beat Andretti Global teammate Louis Foster by 0.82 seconds, with Jacob Abel in third. Foster and Abel already have two wins each this season, and are the top two in the points, with Abel leading.

This is the second NXT season for Chadwick, 26, after winning three championships in the Europe-based, all-female W Series. That series was cancelled after three seasons for lack of finances, and last ran in 2022, when Chadwick returned with support from Caitlyn Jenner to win her third championship, this time for the newly-formed Jenner Racing team. The W Series was essentially replaced by the female-only, F1-backed F1 Academy in 2023. F1 Academy is on the Formula 4 level, considered a step down from the competition in the W Series.

Prior to racing in the W and NXT Series, Chadwick competed mostly in Europe, but she had several starts in the F3 Asian Championship. She has also been a development driver for the Williams F1 team, and a test driver for the NIO Formula E team. Chadwick co-drove an Aston Martin to a win in the Silverstone 24 Hours in 2015, and to fifth in class in the 2019 running of the 24 Hours of Nürburgring. She’s also competed in Extreme E, the electric off-road series.

Additionally, Chadwick is also the official advisor for 17-year-old Lia Block, daughter of the late stunt driver and rally racer Ken Block, as she competes for Williams in the F1 Academy series this season. After four of the scheduled 14 races, Lia is 14th in points out of 17 drivers.

Chadwick moved to the NXT series in 2023, where she had a best finish of sixth, and ended the season 12th in points. It took her a while to get acclimated to U.S. tracks and the NXT car, which is a Dallara chassis with a turbocharged 2.0-liter Mazda-AER four-cylinder, with six-speed gearbox. The series is owned by IndyCar, which means it’s owned by Roger Penske. Her best finish this season had been third on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s road course.

While Chadwick led Sunday’s race from the pole and never gave up the lead, it wasn’t easy. A crash on lap 16 caused officials to fly the red flag, stopping the race to allow for a clean-up and ensure that it wouldn’t finish under a caution flag. It was restarted with two laps to go.

“With the red flag at the end, I was like, ‘Come on!’” Chadwick said. “We started to lose the tires a little bit. I just knew I had to be aggressive. I knew they [Foster and Abel] have a championship to worry about, and I just had to get my head down. I really wanted to win today.” The victory moved Chadwick up to ninth in points.

This was the sixth race in a 13-race NXT season. Next up is a doubleheader at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca on June 22-23.

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After the checkered flag dropped on 2023’s Rolex 24 at Daytona, it was the Meyer Shank Racing Acura GTP racer in victory lane. The team of four drivers, in their pink driving suits, hooted and howled on top of the podium. Then, they donned a matching set of Swiss watches.

Every year, Rolex awards its Oyster Perpetual Cosmographs to the victors of the Florida endurance race. This year, Helio Castroneves won his third Rolex 24. If the Brazilian driver ever wanted to open his own watch shop, he certainly has the inventory. Castroneves, despite his recent victories, does not hold the record for most Rolex 24 wins. Scott Pruett and Hurley Haywood hold the title for most overall triumphs at five.

Much in the vein of warm Indy 500 milk, Daytona’s unique tradition dates back to the primordial years of the famous race.

Flash back to 1959. Daytona International Speedway was a newly minted racing facility featuring steep banks and broad turns, a layout that allowed hopped-up sedans and business coupes to seemingly fly around the 2.5-mile tri-oval. The France family, led by patriarch Bill Sr, welcomed racing’s best to its landmark race course. It also greeted a new sponsor: Rolex.

On paper, a partnership between America’s first racing family and a British-founded Swiss watch company might seem odd. In reality, the prestige of each partner elevated that of the other. To commemorate the relationship, starting in 1966, Rolex inscribed the speedway’s moniker—Daytona—into the dial of each Oyster Perpetual Cosmograph.

Over the next three decades, Rolex bolstered its relationship with auto racing. In 1968, the company worked closely with three-time Formula 1 champion Jackie Stewart.

Then, in 1992, Rolex fortified its bond with the famous Florida speedway and became the title sponsor of Daytona’s 24-hour endurance race. The company that originally partnered with the burgeoning facility in the late 1950s returned as the sponsor of professional sports-car racing’s longest stateside soirée.

For two circuits of the chronograph’s needle, drivers compete on Daytona’s 3.56-mile road course. Sticking with the enduro theme, Rolex also partners with another 24-hour motorsports contest: The company is the official timepiece of the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Whether in America or overseas, in the race against time, it’s only fitting that a Swiss watch be awarded to the winners.

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We’re blasting down the 2100-foot straightaway in a race-prepared BMW M2 at the Concours Club’s new track in Miami, Florida. The driver comes to a right-hand kink. Hands light on the steering wheel, he flicks the car through the kink without lifting, then brakes hard for a hairpin. Correcting a slight skid, the driver’s car control seems almost telepathic.

Normally I’d be nervous, but I glance over and notice the driver’s Indianapolis 500 winner’s ring—he has four, and no one has more—and his Rolex watch. He has three of those now, as of last weekend, when he became the first driver to win the Rolex 24 at Daytona sports car race three consecutive years.

Helio Castroneves is smiling, which is not unusual. He’s 5-foot-8, ropy, not particularly muscular. His workouts target endurance more than sheer muscle mass. In television interviews he comes across as a very nice guy, animated but genuine. What you saw when he competed in, and won, Dancing with the Stars in 2007 is what you get in person.

It is, in fact, difficult to cheer against the driver known as “Spiderman,” a nicknamed earned from his penchant for climbing the catch fences at tracks after a victory. He did it again, at age 47, on January 29 at Daytona International Speedway.

“It’s a very tough sport. You lose more than you win,” Castroneves said. “It did touch me. That’s why I love this sport. It is very hard and when you get to win, you celebrate.”

Castroneves won his third Rolex 24 in the Meyer Shank Racing Acura, co-driving with Tom Blomvquist, Colin Braun, and his Meyer Shank IndyCar teammate, Simon Pagenaud. The car qualified on the pole and led repeatedly to the win, finishing 4.2 seconds ahead of the other Acura, fielded by Wayne Taylor Racing with Andretti Autosport.

“This team is amazing. This is absolutely a dream come true,’’ Castroneves said after the race. “So happy to start the year like this.”

Castroneves gets back behind the wheel at the March 5 IndyCar season opener, where he’ll drive a Meyer-Shank Honda in the Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg, a race he’s won three times. After that, he’ll run the full IndyCar season, and as the only active driver to have four wins at the Indianapolis 500 (the others are A.J. Foyt, Rick Mears and the late Al Unser, Sr.), Castroneves would love to make it a record-setting five. Though he has never raced in NASCAR, he had been hoping to find a ride for the Daytona 500 on February 19, but he ran out of time. He said he may well go as a spectator and shoot for 2024 to drive in the Great American Race. He will also compete in the summer made-for-TV SRX series, which he has also won in. “I’ll race most anything,” he said.

As we pull into the pits, Castroneves parks the BMW and a hostess greets us with a cold towel and a bottle of water. That isn’t because I’m with Castroneves, it’s just part of the service.

About that Concours Club service: The venue had a quiet opening in July of 2021, and it continues to grow on its 75 acres located on the edge of the grounds of the Miami Opa-Locka Executive Airport, a short distance from downtown Miami. The airport is home to plenty of celebrity-owned airplanes, including Jennifer Lopez’s private jet, but the real advantage of the location is that the Concours Club has no noise, lighting, or late-night restrictions.

It was founded by attorney Neil Gehani, CEO of Trilogy Real Estate Group in Chicago and a part-time Miami resident, and managed by Aaron Weiss, the club president. The membership list—and no, you can’t look at it—is a who’s who of South Florida car-enthusiast millionaires-and-beyond. Some decline to be identified even within the club. On the list of the five fastest laps turned by members, numbers three through five are listed as “Anonymous.”

Certainly one of the only race tracks that employs a Master Sommelier and a members-and-guests-only gourmet restaurant on site, presided over by Brad Kilgore, described by the Miami Herald as “one of Miami’s most celebrated chefs,” the Concours Club prefers to take on new members who have been recommended by current members.

Naturally, membership comes at a steep cost. The initial fee is $375,000, with annual dues of $35,000. “That is as of today,” said Susana Olmos, the club’s director of marketing. It did not sound like the price is expected to go down anytime soon.

That’s for a basic membership, and while that covers a lot, if you want one of the 41 Auto Lofts—your collector and race cars on the bottom, a luxury condo upstairs—you’ll need to ante up a lot more if there is still one available: “By the time you publish this, they should all be sold,” Weiss said. Less expensive car storage is offered, with round-the-clock security and state-of-the-art fire suppression systems. Plenty of members have car collections, which many prefer to keep at the track. Walking through the club garages is like going to a high-end car show.

While most every aspect of the Concours Club is state-of-the-art, the term certainly applies to the track itself, a smooth, tight, technical circuit that can be run in seven different lengths and configurations. Most impressive is the operation of the track and the instruction offered by multiple on-staff pro drivers, including veteran Oswaldo Negri—a Brazilian (like Castroneves) who won the 2012 Rolex 24 at Daytona and raced at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

There is no flagman. Literally dozens of cameras line the track, making remote operation possible, as does “semi-autonomous predictive electronic flagging software.” Instruction is also remote; Weiss personally knew race drivers who died in crashes with students while instructing from the right seat, so all instruction is done from a constantly-monitored control center via video monitors and radios in the cars. Instructors get real-time data, so they can tell students that they did better on a turn this lap than they did on the last one.

“It’s every bit as constructive as coaches riding in the car with members, maybe more so,” Weiss said. Also, some of the members’ rides either have no right seat, or the space inside is so tight that fitting two adults would be a challenge.

Back in the main clubhouse—the style is not remotely ostentatious—we sip a sommelier-selected glass of wine and talk about racing and life and the Concours Club. “I’ve never seen anything like this place,” said Castroneves, who is club member number 4. He brought a friend from his sponsor’s company, AutoNation, to the club, “and this is a guy who loves to critique things. He found nothing to critique here.”

Castroneves was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1975, and was just five when he discovered auto racing, an interest he inherited from his father, Helio Castro Neves, Sr. (the younger Helio changed his surname to Castroneves in 2000 because the media was confused by the two last names, he said). His car-dealer father earned enough money to buy a small stock car team in Brazil, and often smuggled his son into races in the trunk of his car wearing a custom-made fire suit and matching helmet.

At age 10, Castroneves began racing karts, and progressed up the ladder as far as his father’s money could take him. The senior Castro Neves sold practically everything he had to help fund his son’s racing. Eventually sponsors entered the picture, and Castroneves raced in Europe before coming to America to race Indy Lights and then IndyCars.

The rest is, as they say, history. Castroneves signed with team owner Roger Penske in 2000 and that partnership lasted for 20 years. Now Castroneves is signed to Meyer Shank Racing, a much smaller team than Penske’s but one that can obviously get the job done. It doesn’t hurt that Castroneves is a master at communicating what he needs in a car to the engineers and crew.

“I might be the one in front of the cameras, but racing is teamwork. It’s the team that gets you that opportunity. You can’t win a race without great pit stops, and great preparation—again, everything starts at the shop. Those guys make it happen. Going 235 mph in an IndyCar, I have to be able to trust that every screw has been tightened.”

Castroneves may be the same age as NFL quarterback Tom Brady, but unlike Brady, Castroneves isn’t ready to hang up his helmet.

How much longer, Helio? “I don’t know. As long as I have the fire. I don’t want to stop, take a year sabbatical, then come back. That’s not for me. That’s wrong. Once I’m out, I’m out.”

But not now, he said. “The fire, it still burns.”

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