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Prologue

Kyalami Grand Prix Circuit
Midrand, Gauteng, South Africa
Sunday, November 19, 2017
10:35 AM


Bright sunshine filled the thin-aired skies of North-Central South Africa, shining down through cloudless skies that marked the early portions of summer in South Africa. The summer at this place was one which a certain kind of people loved. The kind of people who loved cars, technology, competition and passion. Pretty much everyone, really, at least in the minds of the couple thousand men and women who worked feverishly in the pits, mostly working under vast canopies or inside Kyalami's buildings, while a massive crowd gathered outside of the track, with some piling into the thousands of seats at Kyalami's stadium-style seating sections, other hiding under grown trees on man-made hillocks giving a beautiful view of the track in front of them in the best spots. Many of these had come wearing the colors of their favorite teams or drivers, because to show support to one's favored sport few would not do, say, believe or wear things they otherwise wouldn't, and motor racing was no exception to this rule, especially when one was going to be racing in such an event as the Kyalami Nine Hours.

In the expansive VIP building on the inside of Kyalami's Turn One, Dr. Don Panoz stood, looking out the windows at the paddock to the West, noting the fevered activity in it and smiling at it. It was both like and unlike the events that he had spent twenty years shepherding in North America, and despite all of the trials and tribulations along the way, it was clear that when one looked at the teams working so hard to make their cars ready for today's race, it had been worth the journey. This race would decide three different championships at one time, and indeed Kyalami was as about a good a place to do that as could be imagined. South Africa was rising as a country, and even among the darkness of the nation's tortured past there had always been passions for sport, and Panoz felt more than a little privileged that motorsport was one of the sports that the nation's white minority and black majority could both agree to love. Like so much in this land, that had been the result of a few good men, who had both changed the course of the nation and made themselves a not-inconsiderable amount of money and a measure of fame at the same time. But beyond the privilege of being involved in South Africa's new world, Panoz's efforts had changed the racing world of his North America, and in ways that some hadn't ever imagined....

"Impressive, isn't it?" The gravelly Australian voice of Kevin Kalkhoven, one of Dr. Panoz's partners, grunted from behind him.
"But of course, Kevin. But then again, I kinda wonder what this would all look like without all of us."
"It would still be a race track, I'm sure of that. South Africa loves their cars, and you can easily enough see downtown Johannesburg from here."
That was true, Panoz had to admit. Fifteen miles from downtown Johannesburg and with two shoulders to residential and commercial areas, Kyalami was a perfect place to host an automobile race. Johannesburg's skyscrapers, including several of the glassy new ones built since the end of apartheid, were clearly visible from Kyalami. Panoz knew Kalkhoven was right, but the question really wasn't about the track.
"I wasn't really referring to the track, you know."
"Oh, you mean us?"
"Yes." A pause. "We've come a long ways since those days back then."
"Though on somewhat diverging paths." Kalkhoven smiled. "At one time, I woulda wished death upon you."
"Nice to know you're still as brutally honest and lacking in diplomacy as ever."
"Hey, you asked."
Don chuckled at that. "I suppose I did, but I think we both kinda needed each other back then. After all, you were finding out the problems with your little purchase and what you felt it needed to be."
Kevin somewhat admired that Panoz hadn't been any more diplomatic than him. "Maybe so, but today we get to look down on all of this."
"Indeed we do, but I would hope that our journey is not gonna make all of us forget what we did to get here."
"You know I never will. You?"
"Never." Panoz smiled. "Neither one of us exactly saw this as our calling I'm sure, but it kinda is what has become."

Down in the pits for Champion Audi Racing, Kelsey Matheson was leaning against the side of the huge truck that operated as the team's hauler, looking out at the Audi Quattro IMSA race car that sat, almost ready to race, with it needing just the final adjustments - adjustments that the team was feverishly working on making at that very moment.
"Ready to go, Kelsey?" Dave Maraj, her car owner, asked amicably.
"I sure am. Johnny and Cameron good to go?"
"They say so."
"We better be. Rahal's guys are fast this weekend. We'll need every ounce of the speed the car's got to make them fall back."
"True, but we got Nine Hours to shove on them until the break, no?"
"Maybe so, but they are getting better all the time. I don't need to tell ya that."
"No, but we can do this, and we will only know by racing."

The race began on time at 12:05, with the cars from the three series involved all lining up in the order they raced in. The race was divided into four classes - Le Mans Prototype Two, Grand Touring Outlaw, Grand Touring Evolution and Grand Touring Sport - as well as a handful of "wild card" entries. The Grand Touring Outlaw and Prototype Two cars were remarkably close in overall lap times - the P2 cars clearly faster in the corners and on the brakes, the GTO cars clearly faster in a straight line - while there was a sizable gap between them and the GTE cars, and another back to the GTS cars. The Prototype cars were all made by dedicated race car makers and looked like it, while the GTO cars looked something like road-going cars but clearly were race cars, while both the GTE and GTS cars were built from the production car chassis, though the rules were rather more open in the former category than the latter, though the GTS cars had a provision allowing one to build a car from a "mother chassis" and then have its performance balanced out with the production-based cars.

The IMSA Shell V-Power Sportscar Championship had cars from all four classes, while the FIA World Sports Car Championship provided examples of the P2 and GTE cars, while the Springbok Series native to South Africa provided a single GTE car, four Prototype Two cars and six GTS machines, as well as the five wild cards - three of them being four-door sedans from the Springbok Series built from the ground up with big V8 engines, the other two being full-blown race cars with late model Ford Falcon-esque bodywork but being full race cars underneath which could easily maintain the pace of the visitors from America and Europe. The GT racers represented nearly every major car maker on Earth - the GTO class had Ford Mustang, BMW i8, Audi RS5, Acura NSX, Toyota Supra and Nissan 380Z competitors, while the GTE class saw the Chevrolet Corvette, Ford GT40, Dodge Viper, Ferrari F12 Berlinetta, Porsche 911 RSR, Aston Martin Vanquish, Lexus LFA and BMW M6 represented. The GTS class had the greatest variety of all - racers picked from the Porsche 911 GT3RS, Ferrari 488 GTB, Lamborghini Huracan, Audi R8, McLaren 650S, Bentley Continental GT, Nissan GT-R, BMW Z4, Mercedes-Benz AMG GT, Aston Martin V8 Vantage, Jaguar F-Type, Lotus Evora and Cadillac ATS-V.R, and if those didn't catch one's fancy they could build a car based on the mother chassis - and the presence of a pair of Honda CR-Zs, a Subaru BRZ and two Alfa Romeo 4Cs proved that some people did prefer to make their own. The cars ran on Michelin, Goodyear, Continental, Dunlop, Pirelli and Yokohama tires, and the drivers came from across the world. The South African entries had mostly home-grown drivers (though the GTE car had one of its drivers from neighboring Zimbabwe), but the WEC and IMSA entries had drivers from all across the planet. 84 entries, each one with a team behind them and a combined total of half a billion dollars in equipment, lined up to run the race.

What came next was a classic endurance race.
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