I saw Dale Earnhardt Sr. race at Bristol. And at Richmond.

I rank those nights right up there with seeing Wayne Gretzky play at Madison Square Garden. And with watching Derek Jeter at Yankee Stadium during the ALCS. Twice.

You do not realize what you are looking at when you are looking at it. You think it is a great night, a great game, a great race. You think there will be others. You buy the program, you take a few pictures, you talk about it the next day at work. Then ten years go by, then twenty, and somebody mentions the name of one of those athletes and you realize the moment you were standing in is not coming back. The person you were watching cannot be re-watched. The thing you saw cannot be re-seen.

The list of athletes who get to be that for an entire generation is short. The list of racing drivers who get to be that is shorter. Drivers’ careers end. Sometimes they end on schedule, with a retirement announcement and a farewell tour and a soft landing into a broadcasting job. Sometimes they end suddenly, the way Kyle Busch’s did, and the window slams shut without warning.

Rest in peace, Rowdy. We do not get to plan another race weekend to go see you. That trip was always going to be on next year’s calendar. Now it is not.

That is the point of this piece. There are three drivers in motorsport right now you will one day wish you saw race in person. F1, IndyCar, and NASCAR. One in each discipline. All three at the peak of their careers, all three running toward the part of their careers where the answer to “when should I go see them?” is “this year.”

Not next year. Not the year after. The year you are reading this.

Here is who they are. And here is where to go see them.

Lewis Hamilton

If you are an F1 fan and you have not yet stood inside an F1 weekend and watched Hamilton drive, you are running out of years.

Seven-time world champion. The all-time wins leader in Formula 1. The driver who took the sport global. He is at Ferrari now, in the second half of the most-watched chapter of any Formula 1 career in the last forty years, and the days of him on a starting grid are numbered. They will not be numbered forever. Even all-time greats stop driving.

You do not need me to make the case for Lewis Hamilton being one of the all-time greats. The statistics make the case. Seven championships, more wins than any driver in F1 history, and a body of work that puts him in the same paragraph as Schumacher, Senna, and Fangio whenever the conversation turns to greatest of all time. Whatever your rankings on that question, Hamilton has to be in the conversation.

What I will tell you is something different. Watching Hamilton drive on television and watching him drive in person are different sports. Television compresses the speed. Television makes the cars feel manageable. Television does not put you in the grandstand when twenty F1 cars start their engines in front of you and the air pressure changes for a half a mile in every direction. The first time you stand at a Grand Prix and the cars come down the front straight, you understand why people fly across the world to do this.

If Hamilton is the trip, the Racing Passport calendar has you covered.

The Italian Grand Prix at Monza is the obvious one. Hamilton in Ferrari red, in front of the tifosi, in Ferrari’s home country. There is no race weekend in F1 like Monza when Ferrari has a chance to win.

The United States Grand Prix at Austin is the one I will personally be on the ground for. Circuit of the Americas. Invitation only and small.

The Singapore Grand Prix is F1 under the lights at Marina Bay.

The Las Vegas Grand Prix is F1 down the Strip after dark.

The Abu Dhabi Grand Prix is the season finale at Yas Marina.

The Monaco Grand Prix is the Triple Crown race and the most iconic single race on any motorsport calendar in the world. If you only get one Hamilton weekend in your life, Monaco is the one to spend it on.

Pencil illustration of Lewis Hamilton, Alex Palou, and Denny Hamlin in their team suits

Alex Palou

If you do not know Alex Palou’s name yet, that gap is closing fast.

Palou is the best driver, by win percentage, that the IndyCar Series has seen since the likes of A.J. Foyt and Rick Mears. That is not a marketing line. That is the math. Multiple championships already, dominant seasons stacked one on top of the other, the field chasing him race in and race out. There is a version of his career a decade from now where he is in the conversation with the best to ever do it in American open-wheel racing, and we are watching the early-prime years of that career right now.

This is the part where I tell you something specific about how the era of a great IndyCar driver actually works. The peak years are short. Shorter than people realize. There is the climb up, the peak, and then the start of the descent, and the peak years usually fit inside a window of about a decade. Foyt’s peak. Mears’s peak. The Andretti years. Each of those eras you can mark with specific seasons, and if you were not in the grandstand during one of those seasons, the chance closes. The driver gets older. The next generation arrives. The era ends.

Palou’s peak is right now.

The Indianapolis 500 is the answer. The 111th running of the race. The flagship trip on the Racing Passport calendar. If you are going to see Alex Palou drive at the height of his powers, do it at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, on race weekend, with 300,000 of your closest friends.

I will be on the ground for the 500. I have been to every Indianapolis 500 since 2000, and I am not missing the next one. It is the most important race on the American calendar by a significant margin. There are two ways to come with Racing Passport. The Curated Trip and The Racing Passport with insider-only access events the broadcast never shows. Either way, it is the race weekend that gets remembered.

If you cannot make the 500, the IndyCar calendar has road and street courses where Palou’s dominance shows up differently. There is no IndyCar weekend that is not worth being at when Palou is in the field.

Denny Hamlin

The Denny Hamlin question is the one I get asked most in NASCAR conversations right now.

Is this the year? Is this the year that Denny Hamlin breaks through and finally gets his first Cup Series championship?

He has done almost everything else. Three Daytona 500s. Co-owner of 23XI Racing with Michael Jordan. Locked into the playoff conversation every single year. One of the most consistent winners of his generation, and the kind of competitor who gets up every Sunday morning still wanting to win every race on the schedule. He plays the long game and the short game at the same time, which is rare.

What he does not have is the trophy. Every year the championship comes down to the Final Four, and every year so far Hamlin has either missed the final round or come up just short in it. The fanbase has been waiting twenty years for that championship to come home with the 11 car. The patience has been studied at this point.

If this is the year, you want to be there when it happens. Even if it is not, you want to see him drive while he is still driving. NASCAR Cup careers end. Jimmie Johnson stepped away. Kevin Harvick stepped away. Kurt Busch stepped away. The window for any Cup driver is real and it closes earlier than the casual fan assumes.

The Racing Passport NASCAR calendar lines up around the Cup season.

Brickyard 400 at IMS. NASCAR on the IMS oval.

Richmond. Short-track racing on a Saturday night. The same Richmond I watched Dale Sr. drive.

Darlington Southern 500. The Track Too Tough to Tame. Opener of the Playoffs.

Bristol Night Race. Half-mile under the lights. The other track on my Dale Sr. list.

Talladega. Superspeedway drafting and chaos in the Round of 12.

Homestead Championship Weekend. The title decider. If Hamlin is in the Final Four, this is where the championship gets decided. I am available on-site if enough interest forms to build a group.

Daytona 500. The Great American Race. Hamlin is always a threat at Daytona.

You do not get the second chance

This is the part I keep coming back to.

I have seen a lot of races, and the ones I treasure most are the ones I almost did not go to. The Bristol night I saw Dale Sr. drive. The Richmond weekend that turned into one of his last great races. Gretzky at MSG against the Rangers. Jeter at Yankee Stadium in the ALCS, both times. Each of those was a “we’ll go again next year” trip that turned into “we should have gone twice that year.”

Kyle Busch is the latest reminder. The trip we always meant to plan and never did. The race weekend we always thought would come around. It does not always come around.

Lewis Hamilton, Alex Palou, and Denny Hamlin are all still driving. All three are at the part of their careers where the answer to “when?” is “now.” All three are reachable through a Racing Passport trip you can plan with one conversation.

The conversation is the inquiry. Tell us which driver, which race, which weekend works for your group. Robert and his team plan it. You travel. The hotel zone is right, the tickets are right, the transfers are handled, and the access is the kind a single phone call gets you that no website ever will.

One conversation. One bucket list trip. Off the list.

Do not let any of these three become the next “we should have gone.”

racingpassport.com/inquire/