DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Hey, gramps, are you going to drive the entire Daytona 500 in the right lane with your left blinker on?

What kind of car are you going to drive – a Ford Crown Victoria or a Chrysler New Yorker?

Are you going to wear racing boots or sandals with black socks?

And what sort of tires are you going to use – rubber Goodyears or stone wheels?

James Hylton, the 72-year-old racer trying to become the oldest in history to qualify for the Daytona 500, has heard them all. And even laughs at most of them.

“Jay Leno said my crew is going to have to change my catheter during pit stops,” Hylton says, chuckling. “That’s funny.”

At the risk of sounding like the worrywart whippersnapper trying to pour Pennzoil in the old guy’s prune juice, dare I say this really isn’t a laughing matter? As kind a man as Hylton is and as good a racer as he once was, there’s no way a septuagenarian should be driving a stock car at 190 mph – two centimeters away from the best drivers in the world and one muscle twitch away from disaster.

Says racer Michael Waltrip: “I’m only 43, and I’m amazed at what we do. If you tacked on another 30 years and told me to get out there, I’d say, “You’re crazy, man.”‘

What’s crazy is NASCAR actually allowing this to happen. This isn’t golf, where it’s harmless, nostalgic fun when Arnold Palmer tees it up in the same tournament as Tiger Woods. Arnie probably isn’t going to kill anybody if he shanks an errant drive into the gallery. But this is racing, a sport where the legendary Jim Murray wrote perhaps the most famous line in sports-writing history: “Gentlemen, start your coffins.”

There’s a reason commercial airline pilots have a mandatory retirement age. There’s a reason the military has a maximum enlistment age. Because those are dangerous endeavors, just like racing.

God forbid if something were to happen to Hylton during Thursday’s qualifying races. Think of the outcry if he were involved in a serious accident or, worse yet, caused one.

“The thing I fear isn’t his talent level,” fellow racer Jeremy Mayfield said. “It’s what happens if he gets in a bad wreck. The older you get, the weaker your bones are. The impact of a serious accident on an older body could be devastating.”

Some drivers are OK with Hylton trying to qualify (Tony Stewart: “If he still has that fire, more power to him”), and out of respect, nobody will come right out and say he shouldn’t be on the track. But you can read between the lines. Kyle Petty, even though he acknowledges Hylton’s past accomplishments, says frankly, “Let’s call it what it is. It’s all about P.R.”

Even though Hylton says this isn’t a publicity stunt, how can you take it as anything different? This is, after all, a senior citizen being sponsored by Retirement Living TV – a new cable TV venture aimed at senior citizens.

Don’t get me wrong, it would be a wonderful story if Hylton were to somehow outrun the hands of time and qualify for the 500. He’s a racing lifer whose first NASCAR race came a few months after Kennedy – John, not Robert – was assassinated.

But if it’s not a publicity ploy, then why? A quarter-century after he last drove Daytona, why is he crawling back inside these 3,000-pound guided missiles?

“Because,” James Hylton says, smiling, “when I become an old man, I don’t want to look back and say, “I should have took that chance.”‘