Sarah Palin at racing's biggest stage.

Sarah Palin is without her sweetheart, Todd, on Valentine’s Day. While the First Dude prepared for the Iron Dog race in Alaska, Palin visited Daytona International Speedway on Sunday to take in her first Great American Race.

Palin was swarmed as she entered the room during the driver’s meeting, and sat right up front next to Harry Connick Jr. She also chatted with Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele and anybody who wanted to get an autograph or photo. After the  meeting ended, her handlers tried to shuttled her out of the room quickly, but Palin couldn’t help herself and wanted to talk with anybody who wanted to come and say hi.
She finally was led out of the building with an entourage of 12, including a police officer, security officer, Daytona officials and spokespeople. We were able to get in two questions:

Q: How do you feel about being here?
A: This is awesome. It’s an All-Americana event. A good, patriotic, wonderful event that’s bringing a whole lot of people together. I think it’s good for our country.
Q: This is a good base for you, being in Florida, a swing state, right?
A: Haven’t thought a darn thing about the politics of this. I’m thinking about this good, active, speed-loving event that a lot of Alaskans, too, are really into. We’ve got our snow-machine races up there, and this is of course on a much greater scale same type of sport though same type of breath taking speed loving All-American event that we like to see up north. (Continues here with Video)