IMSA’s 63rd Rolex 24 at Daytona began with cool, sunny skies and 61 cars ready to do battle. BMW had pole position with Acura, Porsche and Cadillac close behind. There were 10 of the series’ GTP cars in the top 10. Would they be there 24 hours later?
By the time 781 laps of the 3.56-mile road course were complete, the Porsche Penske Motorsport No. 7 963 GTP car had achieved back-to-back victories for Roger Penske’s team, albeit only 1.335 seconds ahead of the No. 60 Meyer Shank Racing Acura ARX-06 race car. It was a grand battle between Felipe Nasr and Tom Blomqvist at the close, as the latter derailed Porsche’s projected one-two finishing order, relegating Matt Campbell and the No. 6 Penske Porsche 963 to third place. With this victory, the third overall win for Roger Penske and fourth Rolex 24 win for this team, Porsche gained its 20th overall Rolex 24 at Daytona victory.
With air temps barely crossing the 60-degree mark in this race, keeping tires working properly and effectively was left to the professionals behind the wheel. Even so, both the No. 40 Cadillac V-Series.R succumbed shortly after dark when it was involved in a multiple-car accident. The No. 31 Whelen Cadillac, which had been exceptionally competitive in the early going, had a single-car incident just before midnight at the track’s NASCAR turn four. Action Express worked for nearly 80 minutes to get their car back on the track, where it finished ninth in class, 16th overall and 50 laps behind the leaders.
Only the podium finishers completed the 781 laps, leaving the pole-sitting BMW M Hybrid V-8 fourth and a lap behind the winners.
Nasr, who drove with Nick Tandy and Laurens Vanthoor, had the honor of helping his teammates secure finishing feats and new Rolex watches. Tandy has now won all four 24-hour sports car races: Daytona, Le Mans, Spa-Francorchamps and Nurburgring. Vanthoor had secured victory in every major endurance race, either overall or in class at least once, but until today never won Daytona. Nasr drove the winning car last year, giving him back-to-back first-place results.
Persevering for 23 hours is the only way to win one of these races and, after his final pit stop Nasr restarted third in a race that had 14 caution periods over the 24 hours. Thankfully, none of those cautions were for rain. “I knew the car was capable,” Nasr said, “and I knew we had a great team behind us. No one did a foot wrong all weekend and we’re all celebrating this victory. Doing it back-to-back, it’s incredible.”
Porsche Penske Motorsport had the race in hand nearly from midnight to the checkered flags; the two Penske Porsche 963s led 517 laps overall, 307 of them led by the No 7. The two Penske Porsches did battle between one another until Blomqvist drove around Campbell with just about five minutes left! He did the feat with regular co-driver Colin Braun and INDYCAR standouts Scott Dixon and Felix Rosenqvist.
Roger Penske was effusive after the race, giving full credit to the team he’s put together: “It’s amazing to see the work we’ve done with this Porsche program the last couple of years, winning the [IMSA] championship last year, and with the relationships we have with Porsche, our organization, I’m thrilled. It was quite something there at the end,” he related.
This was the fifth consecutive year that the No. 60 Acura Meyer Shank Racing with Curb Agajanian ARX-06 has earned a strong second place result. Starting from sixth, Blomqvist noted that the team had “struggled for pace and the Porsches were extremely fast.” He thought the team did an exceptional job to get the car working at its best for him in the final hour. “i drove the wheels off the thing and managed to get one of the Porsches, but the other one was a little bit too far ahead. There was just not enough time, really,” he said.
In LMP2 the Rolex watches went to Tower Motorsports, with four-time INDYCAR champion Sebastien Bourdais bringing the team’s No. 8 ORECA 07 to the checkers in eighth place overall. The top finisher of 12 entries, the team of Bourdais, John Farano, Sebastian Alvarez and Job Van Uitert managed to avoid much of the trouble that other contenders faced throughout the battle. Even so, the Tower ORECA was damaged in the eighth hour when the No. 40 Cadillac from Wayne Taylor Racing spun as it exited the second turn, collecting LMP2 contenders No. 2 United Autosports USA and No. 73 Pratt Miller Motorsports’ ORECAs. The No. 8 sustained some damage but kept going; the others, not so much.
Other contenders met with penalties and mechanical difficulties (the No. 99 had a low battery warning), or simply took one another out of the competition, like last year’s winners, Era Motorsport, who were part of an incident with PR1 Mathiasen Motorsports. That incident promoted Tower to the top of the heap and allowed Bourdais to earn his third Rolex 24 watch and first in LMP2, paired with his Prototype, overall 2014 victory and his GT Le Mans victory with Ford in 2017. Bourdais and his teammates led 118 laps in class.
“I was part of the big one, big time,” Bourdais explained. “The car over my left fender, a car over my right fender and I don’t think I had time to back off, because I made contact, because I was in the gearbox of the Pratt Miller car and it all came to a stop. It was like ‘Days of Thunder,’” he said. “When it all cleared up in front of me and the car still had four wheels on it, and the steering wheel was straight, I was like, man, this is just a miracle!”
Ford’s Mustang GT3 claimed its first global victory on Sunday, beating Corvette in GTD PRO with Dennis Olsen driving the Ford Multimatic Motorsports No. 65 to the rostrum, besting the No. 3 Pratt Miller Motorsports Corvette Z06 GT3.R. In a Detroit-centric 24-hour rumble, the second Mustang made its podium appearance, allowing both Ford and Chevrolet to celebrate; a customer Corvette won GTD, so this was a good weekend for stalwarts of American motoring.The lucky No. 13 Corvette of AWA, which won LMP3 in 2023, added a fifth win for a Corvette Racing-affiliated team in the Rolex 24, earning victory over the No. 120 Wright Motorsports Porsche 911 GT3 R (992) and the No. 27 Heart of Racing Team Aston Martin Vantage GT3 Evo.
Both GTD PRO and GTD classes were chaotic and competitive leading up to the checkered flags, with the latter a bit more clean on the track than the PRO group. “It was quite intense in every category, especially the 30 minutes after a restart,” noted Marvin Kirchoefer, who co-drove with Matthew Bell, Orrey Fidani and Lars Kern. “We know restarts are crucial in IMSA racing and what the fans love to see, which can be nice or sometimes not nice. The emotions were running very high and you can tell how much it meant to the whole team,” he said. “Everyone was super, super happy for the result. For the fans,” who watched both GTD classes finish within a couple of seconds of one another, “I think it was kind of the best race finish you could ask for.”
There’s time for all of these competitors to think about their results and plan ahead for the second race in IMSA’s WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, as the series completes its 36 Hours of Florida with the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring, set to take the green flags March 12-15 on the difficult-to-tame Sebring International Raceway. Will there be repeat winners? Will another team emerge successfully? With the competitiveness of this year’s first 24-hour contest, there’s no doubt the next race scheduled will be filled with similar excitement to the one just completed.
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