A packed grid of prototypes battles it at a record-breaking Daytona 24-hour race

This weekend, the cream of the racing world gathered in Daytona Beach, Florida, to kick off the 2018 racing season at the Rolex 24. It was a grid the likes of which we hadn’t seen in a long time. Veteran megastars from the worlds of Formula 1 and IndyCar, rising young hotshots making their names in GP2 and Formula E, and true talents from endurance racing came together in a field of 20 prototypes and 30 GT cars to fight for supremacy over 24 hours on the banking and infield at Daytona International Speedway.

When the checkered flag waved on Sunday afternoon, the winning car—the #5 Mustang Sampling Cadillac DPi-V.R of Joao Barbosa, Filipe Albuquerque, and Christian Fittipaldi had covered a record-breaking distance: 808 laps and 2,876.48 miles (4,629.2km). Such a furious pace is unusual for the Rolex 24; mixed grids and the endurance format often breed incidents and lots of yellow-flag running behind a safety car. But 2018 wasn’t like that. There was drama a-plenty, and even some heavy rainfall, but only a handful of cautions made this year a 24-hour sprint for the finish and a sign that, while other racing series might have their problems, the IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship is definitely one to keep an eye on this year.

Good drivers, you say?

In the not-too-distant past, endurance racing was something racing drivers did once the gray hairs started showing up, a place to stretch out careers before retirement after flat-out racing had taken its toll. Those days are gone. So we saw F1 names from double world champion Fernando Alonso to hot young phenoms like Felipe Nasr and Lance Stroll. From IndyCar, there were stars like Helio Castroneves, Juan Pablo Montoya, Scott Dixon, Simon Pagenaud, Sebastian Bourdais, AJ Allmendinger, Ryan Hunter-Reay, and Graham Rahal, with at least seven Indy 500 wins and 11 championships between them.

Plus we had some of the very best endurance racers: veterans of factory Le Mans prototype programs like former Audi drivers Oliver Jarvis, Rene Rast, Loic Duval, and Felipe Albuquerque (ex-Audi); Porsche alums Romain Dumas (also ex-Audi), Earl Bamber, and Nick Tandy; Toyota’s Mike Conway and Nicholas Lapierre; and stars-in-the-making like Renger van der Zande, Jordan and Ricky Taylor, and Alex Brundle.

If those folks weren’t signs enough of a deep talent pool, there were also a bevy of young drivers whose names we’ll be hearing a lot more of: kids like Felix Rosenqvist, Robert Frijns, Lando Norris, and Ferdinand Habsburg-Lothringen, all of whom have been tipped for great things in single-seaters.

Fast cars, you say?

The top class at the Rolex 24 is for prototypes. These aren’t the half-billion dollar World Endurance Championship rocketships I’ve opined about in the past, but that’s a good thing. After an amazing 2016 season, the hybrid P1 class at Le Mans imploded following the departure of Audi and then Porsche, leaving Toyota as the sole factory effort left standing in WEC. The race at Daytona is run by IMSA, and it picked the cheaper, slightly slower LMP2 prototypes as the basis for its fastest cars. In the WEC, this is a cost-capped category for pro-am teams; there is a choice of four different chassis, but everyone has to run the same Gibson V8 engine.

IMSA, however, allows for all-pro prototypes, called DPi cars, using the LMP2 cars as a base upon which manufacturers can improve a little. Last year I took a look at Cadillac’s car, the DPi-V.R, which pretty much dominated the 2017 season. But this year Cadillac has some real competition—and from two of the biggest names in racing. Acura (which had a lot of success with prototype racing in the American Le Mans Series) joined forces with Penske, an outfit that for 50 years has been redefining professionalism and attention to detail in racing, gathering almost innumerable wins in the process. We first saw the ARX-05 at last year’s Monterey Car week, but this weekend marked the car’s baptism by fire.

Then there’s Mazda; after previous long-time partner Speedsource proved unable to get to grips with RT-24P, a change was in order. It pulled out of IMSA’s 2017 season halfway through the year and turned the cars over to its new partner, Team Joest. This German operation knows what it’s doing—under its own name, and also together with Audi, it won Le Mans 15 times outright, at times working so well and with such speed that the rules were changed to give everyone else a fighting chance.

The factory DPi cars at Daytona were joined by a whole bunch of LMP2 machines, most of which were also allowed to improve a little in the off-season. Notable visitors from the WEC to Daytona included the Jackie Chan DCR JOTA team (yes, that Jackie Chan), which almost beat the faster P1 hybrids at Le Mans last year for outright victory, and a two-car effort from United Autosport. One of the owners of that team is called Zak Brown, and one of his other day jobs is running the McLaren F1 team. This explains the presence of Fernando Alonso in the race, for he’s getting bored of running mid-pack in F1 and has an eye on winning Le Mans—hence racing at Daytona as an intro to endurance racing (as well as racing a car with a roof).

The interests of space and time preclude me from delving deeply into the GTLM grid, where the Ford GT, Corvette C7.R, Porsche 911 RSR, Ferrari 488 GTE, and now BMW M8 GTLM duke it out. But there have been a few changes to these cars over the winter, so if you follow those links you can read plenty of our previous coverage of those road car-derived racers. (The same is true for the pro-am GTD class.)

Listing image by Brian Cleary/Getty Images

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