Daytona 24 hours 2024

It was a case of about time too, or at least it felt that way to this writer. Just the odd Daytona 24 Hours missed since 1996, and only a single Porsche victory at the US enduro witnessed. And that was what can best be described as a fluke win for a GT car — a 911, of course — in the face of meagre and mechanically frail Prototype opposition. The German manufacturer is — and excuse the American parlance — the ‘winningest’ marque in the history of the great race, so I needed to see it triumph on the famous high banks of the Daytona International Speedway.

That was put right at the end of January when Porsche notched up its first outright Daytona triumph since 2003, the year that The Racers Group squad outlasted the new breed of Daytona Prototypes to take the win with a 911 GT3 R. You have to go back to 1995 — just before my near-unbroken run of attendance began — for its previous victory with a pure-bred racing car. Of course, you could argue that it won in 2009 and ’10, but those were Porsche-powered machines, Rileys to be correct, rather than pukka Porsches. And you could point out that in the majority of years I’ve reported at Daytona there haven’t been Porsches in the premier class.

Yet getting to report on a proper Porsche victory after all these years somehow felt like a rite of passage. After all, it has won seven of the 33 editions of the Le Mans 24 Hours I’ve attended as a journalist. That’s despite being absent from the top flight of nearly half of them.

But the dream very nearly wasn’t fulfilled. Daytona, as ever, was a sprint to the flag from the final safety car period, this time a dash of 32 minutes after the final caution. There are rarely any certainties at the opening round of the IMSA SportsCar Championship, except that to win the thing you have to be on the lead lap when the final hour begins and then have the quickest car for the conditions.

The Porsche Penske Motorsport team managed the former, which it stressed was some achievement after its travails in 2023 in the maiden season of the 963 LMDh. The other big achievement for the PPM squad in January was having its car out at the head of the safety car queue when the race went green for the final time. That won it the race.

“Porsche didn’t have the fastest car at the sharp end of the race, and knew it”

Porsche didn’t have the fastest car at the sharp end of the race, and knew it. But it did have one that was difficult to overtake. So getting to the head of the crocodile was central to its last-hour strategy.

That’s what made the Daytona 24 Hours so intriguing. The tactical interplay between PPM and the Action Express Racing Cadillac team made for another classic confrontation over the countdown to the chequered flag.

The Porsche 963 shared by Felipe Nasr, Matt Campbell, Dane Cameron and Josef Newgarden was the faster car around breakfast time on Sunday and appeared to be in the pound seats, but as the cloud that never delivered the anticipated overnight rain burned off, the balance changed. It changed again at the penultimate round of pitstops.

Action Express brought its Cadillac V-Series.R with Tom Blomqvist at the wheel into the pits three laps early in an attempt to get the undercut. It didn’t quite work out, but Blomqvist had sufficient heat in his tyres to get the run on Nasr down the front stretch as the Porsche started its first flying lap and then seal the deal around the outside of Turns 1 and 2. The Caddy was the faster car at this stage. A return to Victory Lane for the General Motors marque after an absence of three years looked odds-on. Porsche was now second favourite.

Except… the safety car opened things up again. The days of race control at Daytona throwing the yellows late in the game in the name of entertainment are long since a thing of the past. This one was entirely merited. There was a car ablaze on the exit of the pitlane!

The Porsche, courtesy of stopping three laps after the Cadillac, was always going to need less fuel, but PPM rolled the dice and short-fuelled the car. IMSA’s ‘energy-replenishment’ data showed that Nasr left the pits with 5% less fuel than Blomqvist. And crucially he left them ahead of the American car.

The prime position at the head of the queue was duly converted into the race lead — the Porsche had the better acceleration and top speed. The race was pretty much won in the opening seconds of those 32 minutes as Nasr raced on to complete victory by a shade over two seconds over the car Blomqvist shared with Pipo Derani and Jack Aitken.

So Porsche won its first Daytona 24 Hours in more than 20 years. Not quite. It won the Daytona 23 Hours, 58 Minutes and 24.723 Seconds, a new duration for an event that started out as a three-hour race in 1962, briefly ran to 2000km before it became the twice-around-the-clock classic that it is today in 1966. That’s not counting the reduced six-hour duration in 1972 during the fuel crisis, which also resulted in the cancellation of the race two years later. Hence why this was in reality the 57th 24 Hours and not the advertised 62nd.

The 23 Hours etc was the result of an error by IMSA, the governing body admitted the day after the race. But its statement didn’t offer any explanation as to why it happened. A chance to put any conspiracy theories to bed appeared to have been missed.

There were those eager to search for one in the early flag fall. They weren’t easy to find. A first Porsche victory in yonks and a first for Penske since 1969 and its victory with the Sunoco-liveried Lola-Chevrolet T70 Mk3B might look like a desirable result, a nice storyline, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that the car in the winner’s slipstream was fielded by a team that happens to be owned by the France family, which also controls Daytona, IMSA and NASCAR. Nice try.

Or you could go deeper and hypothesise that the top two cars were carrying less fuel than the one in third place. That was an Acura, run by the Wayne Taylor Racing with Andretti squad. The Honda brand had won the previous three editions of Daytona, so perhaps the organisers thought it was time for a change. A none-too-favourable Balance of Performance for its ARX-06 LMDh pointed that way, but it was still a big perhaps to suggest the cars in front were about to run short of fuel. Penske has insisted that it had enough for two more racing laps when the flag erroneously fell.

The more plausible explanation is that it was just a mix-up precipitated by the race starting late. A shade under two minutes to be precise. So Daytona this year pretty much finished 24 hours after it was due to have started rather than a full day after it actually did. So let’s bury all the conspiracies.

IMSA didn’t need the coverage resulting from a Porsche or a Penske victory. It had that by the bucketload because Hollywood was in town. Brad Pitt was there in person filming scenes for the upcoming Joseph Kosinski-directed movie, which may or may not be titled Apex. His character, Sonny Hayes, even had his name on the side of a car, a Porsche 911 GT3 R entered by Wright Motorsports but with the fictional team name Chip Hart Racing emblazoned on its sides.

The movie business and Daytona are no strangers, of course. There was Days of Thunder, but also Paul Newman’s participation in the race. He finished third in 1995. His Roush Racing Ford Mustang carried No70 to reflect his age, just as the cars he raced at Daytona did in further appearances at Daytona, the last of which was just past his 80th birthday.

“Porsche notched up Daytona win 19, equalling its tally at Le Mans”

Pitt’s presence at Daytona should be regarded as a sideshow, though the publicity might have helped bring fans through the gate. This year’s race drew another record crowd, as they all seem to these days. The real story was the battle between Porsche and Cadillac, the two manufacturers that compete in both IMSA and the World Endurance Championship with their LMDhs. The former notched up Daytona win number 19 in January, equalling its tally at Le Mans. The question now is whether it can challenge for victory in the French enduro and make it a nice round 20 victories.