Top 5 Sebring 12 Hours winners

1 Porsche (19 wins)

Jo Bonnier delivered Porsche its first Sebring 12 Hours win in 1960 with a 718 RS60 entered by the Swede for Hans Herrmann and Olivier Gendebien. But what’s really striking about sports car racing’s most successful marque in regards to the older of Florida’s two major sports car races is the length of Porsche’s unbeaten run at the airfield track. It lasted from 1976 until 1988, first via the RSR, then emphatically the 935 and from ’85 the 962. Yet incredibly, since the Group C/IMSA GTP days, only a single victory had fallen Porsche’s way, in 2008 with the Penske-run RS Spyder LMP2 – until this past month. Once again, Penske has ended the drought as its pair of factory Porsche 963s scored a resounding 1-2. Just seven weeks after conquering the Daytona 24 Hours, Felipe Nasr, Nick Tandy and Laurens Vanthoor did the Florida double.

2 Ferrari (12 wins)

Its Sebring tally is one up on its Le Mans win count. Ferrari claimed three wins in the 1950s, four during the 1960s and added a brace in the ’70s – including Mario Andretti’s pointed defeat of Peter Revson and Steve McQueen in 1970, above. Peeved at the credit hyped on the film star when Porsche’s lead was Revson’s doing, Andretti took over Ignazio Giunti’s 512 S after his own had failed simply to thwart a Hollywood ending. Ferraris also won three times in four years in the ’90s with the 333 SP Dallara-built customer car.

3 Audi (11 wins)

From the first edition of the new millennium, Audi soared from zero to 11 wins in just 14 years. No wonder its aces dominate the most-wins list for drivers: six for record holder Tom Kristensen (the first in 1999 was in BMW’s V12 LMR), five for Dindo Capello and four each for Frank Biela and Allan McNish. The tough wins, especially at a circuit notoriously hard on cars, are always sweet, and so it is for McNish. “Sebring in 2009, above, is one of my favourite memories,” he says of the R15 TDI’s defeat of Peugeot’s 908 HDi FAP. “It was the hardest-fought race I did.”

4 Cadillac (5 wins)

All of the luxury US marque’s wins have come recently, since 2017, allowing the GM brand to surpass Ford’s Sebring record (the Blue Oval is on four wins). Brazilian Pipo Derani has scored three of his four wins at the 12 Hours driving Caddys, making him the most successful non-Audi driver in the race’s history. Briton Alex Lynn, now a member of Jota’s works Cadillac team in WEC, has won the race twice in the past nine years, with Wayne Taylor Racing in 2017 and in 2022 with the Ganassi-run works team.

5 Nissan (5 wins)

The Japanese maker ended Porsche’s hegemony with a hat-trick of victories between 1989-91, with Geoff Brabham and Derek Daly each claiming two wins during those years in a GTP breed that remains one of the best-loved IMSA sports cars. Nissan won again in 1994 in the wake of the demise of Group C/GTP, its 300ZX, above, landing the last overall victory for a GT car at Sebring. Its most recent success was in 2018 when Derani took a decisive shot in a Nissan-powered Onroak/Ligier DPi.