29th January 2012

The Daytona 24 Hours celebrated their 50th anniversary in great style. After a thrilling duel the Michael Shank Racing Riley-Ford took the chequer in front of the Starworks Motorsport entry.

3 Hours, 2000 km, 24 Hours and 6 Hours, the Daytona management didn’t pay too much attention to the details and lumped together all the endurance races held since 1962 to celebrate this 50th anniversary. This coincided with the debut of the third-generation Daytona Prototypes, much better looking than their predecessors.

The race was much less broken up than usual by neutralizations to the point that the winners got to within a lap of the distance record. It was a thrilling event, and the duel between the two Riley-Fords kept the large crowd on tenterhooks right till the very end.

Victory went to the car entered by Michael Shank Racing driven by A.J. Allmendinger-Oswaldo Negri-John Pew-Justin Wilson, which took the flag with a few seconds in hand over the identical Starworks Motorsport DP of Ryan Dalziel-Lucas Luhr-Allan McNish-Alex Popow-Enzo Potolicchio.

The GT category attracted a large field and boiled down to a hotly contested all-Porsche battle with the win going to the Magnus Racing entry of Andy Lally-Richard Lietz-John Potter-René Rast.

As usual at Daytona, there were a few stars at the start: Patrick Dempsey came home twenty-first in his Mazda RX8 and Brian Johnson, AC/DC lead singer, was thirty-second in his Riley-BMW.

Read the full report and the classification of the Daytona 24 Hours in Le Mans Racing #72 as well as a history of the first 50 years of the event plus the complete results since 1962!

Text: François Hurel – Photo: Rolex / TOM O'NEAL