Rolex 24: Tire wear, traffic and trouble highlight early hours of Daytona race
By Don Coble, Special to Florida Sports Wire
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. Surviving 24 hours of high-speed racing at Daytona International Speedway is challenging, but race teams also had to contend with tire issues this weekend.
.
Instead of handing a tire company a blank check to ensure the jet-quick prototypes had the fresh grip they needed for the 3.56-mile course, IMSA limited teams to just 21 sets of tires for qualifying on Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday’s
twice-around-the-clock annual event.
In
the first seven hours, it was hard to track which GT Prototype teams skipped tire changes, changing only right-side tires, left-side tires or all
four. In fact, some drivers said they couldn’t figure out what their own teams
were doing.
The
result was 27 lead changes with 17 hours to go.
At
8:40 p.m. – the seven-hour mark – the WTR Cadillac for Jordan Taylor, Louis
Deletraz and Kamui Kobayashi was in the lead, followed by the pole-sitting BMW
M Hybrid V8 for Phillip Eng, Dries Vathoor, Kevin Magnussen and Raffaele
Marciello was running second, the Cadillac for Jack Aitken, Earl Bamber,
Frederik Vesti and Felipe Drugovich was third, the Cadillac for Ricky Taylor,
Filipe Albuquerque, Will Stevens and Brendon Hartley was fourth and the Porsche
963 for Felipe Nasr, Nick Taylor and Laurens Vanthoor was fifth.
The
lead car’s run up front was short-lived because it was involved in a six-car crash
during a restart 41 minutes later. Deletraz left the pit road with cold tires. He lost grip, getting up to speed, and turned sideways in front of the field; he was hit by at least two other cars while three cars crashed trying to avoid the melee. The Cadillac finished in the garage on
a wrecker’s hook, but Deletraz wasn’t injured.
“I
think people are trying stuff with tires,” said Ricky Taylor, one of the
drivers on the other Wayne Taylor Racing’s Cadillac V-Series.R GTPs. “We got to
get through the night, and you're trying to figure out what's the best
strategy. You're doing two tires. You're swapping tires or four tires and
doubling (pit stops without changing tires.) You're just trying to figure out
the most efficient way to save.
“I
think people are just trying different things. I tried some things that didn't
work, and I went straight to the back. It started wild but then settled down as
the night progressed. I think we're just surviving.”
With
temperatures dropping to the upper 40s during the night, teams had the option of
switching to a softer rubber compound from 5 p.m. to Saturday to 10 a.m. Sunday
to gain traction since softer rubber builds up heat quicker than a “harder” tire.
However, the “softer tires” wear out faster and count toward the 21-set allotment.
All
four IMSA classes race at the same time in a 24-hour race. The leader in LMP2 was
the ORECA LMP2 07 for George Purtz, Malthe Jakobsen, Toby Sowery and Colton
Herta in 11th overall, the GT Daytona Pro BMW M4 GT3 EVO for Madison
Snow, Neil Verhagen, Connor De Pillippi and Kelvin van der Linde in 22nd
overall and the GT Daytona for Adam Adelson, Elliott Skeer, Tom Sargent and Ayhancan
Guven in 36th overall.
The
race started with a shocking moment when Nick Boulle’s ORECA LMP2 spun in front
of about 50 cars on the first lap. Two GT Daytona Pro Mustangs went off course
to avoid a crash and took nearly an hour to return to the front of their class.
“It was really bad, actually; we were really lucky there,” said Mustang driver Mike Rockenfeller. “We lost a position, both of us (Mustangs), but it doesn’t matter. It’s a long race, and the track will change, and hopefully, it will be a clean race for us, and we’ll see where we are at the end.”
The
race will end at 1:40 p.m. on Sunday.
