Julien Andlauer leads the Daytona 24 Hours for Porsche with 2 hours to go, fending off BMW’s Sheldon van der Linde.
Porsche have been strong all race, possessing pace during the day and in the night, at least when the race wasn’t neutralised under the safety car for visibility due to fog.
BMW, meanwhile, has been stronger than maybe even they expected, having the pace to fight with the Porsches.
Cadillac and Acura have had pace too, but mistakes and penalties have set them back. In particular, just recently as of writing, the #10 Wayne Taylor Cadillac of Ricky Taylor has had a large engine failure, billowing spoke as R. Taylor pulled it into the pits, presumably to retire from the race.
Nevertheless, Andlauer leads van der Linde in the #22 BMW by just a second or so. Earl Bamber is third in the #31 Action Express Cadillac; the Kiwi is gunning for his fourth separate 24 hour race win, having already won Le Mans, Spa and Nurburgring. He is around 3 seconds off van der Linde ahead, after the restart for the 9th full course yellow of the race.
In LMP2, Alex Quinn is leading in the #04 Crowdstrike by APR Oreca, around 3s ahead of the Tom Dillmann in the #43 Inter Europol Oreca. Third is Nolan Siegel in the #343 sister Inter Europol car.
As always at Daytona, LMP2 has been a fierce and unrelenting battle between multiple teams and cars, including those listed above, plus the #22 United Autosports Oreca and #99 AO Racing Oreca, known as “Spike”.
Thomas Preining is leading GTD Pro in the #911 Manthey Porsche GT3, the team’s first IMSA race. They’re locked in a battle with the #1 Paul Miller BMW of Dan Harper, with the highly-rated Austrian going hammer and tongs to defeat Harper, another highly-rated driver, this time hailing cfrom Northern Ireland, with the two separated by less than a second.
Maxime Martin is third in the #48 Winward Racing Porsche, a further 2 seconds back but very much in the hunt.
Matt Bell is leading GTD in the #13 13 Autosport Corvette, but he’s only a couple of tenths ahead of Lucas Auer in the #57 Winward Racing Mercedes. Third is Danny Formal in the #45 Wayne Taylor Lamborghini.
Discussion about this post