'Porsche' powered DP wins Rolex 24, Mazda takes GT

As I alluded to in my recent post about the Continental Sports Car Challenge, I have little to no love for Grand Am's performance-neutered classes in the Rolex series. I think the DP cars are ugly, uninspiring, and are generally the result of trying to apply a template that may work elsewhere (NASCAR's various oval series), but has no place in a top-tier championship. That said, Grand Am has what was once one of the most prestigious endurance racing events in the world under its jurisdiction, the Rolex 24 at Daytona.

So despite their best efforts to drag sports car racing back into the past, in terms of chassis and engine tech, Grand Am still has one event a year which is a little bit exciting and worth attending. This year the entry list was down compared to years past (when I was going back in the early aughts the field was into the high 70s and low 80s in terms of car counts), but the teams appeared to be as pumped as ever, and the result was quite a race.



A Riley chassis, powered by a Porsche Cayenne V8 which was not at all endorsed by the factory, somehow managed to overcome all the odds to take the overall and DP class win. The engine is street-derived, and despite Action Express being an offshoot of the Brumos team, it was not expected to win with all the other 'known quantities' at the top of the field. So I suppose Porsche won, but then since this was done without Porsche's blessing, who knows if they will acknowledge the win at all. Something tells me the marketing department will manage to put it in the headlines, even if they didn't originally want to make it so. Best thing about the win: Mike Rockenfeller played a key part in the victory and got a 24 hour win.



The GT class is one in which you pretty much expect a Porsche 911 to win. They always do, or used to anyways, as this year a tube-framed 'Mazda RX8' managed to stomp the formidable foes from The Racers Group, Flying Lizard, and the BMWs of Turner to take the GT class win. The winning 'RX8' was the #70 from SpeedSource Castrol Syntec. I feel about the same about tube frame racers as I do about the Daytona Prototypes, but damn that rotary sounded good screaming around the banking. Kudos to Mazda for getting the job done, and hey, at least they sounded good and looked good while winning. You can't count out the importance of that. In my opinion, winning is only worth doing with style...

Speed TV's race recap

_WRS