Looking Back at the Rolex 24 at Daytona

Paul Truswell examines the Average Lap Times - and tries to find meaning in them!

There were sixteen caution periods during the 2013 Daytona 24 hours, which accounted for 121 of the 709 laps completed by the winners. That’s 17% of the total number of laps completed. However, in terms of time, a whopping 6 hours, 45 minutes and 42 seconds of the race were spent under full course caution conditions – that’s more than 28%. That means that under 17¼ hours of the race were actually spent racing.

Furthermore, the safety car regulations not only close the field up, but they also allow cars that are a lap and more behind to recover alap, provided that they don’t pit as soon as the pit lane opens, when the cars line up behind the safety car. The result is that it is possible to recover laps lost relatively easily. Certainly, if you lose a lap, then it is only a matter of waiting until the next yellow and you’ll recover to the lead lap. If there is then a further yellow, then you can close right onto the tail of the leading group, even if, by rights, your lap time doesn’t warrant that position.

This is all well-known to the strategists who sit on the pit wall at Daytona, of course. The trick is to be patient, and to take the hand-outs that the race offers. Perhaps the most remarkable comeback came from the #60 Ford-engined Michael Shank Racing Riley. With four hours gone, the car was seven laps off the lead lap, fully thirteen minutes behind, having lost time in the pits having a steering link replaced. At that stage in the race, however, we had only had one caution period, and at each of the next three yellow flags, the car recovered a lap back.

Then a fuel pump issue cost the car another nine minute pit stop (taken during a full course caution, of course), but still losing two laps. It was a slow old process, but when the safety car appeared for the thirteenth time, the #60, now with Justin Wilson aboard, was able to get back onto the lead lap and stay there.

With the Daytona Prototypes so evenly matched, it is a process that any team can follow, and one from which all the teams can benefit and in that sense, it is a surprise that only three cars finished on the lead lap. The reliability of the DPs is still some way short of LMP cars, it seems.

Let’s have a look at the races of the first three cars home in the overall results:

01 - Chip Ganassi Racing Riley-BMW

Stint Driver From time To time No of laps Ave Green Lap Time 1 Scott Pruett 15:32 17:55 77 1m 43.07s 2 Memo Rojas 17:56 19:31 54 1m 43.88s 3 Juan Pablo Montoya 19:32 22:58 103 1m 43.15s 4 Scott Pruett 22:59 01:02 62 1m 43.18s 5 Charlie Kimball 01:03 02:53 54 1m 44.15s 6 Memo Rojas 02:54 04:41 54 1m 43.51s 7 Juan Pablo Montoya 04:42 07:32 74 1m 42.86s 8 Scott Pruett 07:33 10:19 72 1m 43.39s 9 Memo Rojas 10:20 12:00 50 1m 43.74s 10 Scott Pruett 12:01 13:43 56 1m 43.31s 11 Juan Pablo Montoya 13:44 15:32 53 1m 43.17s

Note that, as there were no timing loops either at the pit entry or the pit exit, I am unable to provide accurate pit stop times – the driver change over point is given at the time during which the car is at rest at its pit.

What these tables certainly seem to show is that the Ganassi car had a performance advantage: not only over a single lap (the fastest lap of the winning car was more than half a second quicker than either the Corvette or the Ford-engined MSR car) but also in terms of the average lap times.

It is also interesting to observe that Juan Pablo Montoya, in a stint lasting more than two hours before the fog descended, was able to complete 45 laps with an average lap time within a second and a half of the cars best lap of the race. Impressive stuff indeed.

I will leave it to the reader to draw further conclusions or to compare individual performances of one driver against another - or to decide whether using three or five drivers is the way to go.

A brief word on fuel consumption, though, which so nearly had an impact on the final dash to the chequered flag. The longest all-green stint that the 01 BMW-engined Ganassi car managed was 28 laps. The #10 Corvette needed to last for 31 laps to get to the chequered flag after the green flag was shown after the final full course caution. Now Ryan Hunter-Reay had run 31 laps earlier in the race (from laps 136 to 166), but this had included 8 laps behind the safety car. Surely Wayne Taylor must have been tempted to try and run to the flag without a stop? He knew though, that the longest all-green stint that the Corvette had managed was 29 laps though, and decided that the extra two laps would be one too many.

It does beg the tantalising question though: if that last safety car had come out four minutes later, then the Ganassi car would have been left one lap short and Max Angelelli would have been left in a position to win the race. When you live by the safety car, you have to be prepared for it occasionally to bite back.

Paul Truswell