2018 Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona

The 2018 racing season has officially kicked off in the USA with the running of the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona. This year’s race was a doozy, with all of the highs and lows one might expect from a 24 hour race. The weather for the weekend was mostly perfect, not too hot, just a little bit of rain.

For the Audi teams, both Magnus Racing and Land Motorsport had great pace at times, but ran into bad luck and couldn’t manage to stay at the front of the class for long enough to take home the watches.

It all started off well enough, with Land just ahead of Magnus as the green flag fell. After only a few laps, Andy Lally put the Magnus Audi R8 LMS GTD ahead of the Land Motorsport Audi, which began a long period of back and forth action between the Audi teams, as well as the rest of the GTD field.

Somewhere in the early evening the Land Motorsport team found themselves in the lead quite handily, which was extremely exciting to all Audi enthusiasts at the race, but this was to be short lived. Due to a racing regulation related to Balance of Performance, which is designed to ensure that all of the very different cars in a class are more or less identical in overall performance on track, the sanctioning body (IMSA) determined that the Land Motorsport car was somehow taking fuel at a faster rate than was expected, despite the fact that the approved, inspected and double checked flow regulation system was in place and functioning correctly. Because this was a BoP violation, there is no appeal, and the Land team was forced to accept their 5 minute(!) penalty. Taken with lap times for comparison, the fastest lap for the Land car was around 1 minute 48, so 5 minutes was a MASSIVE penalty to be served under green. It put them 3 laps down and nearly impossibly out of contention. Somehow they managed to claw back a lap and ended up in 7th place in class.

Meanwhile, the Magnus car was having a great and uneventful race. They had the pace to be at the front of the race, but for whatever reason fell back throughout the night, and were not able to recover to the top of the pack. They came home in 6th place, which was no doubt disappointing, but they really did nothing wrong at all.

There were a few things that could have helped both Audi teams, but never really happened. First and foremost, weather forecasters had been calling for rain Sunday morning, but it never arrived. The other factor that might have helped the Audi squads would be some more caution periods. As it was, there were only 4 full course caution periods for this race, which is unheard of for a 24 hour race.

Despite the bad luck, both Audi teams performed well, and have good cars to work with in the next races. We’re looking forward to seeing Magnus Racing and Land Motorsport throughout the remainder of the IMSA Weathertech Sports Car Championship.