A historic one-two for Acura and ORECA at the Rolex 24 at Daytona!
The Rolex 24 at Daytona kicks off the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship season each year. For the 60th running of the race, with its impressive field of 61 cars, two Acura ARX-05s competed in the DPi class and 10 ORECA 07s in LMP2.
This year’s race was a stunner from start to finish. After a frenzied mano a mano between the two Acura ARX-05s built by ORECA, not to mention fighting off five Cadillacs, Helio Castroneves of Meyer Shank Racing triumphed over Ricky Taylor representing defending champion Wayne Taylor Racing. The particularly rewarding win came on the 10th anniversary of the team’s first victory at the endurance classic in Florida.
Castroneves crossed the finish line with a 3.028-second lead on Wayne Taylor Racing, the team with which he won the 2020 edition. He joined forces once again with Frenchman Simon Pagenaud, Oliver Jarvis and Tom Blomqvist to give Acura its second win in a row at Daytona. However, the team founded by Michael Shank was not spared its challenges, including a tire puncture at the start of the race, a change of engine cover and a penalty for excessive speed in the pit lane.
With their second-place finish, Ricky Taylor, Filipe Albuquerque, Will Stevens and Alexander Rossi offered Acura a one-two at the end of the DPi era before the arrival of the LMDhs next season. ORECA Technology placed eight of its chassis in the overall top 10 with the Acura ARX-05s and ORECA 07s!
The race proved full of suspenseful twists in LMP2 as well, with DragonSpeed’s ORECA 07 shared by Colton Herta, Éric Lux, Devlin DeFrancesco and Pato O’Ward claiming the top step on the podium. This marked the third class win in four years at the Rolex 24 at Daytona for the American team and an excellent fifth place finish overall.
At the wheel of DragonSpeed’s #81 ORECA 07, Herta took the reins 10 minutes from the checkered flag and finished the race with a 7.089-second lead on Giedo van der Garde driving Racing Team Nederland’s #29 ORECA 07. A contender for victory until the last hour of the race, Louis Delétraz driving the Tower Motorsport #8 ORECA 07 saw victory slip through his fingers just 15 minutes from the finish. The team did round out the podium, however.
The #52 ORECA 07 pole-sitter entered by PR1 Mathiasen Motorsports and shared by Ben Keating, Mikkel Jensen, Scott Huffaker and Nicolas Lapierre finished in fourth place, followed by G-Drive Racing by APR’s #68 ORECA driven by Oliver Rasmussen, Ed Jones, René Rast and François Heriau, and United Autosports’ #22 ORECA of James McGuire, Guy Smith, Phil Hanson and Will Owen.
The 2021 winner, the #18 ORECA 07 fielded by Era Motorsport, managed to finish in seventh place after suffering a crash in the first hour, dashing its hopes for victory.
Three cars were forced to retire: High Class Racing’s #20 ORECA 07 after an incident, early contender PR1 Mathiasen Motorsport’s #11 and G-Drive Racing’s #69.
The 2022 Super Sebring race weekend kicks off on 19 March for the FIA WEC 1000 Miles of Sebring and the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship 12 Hours of Sebring, second round of the season.
