Since the Daytona Prototype era took hold in 2004, the Grand Am Rolex GT class has been a bit like the Heartbreakers without Tom Petty — a good back-up group without star power.
If the evidence from the Rolex 24 weekend can be repeated down the road this season, that may be changing.
Large in number and strong on inter-brand competition, the GT field for the season opener made it appear the Daytona-based organization has achieved a delicate balance between production based cars (read Porsche) and tube frame silhouette racers (read Pontiac, Mazda, hopefully Ford, and maybe BMW). While the Daytona field is always pumped up by teams that won’t appear regularly during the season, the prognosis is favorable. 
Grand Am’s avowed purpose in assembling the Daytona Prototype rule package five years ago was to make the new class the stars of the show while avoiding the cost escalation that had driven the preceding generations of endurance sports racers, GTP and World Sports Cars, out of reach for most U.S. car owners.
That meant a parallel down-spec of the top GTs, like the Tommy Riggins-David Machavern Mustang and the Cort Wagner-Brent Martini Ferrari, which were often a match for the embryonic Daytona Prototypes in 2003.
The result, as it has seemingly been since the dawn of time, was the domination by force of numbers by Porsche’s over-the-counter racers, with Bill Auberlen’s Prototype Technology Group BMW to keep them honest, and incidentally to win the 2004 title. Then Pontiac chose Grand Am Rolex GT as the racing forum for its GTO revival, signing premier Porsche operation The Racers Group to lead the charge. The racing effort was successful, winning both drivers’ and manfacturers’ crowns in 2006, but the neo-GTO flopped in the showroom.
For 2007 the Pontiac mantle passed to Leighton Reese, a GM loyalist in everything from Trans Am to ASA, and the GXP-R model. The newest road-racing Tin Indian was a true silhouette racer, as it carried the body style derived from the front drive G6 on a rear drive chassis courtesy of Corvette specialists Pratt & Miller.
This time the edge went to Porsche and Dirk Werner, but only by a handful of points.     
Mazda’s history in the GT ranks includes a decade-long RX7 winning streak in class at the Rolex 24 and multiple titles for the likes of Jim Downing and Roger Mandeville, but the distinctive cry of the rotary engine had been largely absent from Grand Am GT until Sylvain Tremblay debuted his tube-framed RX8 with three race wins and third in points in 2007.
Meanwhile, Blackforest Motorsports, like Tremblay’s  SpeedSource team, a Florida-based  powerhouse in the Koni Challenge street stock ranks, raced its Mustang in ’07 with the usual teething problems but evident potential.
That brings us to last December, where the latest variation on the Rolex GT theme appeared in the Grand Am booth at the PRI show in Orlando: a V-8 powered, carbon-fiber bodied BMW M5. The godfather of this creation was the diminutive Tampanian, Joe Varde, whose reputation for driving hard, building fast, and reading the rule book closely goes back to the heyday of the Firestone Firehawk series two decades ago.  
Porsche, of course, has seen contenders and pretenders to its throne come and go since the original 911 model was introduced in the mid 1960s, and no less than 25 examples of the current GT3 Cup version were among the 41 GT contenders in the Rolex 24, including seven-car squadrons from The Racers Group and Farnbacher-Loles Racing. There were even a couple of Italian-entered Ferrari 430s in the garage.  
So, how did these hopefuls fare when the rubber met the road?
Tremblay’s Mazda was fastest in qualifying followed by one of the Ferraris and two Porsches ahead of Matt Connolly’s Pontiac GTO. The best Mustang was 15th in class, and the BMW 17th on the grid. The race saw Mazda and Porsche slug it out for 24 hours before Tremblay, with teammates Nick Ham, David Haskell, and Raphael Matos, pulled out a one-lap win over the top two Racers Group Porsches, with the trio placing ninth, 10th and 11th overall behind the surviving Daytona Prototypes.
The fast Ferrari and the BMW, which rumbled like a big block Chevy, were in the garage Saturday evening while all the Pontiacs encountered problems and could score no better than seventh in class. The Mustangs, resplendent in throwback Bud Moore Trans Am paint jobs, were well off the pace despite the best efforts of Boris Said.
Maintaining balanced competition in a diverse field of cars is a moving target, as the tech staff of any racing series can confirm. Grand Am’s Rolex GT package seems, for the moment at least, to have it pretty well in the crosshairs.
Next on the agenda is Homestead at the end of March.