DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — The significance of Ganassi Racing’s three-straight Rolex 24 victories can be easily appreciated when you consider the two-time winners who failed to get the hat trick.
Shelby American (1965-66) fell in the 1967 Ford debacle of broken transmissions. John Wyer’s Gulf Porsche team (1970-71) couldn’t complete the triple with their own Mirage-Fords in 1972 when the race was cut to six hours at the FIA’s demand under pressure from Ferrari.
Brumos Porsche came up short in 1976, the year water was found in the pit fuel supply, after winning in 1973 and 1975 (the ’74 race was cancelled due to the oil embargo). Most recently, Holbert Racing failed to back up its 1986-87 triumphs in 1988, Al Holbert’s last race at Daytona.

• Scott Pruett and Juan Pablo Montoya become the fourth set of teammates to win back-to-back in the Rolex 24. Previous repeaters were Ken Miles and Lloyd Ruby (1965-66), Peter Gregg and Hurley Haywood (1973-75), and the trio of Al Holbert, Derek Bell and Al Unser, Jr. (1986-87). Gregg went on to win a third straight in 1976 with different co-drivers.

• Scott Pruett joins Derek Bell, Bob Wollek, Andy Wallace and Butch Leitzinger as a three-time overall Rolex 24 winner. Hurley Haywood has five wins, Pedro Rodriguez and Peter Gregg four each.

• Derek Bell returned to action at Daytona for the first time since 2003, driving Roger Schramm’s Rock Valley Oil Pontiac Riley with his son Justin Bell, Tonis Kasemets and owner Schramm.  Kasemets ran in the top 10 in the early laps but the car was out in the third hour.
Bell, 67, was not the team patriarch. According to the Grand Am media guide, Schramm is about six months older.     

• Hurley Haywood’s 35th Rolex 24 was promising Sunday morning as the Brumos Porsche Riley  No. 59 stayed on the lead lap, running in the top five and leading occasionally during pit sequences. Then the gremlins struck and Haywood was relegated to 25th with teammates J.C. France, Joao Barbosa and Terry Borcheller.
With no Red Bull sponsorship on the Brumos No. 58 this season, both the cars from Jacksonville ran in their traditional colors of white with red and blue stripes, differentiated by dayglo windshield and rocker panel bands. It was pointed out that the green bands on Haywood’s car were the same as the identifying marks on the Joest Porsche in which he scored his last Rolex win in 1991.  

• Talk about an eclectic driver lineup... the Southard Motorsports Lexus Riley teamed a sports car veteran (Shane Lewis) with a NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series driver (Bill Lester), an open wheel pilot (Alex Barron) and one of the greats of short-track racing (Ted Christopher). Both Lester and Christopher have NASCAR Cup Series appearances on their resumes as well.

• The rainy periods on Saturday afternoon and through the night tested the judgment of team managers as Pirelli, making its debut as Rolex Series tire supplier, provided only slicks and full wet tires — no intermediates. All the cars who went to the grid on wets pitted on the pace lap for dry tires, leaving a ragged lineup coming to the green but no other problems.

• During the night, the track stayed wet, with lap times around the two-minute mark for the leaders. When slicks went on at dawn, the pace picked up to the mid 1:40s.

• Stars of the deep night were Ian James and Patrick Long. James twice chased down the eventual race winner after restarting the Michael Shank Racing No. 6 far behind in traffic. Long and his Alex Job Racing teammates were pinned a lap down for hours as the lead lap cars never pitted together under caution, meaning they never got the benefit of the wave-around.
When he finally got back on the lead lap, Long was a second faster than anyone else with wet tires on a slowly drying track. Unfortunately, neither team was destined to finish.

• When Helio Castroneves cut a right-front tire, the flailing pieces ripped the front bodywork of the Toshiba No. 9 to shreds, resulting in a long stop that put the eventual third-place finishers two laps down as well as an extensive track sweep.
Then Guy Cosmo had the entire right-front wheel of the Spirit of Daytona No. 09 depart at speed on the backstretch. He made it to the pits without damage and didn’t even draw a full-course caution as the wheel drifted to a halt out of harm’s way at the chicane. Later, the same car threw the left front wheel. 

• With the Florida primary a few days away, that political staple, revisionist history, was practiced by Rolex 24 Grand Marshal Dan Gurney.
The legend has always been that Gurney won the first Daytona Continental in 1962 when his engine blew on the last lap by coaxing his Lotus 19 across the line on the starter motor. Now he admits gravity was the motive power. He coasted down the 18 degree banking at the flagstand to take the checker, but the starter was grinding away to satisfy the FIA rule that the car had to finish under its own power.

• The GT victory by the SpeedSource Mazda RX8 of Sylvain Tremblay, Nick Ham, David Haskell and Raphael Matos was the first by a rotary-engined production car since the 1980s.

• Bob Stallings, the owner of the Gainsco Team which finished second Sunday in the Rolex, admitted that he had made a bad decision on when to change the failing gearbox in his Pontiac-Riley, whose reigning championship duo of Alex Gurney and Jon Fogarty was bolstered by Jimmie Johnson and Jimmy Vasser.
“We had a choice of fixing it under a yellow, but decided to see if we could get it to last a bit longer,” Stallings said. “As a result we wound up doing it under green, and that was the difference between being second rather than first.”