Ganassi Team Scores Third-Straight Rolex 24 At Daytona Victory

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Despite a record number of lead changes and a record number of yellow flags, the story remained the same at Daytona Int’l Speedway. Chip Ganassi Racing posted its third-consecutive Rolex 24 At Daytona triumph.
In a race that featured 60 lead changes among 25 drivers and 15 cars and 24 full-course cautions that ate up 95 laps of the 3.56-mile road course, Scott Pruett, Memo Rojas, Juan Pablo Montoya and Dario Franchitti dominated the final quarter of the twice-around-the-clock affair.
Driving a Lexus-powered Riley, the quartet completed 695 laps and won by more than two laps over the second-place Gainsco Pontiac of defending Rolex Series champions Jon Fogarty and Alex Gurney, who had help from two-time NASCAR Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson and retired Champ Car racer Jimmy Vasser.

FANTASTIC FOUR: (From left) Scott Pruett, Juan Pablo Montoya, Dario Franchitti and Memo Rojas celebrate their victory in the 46th annual Rolex 24 At Daytona. The group scored the third-straight victory for team owner Chip Ganassi. (Grand Am Photo)

Pruett and Montoya visited victory lane for the second-straight year, having shared their car with Salvador Duran in 2007. They were the first drivers to repeat victory at Daytona since Derek Bell and Al Holbert in 1986 and 1987.
“This is over the top to come here and win this thing overall, now back-to-back and three in a row for Chip,” said Pruett, who was behind the wheel for the checkered flag. “Wow, this is unbelievable.”
Franchitti, last year’s IndyCar Series champion and Indy 500 victor, tasted victory at Daytona for the first time just two weeks before he begins his new career as a NASCAR driver.
“It’s been a helluva year,” Franchitti said. “These guys, the preparation they put into this car is the reason why we’re here. We just tried to stay out of trouble and here we are — bloody brilliant.”
Ganassi became the first team owner to win the prestigious event three-consecutive years.
Much of the race was a mass of confusion filled with accidents and punctuated by mechanical mayhem and occasional rain showers. Yet, as so often happens at Daytona, it was only in the event’s final stages that its true story began to emerge.
At the start, the winning team started from pit lane because it had chosen to begin the event on rain tires, but pitted during the two pace laps to change back to drys after the initial threat of rain had dissipated, and were held on pit lane with a number of other competitors until the Daytona Prototype portion of the field had passed.
Although they were forced to come through the pack, after the fifth hour they were never lower than fifth, and for much of the race fought for the front-running position with the Michael Shank Racing Ford-Riley of Ian James, John Pew, A.J. Allmendinger and Burt Frisselle and the Alex Job Ruby Tuesday Porsche Crawford with Patrick Long, Andy Wallace, Joey Hand and Bill Auberlen aboard.

THREE IN A ROW: Team owner Chip Ganassi hoists the Rolex 24 trophy Sunday at Daytona Int'l Speedway. (Grand Am Photo)

Both teams had turns in the lead, but were out of contention with engine trouble before 11 a.m. Sunday morning.
The No. 59 Brumos Porsche team held the lead with five hours remaining when the rear suspension failed sending driver Joao Barbosa into the wall and handing the lead to the eventual winning Ganassi team.
“Joao had a great restart and going around the banking coming out of (turn) four, the lower tie rod broke,” said team co-driver Hurley Haywood. “The bolt that holds it on broke and it just sent him right into the wall. There was nothing he could do about it. You want to cry, almost.”
That left Pruett and company with a five-lap advantage over the Gainsco Pontiac-Riley. Although the Gainsco crew whittled the lead down to two plus laps at the finish, they couldn’t overcome the time lost earlier when they were forced to make a gearbox change under green.
The third-placed Toshiba Pontiac-Riley of Penske-Taylor Racing, which was a further four laps back because of constant overheating issues, held on to finish third. The driving trio of Helio Castroneves, Ryan Briscoe and Kurt Busch held on to third, six laps behind the winners at the checkered flag.
Indeed, both Montoya and Pruett made a point in their post-race news conference of saying that this was one of the most difficult events they’ve done.
“The conditions were just awful with the on and off rain making the track incredibly slick. You really had to work hard,” Pruett said. “However, it was really great to see how well we all worked together, and how it turned out. It was great.”
Montoya echoed Pruett. “You had to push all the time,” the 2007 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Rookie of the Year said. “There were just so many really quick cars in the race, so you could never relax. Last year I think we had something of an advantage. This year we didn’t and that was a really difference.”
Rounding out the top five were two more Pontiac Rileys, the Krohn Racing car of Nic Jonson, Darren Turney and Ricardo Zonta, and the SunTrust entry of Wayne Taylor, his son Ricky, Michael Valiante and Max Angelelli.
In the GT class, the No. 70 SpeedSource Mazda with drivers Sylvain Tremblay, David Haskell, Nick Ham and Raphael Matos finished ninth overall and captured the class victory by a margin of seven laps.
“It was pretty special,” Tremblay said. “I’ve dreamt of this since I’ve started racing. To win at Daytona has been a dream of mine for a long, long time. When I first talked of getting a Mazda running against the Porsches, it seemed like a joke back then. There was so much that had to happen, so many pieces we had to build. Then we had to convince other people to believe in our dream, and pull on from there.”
The second-place GT finisher, the TRG Porsche 911 GT3 coupe of Bryce Miller, Ted Ballou, Andy Lally and Richard Westbrook, were forced to back off during the closing portion of the race because of high oil temperatures.
Another TRG Porsche, handled by Tim George, Jr., Spencer Pumpelly, Bryan Sellers, Romain Dumas and Emanuel Collard, was third in class after fighting similar mechanical gremlins.