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PRUETT: The Rolex 24 rewind

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emailBy Marshall Pruett | February 3, 2022 10:03 PM ET

An epic edition of the Rolex 24 At Daytona us behind us. Here are a few observations and takeaways from IMSA’s grand season-opener.

IT’S HELIO TIME

The rub on Helio Castroneves was his career-long lack of championships.
On the heels of finishing second in the 1997 Indy Lights standings, he entered the CART IndyCar Series in 1998 and over the next 20 seasons, the Brazilian made his name at the Indianapolis 500, and the Indy 500 alone.

Sure, he earned four runner-up finishes in the Indy Racing League and NTT IndyCar Series standings over that span, and three third-place results, and he was fourth on six occasions… but he was a perennial bridesmaid when it came to winning titles.

And then at 45, after his full-time IndyCar career was gone, he went and won IMSA’s biggest prize after claiming the 2020 DPi championship in his farewell with Roger Penske and the Acura Team Penske WeatherTech SportsCar Championship program. True, it wasn’t the IndyCar title he coveted and chased for decades, but don’t believe for a moment that capturing the title in IMSA’s top category was any less of an achievement than taking home an IndyCar crown.

Left without a full-time opportunity in any form of the sport, Castroneves accepted an invitation to join Wayne Taylor Racing’s new Acura DPi effort at 2021 Rolex 24 At Daytona, and promptly won in his sixth attempt.

With his first championship in hand and a shiny new Rolex Daytona watch on his wrist, the next nagging question was whether the 46-year-old would ever break free from Indy’s three-time winner’s club. His last Indy win came in 2009 — a lifetime ago — and he answered with the best story of the year as the unheralded Meyer Shank Racing open-wheel team toppled the series’ best on the way to winning its first IndyCar race.

And if that wasn’t enough, on the weekend where 44-year-old Tom Brady’s retirement after 22 seasons and seven Super Bowls came to light, Castroneves seemingly took the torch from ‘TB12’ and starred in a showdown with his former ATP and WTR teammate Ricky Taylor to produce his second consecutive Daytona win and the first for MSR with the Acura ARX-05 DPi.

I’m not sure we’ve seen this kind of big-race output from a driver at the tail end of their career. Mario Andretti famously won the 1993 CART IndyCar race Phoenix oval at the age of 53, and there are other entries in the history books of old lions making their way to victory lane, but he’s been on an unparalleled bender over the last 12 months with winning the Rolex 24, Indy 500, and the Rolex 24 again.

The normal story arc sees a driver like Castroneves consumed and routinely failing to recapture the glories achieved in his youth. Instead, he’s rewritten the narrative on his career in its twilight in ways that are truly remarkable. In those early ATP DPi days, he looked like the most unfulfilled person in the IMSA paddock. Other than the annual visits to the Indy 500 in an extra Penske entry, IndyCar was taken away and he bristled at the idea of retiring without getting another shot at scoring his fourth win at the Speedway.

On the heels of joining that four-timers club, MSR elevated Castroneves to full-time IndyCar status in 2022 where he’ll turn 47 in May and enter the 500 as a pre-race favorite. And with Rolex watches on each arm. The ‘Drive for 5’ is next for Castroneves, who will try to form an Indy 500 club of his own as the only driver to win the great race five times. Considering all he’s done since winning that IMSA championship in 2020, there’s every reason to believe the ageless wonder has more massive victories to capture before he’s done.
At a age when most drivers are winding their careers down – or having their careers wound down for them – Castroneves has become a trophy magnet. Motorsport Images

CORNER WORKER UPDATE

The corner worker who was hit and injured in the unfortunate crash by ERA Motorsport’s Dwight Merriman was back at the circuit on Sunday to see his brothers and sisters flagging at Turn 6. No doubt one of the toughest people at the event, RACER understands he suffered multiple broken toes in the impact, but wanted to return to the circuit and be with his brethren. It’s believed the splitter on Merriman’s LMP2 car dug beneath the Armco barrier and struck the worker’s feet, which sent him tumbling backwards and onto the ground. Kudos to Merriman as well, who reached out to the SCCA volunteer to check on his wellbeing.

LUMPS APLENTY

The factory BMW and Corvette GTD Pro teams sure took a whooping during the race as reliability woes struck both brand-new BMW Team RLL M4 GT3s and the modified Corvette C8.Rs. The problems for the BMWs weren’t a surprise due to the model’s lack of hardcore endurance racing mileage. The No. 3 Corvette was felled by an alternator issue and the sister No. 4 car was knocked out of contention from damage sustained while trying to avoid a spinning prototype.

In a note that’s possibly related, the No. 01 Cadillac Racing DPi-V.R surrendered the lead when its alternator — the same model and unit as found on the Corvettes — failed. Throw in the fuel pump issues that kept the No. 02 Cadillac in the garage for an extended period of time, and all four factory GM entries had a Rolex 24 to forget.

BECKY AND TOTO

The sports car racing community lost two if its family members in the weeks leading into the race. Becky Mishtawy, wife of IMSA official Jeff Mishtawy, bravely fought brain cancer until the end. In addition to her work for racing teams, she was widely known and cared for throughout the paddock. IMSA commissioned a commemorative sticker which many teams ran during the race, including MSR, which drove into victory lane with her name carried on the nose of the overall winner.

Veteran driver Toto Lassally was also taken from us in January, albeit unexpectedly. On top of racing at the Rolex 24 on multiple occasions, Lassally was a fixture with his business selling racing radios and other support items to Grand-Am, ALMS, and IMSA teams. A sticker for Lassally was also carried on a number of cars last weekend.



I see an un authorized piece of tape on an IMSA car......that is worth an immediate disqualification.
Turn yourself in immediately.

senor honda

PRUETT: The Rolex 24 rewind...Racers trying to escape the bottom of the officials port-a-potty that IMSA BOP puts them into.

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emailBy Marshall Pruett | February 3, 2022 10:03 PM ET

BALANCE OF BAMBOOZLING

You should have heard the comments during the Roar Before The 24 and again when the Balance of Performance adjustments were published days before the big race. Some of those voices, be it from team owners or manufacturer representatives, gave the impression that IMSA had committed heinous crimes by saddling their cars with added weight, or killed any chances of being competitive by taking power away for the 24-hour contest.

The fun part of listening to the annual ‘WHY DOES IMSA HATE ME?’ cries at Daytona is knowing that at least one of those poor teams or auto brands will end up winning the race overall or taking a class victory. This magically happens like clockwork each January, despite being handcuffed by IMSA’s ‘unfairly biased’ BoP.

There’s another aspect behind the motivations for those cries, and it’s to mask the team or brand’s efforts to hide their car’s true potential. What better way to cause a distraction than by shouting to all who’ll listen that you may as well pack up and go home before the race, all while secretly holding a winning hand in the BoP poker game that gets played between the series and its entrants?

Giving evidence against yourself

IMSA implores its teams and manufacturers to go as hard as possible throughout the Roar in order to give the series’ technical team accurate performance information to use while formulating the BoP for each model, but the games continue to be played by some. IMSA monitors so many aspects of the onboard telemetry that it’s hard to get away with something blatant during the Roar like lifting off the throttle or dragging the brakes on the straights to reduce top speed and increase lap time to create a false portrait of the car’s capabilities. Once those obvious manipulations were lost as options, more inventive efforts were made to try and make IMSA believe certain cars needed significant BoP handouts to have a fighting chance in the race.

One sneaky ploy involved filling the fuel tank far beyond what the car needed for a test run; if five gallons were needed (at approximately seven pounds per gallon), some teams tried to trick IMSA by slowing their cars down by dropping double or triple the amount into the tank. A few even made sure to keep their cars topped up at all times. Thanks to the extra and unnecessary fuel weight, the car would run a few tenths slower per lap as the telemetry showed the driver giving 100-percent effort to paint the portrait of the BoP being in need of adjustment.

But then IMSA started randomly weighing the cars after those test runs, and on more than one occasion, it asked teams to explain why so much fuel was onboard…
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The reply from Smokey Yunick would be: "Cause it's not illegal, you GD MF'ers!"
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Those manufacturers’ BoP pleas were dismissed. Another area of manipulation was found with over inflating the tires to reduce grip—in an exaggerated sense, it was like turning them into balloons — to negatively affect lap times.

There are other tire and suspension adjustment efforts like this that were caught and brought to an end, which takes us to some of the newer ways I heard were used during the Roar to avoid the bottom of the IMSA officials porta-potty, and receive a real BoP break for the Rolex 24.

One of the artful approaches involves a manufacturer manipulating the activation of its turbocharger anti-lag system. With anti-lag being used to keep a turbo (or turbos) spooled up and ready for instant action after the driver, say, lifts off the throttle and brakes entering the Bus Stop, anti-lag eliminates the brief wait for the exhaust gasses to flow and spin the turbines and make boost. But if the anti-lag didn’t engage, a car would accelerate slower once the driver got through the first portion of the Bus Stop and hammered the throttle to charge out of the corner and take the long trip on the banking to cross the start/finish line.

Think of it like two identical dragsters, one with an engine that rages sooner than the other off the line and has a faster elapsed time, and the second engine which takes a little longer to hit its top speed and reach the finish line. They’d both hit the same top speed, but the first one would have the better E.T. In this scenario, losing anti-lag would present a false portrait of the car’s acceleration curve without triggering any significant alarms at IMSA, since the deeper engine functions and ECU settings are not believed to be within its monitoring capabilities.

You’d get glorious data showing drivers being super aggressive on the throttle and get top speeds that fall in line with expectations, but with the slower E.T. on the banking due to the disengaged anti-lag, it sure would help a team or manufacturer’s claims of needing more power for the race.
On a related note, another fun one I heard about, which isn’t necessarily new, was a brand making sure its traction control system was working overtime during the Roar. Just as traction control can be a real help by reducing wheelspin under acceleration and thereby improving lap times, it can also be used as an intentional hindrance. Dialing TC down in order to allow excessive wheelspin and hurt lap times would be easy to spot by IMSA, but if you crank it up just slightly beyond what the driver really needs, you can ensure the rear tires have more grip than is optimal. With too much TC intervention, tiny additions of time are added to the lap while the tiny drifts are cut out of the acceleration profile.

Imagine having fractionally more grip and fractionally less acceleration through TC in the infield, or having fractionally less acceleration at high speed as the anti-lag is made to lag, and you just might sell the notion that your BoP needs-a-fixin’ leading into the race…

Look for IMSA to lock these areas down before we get to Sebring in March...or find new ways to shove racers into the bottom of the officials porta-potty.
Mmm-BoP. Yes, that was a Hanson reference. Richard Dole/Motorsport Images

MISC

* Look past the stellar races in four of the five Rolex 24 classes (LMP3 was all but decided on Saturday) and we had two perfect scene-setting results with Memo Gidley returning to Daytona for the first time since his giant crash to take pole and second in the IMSA Prototype Challenge LMP3 race with young ace Alex Koreiba. And then with Robert Wickens and Mark Wilkens claiming third on their debut as a twosome with Bryan Herta Autosport and Hyundai in the Michelin Pilot Challenge TCR class, it felt like no matter what happened across the 24-hour race, we’d already been gifted a pair of great feel-good stories.

* The MSR team spared plenty of thoughts and well wishes for 2012 Rolex 24 winner John Pew who was ill and unable to join the team in celebrating its win on the 10-year anniversary of their breakthrough at Daytona.

* I heard a few suggestions that the debuting McLaren 720S GT3s would be like endurance racing grenades, with their pins pulled at the start and barely a chance the two entries from inception racing and Crucial Motorsports would survive beyond three or four hours. The prophecies were partially accurate as the Crucial McLaren was addled with issues and fell out around the one-third point of the race. The lower case-loving inception squad defied the odds and took a strong fifth in GTD, two laps off the winning Wright Motorsport Porsche.

* On a related note, there were fears that in an all-pro class, Lexus and its large and somewhat aged RC F GT3 would be pummeled by the other factory entries. The Vasser Sullivan team finished third in GTD Pro.

* We’ll close with NBC’s broadcast of the race. Among the various items that stood out, commentator Calvin Fish appearing to call a Turn 1, lap 1 overtaking attempt a ‘Big d*** braking maneuver’ certainly opened the show with punch! Fans who watched with the automated closed-captioning function enabled reported Lamborghini driver Mirko Bortolotti’s last name was translated on the screen as Port-o-Potty, and a reference to ‘Sex with the Kink’ and other gems were also produced. Gallows humor and endurance racing—who could ask for more?
Lets go Brandon, F Joe Biden!