Brumos lead Daytona after six hours

The polesitters have stayed out of trouble and remain in control of the race despite losing the lead several times to a number of cars.

"It's kind of uneventful right now," said Buddy Rice, after finishing his stint in the lead. We're just trying stay out of trouble. We have yet a lot of work to do, because we've been in this position before and we've had problems.

"So we have to make it though the night. There's a lot of debris, cars putting dirt on the track so you have to be careful."

Despite making three stops in the first two and a half hours, the No. 16 Penske Porsche Riley driven by Timo Bernhard and Romain Dumas led the field early on. However, shortly before the 50-minute mark they made an unscheduled stop after experiencing fuel pressure problems.

They later regained the lead but have stayed out of sequence with other front-runners, although they remain on the lead lap.

The leading Ganassi car has been the No. 02, driven first by Scott Dixon and then by Dario Franchitti, who got as high as second. Together with Alex Lloyd they have remained in the top-three, making a front brake change around the fourth hour during a caution period.

Juan Pablo Montoya enjoyed a good first stint and moved his car up into the top-three after taking over from Scott Pruett, who handed the car to him in sixth place. The Colombian had been running second right before the fifth caution of the day, but stalled his car leaving the pits and dropped down to seventh.

He came back and recovered to hand the car over to Memo Rojas in third place, but believes it will be hard to beat the speed of the Porsches.

"I don't know what happened to the car," Montoya told autosport.com. "It wouldn't fire up after it stalled and we lost a lot of time there. We recovered but with the speed the Porsches have on the straights we can't do anything. They're on a different league.

"It's still early in the race but the only way to beat them is if they have a problem."

However Rojas was called into the garage later during the seventh caution of the day to repair a broken splitter and change the front brakes. They went a lap down and fell to tenth place in the process.

Reigning NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion Jimmie Johnson has not enjoyed a good start to his Rolex 24 after he stalled his car leaving the pits during his first stint at the wheel. He then caused further transmission issues on his No. 99 GAINSCO/Bob Stallings Racing Pontiac Riley while trying to get going.

"I feel terrible that I broke the toy for the guys," Johnson said. "It's a little disappointing. We got three or four laps back and I hope we can get back the other five or six that we're behind. I don't think we have the pace to get them back on pure pace but hopefully the cautions help us."

"It's still nice to get the racing butterflies going with this race. This year mentally I think it's more important to do this race than in previous years."

Fellow NASCAR racer AJ Allmendinger led the race for a while after a strong stint but his Michael Shank Racing car stopped suddenly with an electronic problem that brought his team's race to a premature end.

In the GT Class the No. 86 and 87 Farnbacher Loles Porsches have led most of the way, battling with the No. 7 Pontiac GXP.R of Paul Edwards, Kelly Collins and Jan Magnussen and the No. 66 TRG Porsche.