How BMW's Daytona disappointment created a lopsided Porsche win battle

An hour and half into the race, Porsche Penske Motorsport boss Jonathan Diuguid looked to his colleagues on the pit stand and sighed. “This is going to be a long 24 hours,” he reckoned. It didn’t look good for a manufacturer bidding for its 20th overall victory at the Daytona 24 Hours.

Yet come Sunday afternoon it was celebrating that mark and a second consecutive win for the Porsche 963 LMDh in the opening round of the IMSA SportsCar Championship.

Porsche had the kind of clean race needed to win big sportscar enduros. The winning #7 entry shared by Nick Tandy, Felipe Nasr and Laurens Vanthoor finished with barely a scratch on its bodywork and received no penalties over the course of the event. The factory Porsches might not have been quick at the very start of the race, but the 963 came alive in the cooler conditions of the night and was again quick when temperatures hit a race week high after the sun came up on Sunday.

Yet the Porsche wasn’t the favourite for honours in last weekend’s IMSA curtain-raiser as the race entered its final hours. That honour fell to BMW with the best of its Rahal-run M Hybrid V8 LMDhs shared by Dries Vanthoor, Kevin Magnussen, Philipp Eng and Raffaele Marciello.

The pace of the younger of the Vanthoor brothers at the beginning of the race explained Diuguid’s early pessimism. The pole-winning driver flew in the early exchanges. He was 10s up the road by his first pitstop and 25s to the good by his second. The Bimmer’s advantage disappeared in the night, but now with the temperatures rising and Vanthoor back in the car for the final three hours, the smart money was on the #24 car.

Certainly, Vanthoor was backing himself to do the business. “I would have put myself favourite,” he said. Tandy, too, knew exactly what to expect from the M Hybrid, a car that had shown its credentials from the pre-event Roar test the preceding weekend.

PPM went back-to-back at Daytona as Tandy secured a little slice of history - although BMW had been the favourite before its race unravelled

Photo by: James Gilbert - Motorsport Images

“In the conditions at the end they were fast,” said the Briton, who by claiming a maiden outright Daytona victory to go with his Le Mans, Spa and Nurburgring triumphs became the first driver to win all four of the world’s big 24-hour races. “Even if they’d been down at the back of the queue [after the final safety car], they would have been favourites. They lost the race at the end.”

Daytona 2025 was “one that got away”, team boss Bobby Rahal’s words after the race, as BMW bid for a first victory at the Florida enduro since winning with the 3.0 CSL in 1976. And the win this time would only have been overall victory number two.

Exactly when it started to go wrong for BMW isn’t clear and will probably never be known. Suddenly, with a shade over an hour remaining, the car started bouncing violently. Vanthoor initially believed that a damper had failed, so dramatic was the change in the car’s behaviour, but the problem was in fact down to a broken mounting point on the nose assembly.

"If I’d had the car that I had at the beginning of the race, no doubt we could have won or at least been fighting for the win"
Dries Vanthoor

There had been a slight touch with a GT Daytona class Ferrari and a little off on Turn 2 after Vanthoor’s return to the car for the final time, but the Belgian suggested that the problem could have dated all the way back to the second hour of the race. He had nudged the wall as he arrived in his pit stall at an acute angle under yellows, the commotion that followed and a penalty wiping out his early advantage, and then some.

Whatever the reason for the problem, it spelt the end of BMW’s challenge. The car became more or less undrivable, or at least unraceable.

“The car was porpoising massively, and I’ve still got a massive headache,” said Vanthoor more than a couple of hours after the chequered flag. “I couldn’t fight with the car like that. I couldn’t outbrake anyone, because if I’d tried, I would have locked up and crashed.”

Vanthoor was somehow still in second when the safety car was sent out for the 14th and final time with 50 minutes left on the clock. But after he gave race leader Matt Campbell’s Porsche the slightest of nudges up the rear at the restart, the nose gave up the ghost. The pitstop that followed and the slow lap getting there left the BMW two laps down in fourth position at the chequered flag.

“We’ve got to analyse the problem and understand where it is coming from,” said Vanthoor. “For sure, it ruined our race. If I’d had the car that I had at the beginning of the race, no doubt we could have won or at least been fighting for the win.”

The #6 PPM Porsche had found itself at the head of the field in Campbell's hands for the final restart, but had a crucial disadvantage relative to Nasr

Photo by: Porsche

There was a fight for the victory at the end, however. Campbell, who shared the #6 PPM entry with Mathieu Jaminet and Kevin Estre, had led into the final caution. The Australian had jumped Nasr after stopping a lap later in the penultimate round of pitstops, Vanthoor doing likewise in the BMW.

When the yellows flew for one final time, PPM made a decision that played a crucial role in deciding the outcome of the race. It opted to give Campbell only two fresh tyres in the name of track position, while Nasr got four.

“We wanted to make sure that PPM had one car in front of the BMW,” explained Diuguid. “That was our plan based on what we saw at the start of the race: we didn’t have the pace to run with the BMW but we thought that if we were out front we could control the race.”

Penske’s worries about the BMW evaporated within seconds of the restart, which turned the battle at the front into an all-Porsche affair. And Nasr, with four new medium-compound Michelin tyres under him, had the sharper tool when the race went green for one final 38-minute sprint.

The leader hung on out front for a dozen laps before Nasr swept into the lead. Campbell had nothing for his team-mate and had to turn his attention to his mirrors. Right behind was the Meyer Shank Racing Acura ARX-6 with Tom Blomqvist at the wheel. Five laps before the finish, the #6 Porsche was demoted to third by the car the Briton shared with Colin Braun, Scott Dixon and Felix Rosenqvist.

There wasn’t much to choose between the two PPM entries last weekend, though the winning car led more laps, 307 to 210. But on Sunday morning, #6 appeared to have the slightest of edges. Estre had passed the sister car for the lead twice during a stint stretching to nearly two hours before Campbell took over for the run to the flag.

There was a minor hiccup when Estre was hit up the rear by a GTD Mercedes at the first of the infield hairpins. It forced the team to replace the rear wing assembly, but the time lost when it was changed under yellows was quickly overcome. That was despite a bit of a kerfuffle while the engine cover was loosened and wiggled back into the correct position to facilitate the change.

Taking four tyres at the final stop meant Nasr could surpass Campbell without great resistance

Photo by: Andreas Beil

The misfortune for Campbell, Jaminet and Estre was that they were ahead at the final yellow and the BMW was behind them, splitting the PPM cars. That meant they got the short straw when Penske played the percentages strategically.

“I was happy with my performance in my final stints and I think we had the faster car,” said Estre. “When you feel you have the victory in your hands and you lose it, it’s hard. But you have to have the performance in the final hour when it counts.”

Vanthoor and his team-mates must have driven out underneath the hallowed banking of the Daytona International Speedway as they headed for home thinking the same thing.

RLL felt that victory at Daytona, which would only have been the second outright for BMW in event history, was one that got away

Photo by: Andreas Beil