Should the Daytona 24 Hours have been red-flagged in the fog?

The question, looking back, was an obvious one. Why don’t they just red flag it? The IMSA SportsCar Championship field had already been droning around behind the safety car for a couple of hours at last weekend’s Daytona 24 Hours and the fog that caused the caution was showing no signs of lifting. It would be another four hours before we went racing again. As much as the idea, posed by a fellow journalist, that the race should be temporarily halted might be regarded as common sense, it offended my European sentiments.

I’d travelled to America to report on a 24-hour race and that’s what I wanted to see, no matter how much of it took place behind a slow-moving road car with flashing lights on its roof. Or actually two of the same, such was the length of the caution that the course vehicle had to be switched on two occasions as the things used up a tank of fuel.

Therein lies the difference between me and my colleague. I’m European and he’s American. Our outlooks on sportscar racing differ significantly, and nowhere is the contrast more apparent than at Daytona, a race that draws an obvious comparison with the Le Mans 24 Hours.

Forget about the divergent number of safety cars you are likely to see at the two events - nine at Daytona in 2026, just the one at Le Mans in 2025 - I’m thinking about red flags here. Someone high up in the Automobile Club de l’Ouest, the organiser of the French enduro, once said to me, “Le Mans has never been stopped and never will.”

My man at the ACO was actually wrong on the first bit of his claim. Back in 1937, the event was red-flagged, unilaterally by a marshal out on track at Maison Blanche somewhere around the one-hour mark. The privateer Bugatti driven by Rene Kippeurt had hit the bank and rolled, triggering a multi-car shunt.

The driver of one of the cars involved, Raoul Forestier got out of his Riley and ran down the track waving his arms, followed by a marshal brandishing a red flag. Race leader Jean-Pierre Wimille couldn’t manage to bring his newer Bugatti to a halt in time and threaded his way through the carnage, but as spectators ran onto the track to pull Kippeurt’s body to the verge — he would die at the scene — the rest of the field had no choice but to come to a halt. That eventually included Wimille, who therefore gained a whole lap on the field. Contemporary reports suggest that this kind of unofficial stoppage lasted for 10 minutes.

Wimille leads the 1937 Le Mans 24 Hours - one of the rare events to witness a red flag

Photo by: Motorsport Images

While we are casting our eyes back through history, it is worth remembering that the race wasn’t stopped in 1955, when more than 80 spectators died after Pierre Levegh’s Mercedes flew into the crowd and disintegrated. The failure to bring out the red flag was slated by Fleet Street at the time, though the specialist press offered a counter opinion. Motor Sport magazine reckoned that calling a halt to proceedings would almost certainly have sparked a mass exodus of spectators and hindered the rescue operation.

But in my time going to Le Mans, there have been occasions when the conditions could arguably have merited a red flag. Think back to 2007 and Audi’s second victory with the R10 TDI LMP1 turbodiesel. The conditions were atrocious in the final stages of the race, and I recall Marco Werner in the winning R10, a car that was always a bit of a beast in the dry let alone the wet, screaming over the radio for the race to be stopped.

He was actually trundling around behind the safety car at the time, though the pleas of a winner of the triple crown of endurance fell on deaf ears. The ACO, it seemed, wasn’t going to allow the race to climax behind the safety car. I can understand that there would have been stigma attached to that.

Any endurance race is meant to be a test of man and machine, so that means running for the full duration

To say Daytona has been routinely red-flagged wouldn’t be quite right. It’s actually seven years since we had one at the Florida classic. In 2019, the year Fernando Alonso won in a Wayne Taylor Racing Cadillac Daytona Prototype international, the race was called 10 minutes short of what would have been the 24-hour mark. The cars had already been parked for the better part of two hours under the second red flag of the event when it was decided there was no prospect of a restart.

It was not the only red flag during a race I’ve seen in my time reporting on Daytona. One I recall was 2004 when a race blighted by rain was halted for a shade over two hours on Sunday, a temporary stoppage that followed a brief green after a three-hour safety car period. The official reason put out at the time was that it was too dangerous to continue in the conditions. That is only half true. The other half was that Goodyear, which supplied the tyres for the Daytona Prototype machinery, was running out of wets.

The reason I remember it so well is that I used the downtime to catch up with Terry Borcheller, who’d taken the inaugural Grand-Am DP title the year before. I’d interviewed him earlier in the week for a feature in Autosport but still had a few more questions. So as far as I was concerned, it was a timely stoppage. I was going to save myself the cost of a transatlantic phone call.

The 2019 Daytona 24 Hour was red-flagged due to heavy rain making conditions unsafe

Photo by: Richard Dole / Motorsport Images

Our decision to do something on Borcheller in the magazine was also timely: as we sat in the pits on a pile of tyres — I can’t remember if they were wets or not — he was on his way to winning the race driving a Pontiac-engined Doran!

As much as I welcomed that one, I wouldn’t have wanted the race stopped last weekend. Any endurance race is meant to be a test of man and machine, so that means running for the full duration. A 24-hour race is a 24-hour race even if we spend over six hours behind the safety car.

Ultimately this year's Daytona 24 Hours wasn't halted

Photo by: David Rosenblum / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images