While analysis from the Roar test and practice indicated Porsche were a little down on pace compared to Cadillac, Acura, and BMW, this did not turn out to be the case in the 2025 24 Hours of Daytona, the 63rd edition of the race.
Indeed, Porsche won the race. In fact, the German manufacturer almost took a 1-2, if it wasn't for Acura's Tom Blomqvist overtaking Matt Campbell, who had been leading heading into the final hour, in the final few minutes of the race.
Dries Vanthoor creates a gap
Dries Vanthoor, in the #24 BMW M Hybrid V8, qualified his car on pole on Thursday. At the start of the race, he held the lead and created a gap to those behind. His lead was up to over 11 seconds seconds by the time he pitted for the first time on lap 33, and over 25 seconds when he handed over to Philipp Eng after his 59-lap double stint.
Looking at the data, D. Vanthoor was over a second quicker on average than Acura's Nick Yelloly, Cadillac's Jack Aitken, Blomqvist, and Porsche's Felipe Nasr in that opening hour and half. Yelloly triggered the start of the second GTP pit cycle on lap 50, where he handed the #93 Meyer Shank Acura over to Daytona debutant Kaku Ohta.
The graph below shows D. Vanthoor's average compared to the drivers behind, when you take the fastest 20% of laps set by each driver and average it out. The BMW driver was well over a second faster on average than Yelloly, and around eight tenths faster than Aitken in third.
However, this doesn't tell us the whole story. If you average out all 50 laps from each driver, we can see that D. Vanthoor wasn't the fastest on average. In fact, he was slower than Blomqvist, Aitken and Yelloly, sometimes by quite a margin.
Put both of these things together — the top 20% average and the overall average — and this indicates that he may not have been as fast through traffic, but when he had clear road ahead, he pulled away and created the gap.
When he pitted to hand over to Eng, though, D. Vanthoor clouted the pit wall on drivers left as he entered. While the car was undamaged, it meant the team had to move the car back to the correct position before servicing it, which cost time and lost them the lead. Eng would rejoin the race in fourth for the start of his stint.
The cautions start
During this period, Nasr sat in the top 5 but not threatening for the lead. By the time he pitted on lap 58, he was almost a minute behind Vanthoor.
Anyone who watches IMSA regularly will know that caution periods, or full course yellows, are a key part of the race strategy in the series.
The first caution at Daytona this year occured when Ohta was in the lead for Acura, 2 hours 11 minutes into the race. The Japanese driver had a 6.3 second lead over fellow IMSA debutant Frederik Vesti, in the #31 Action Express Cadillac. Nick Tandy, who'd taken over from Nasr when the Brazilian pitted, was third in the #7 Porsche.
Vesti, in the #31 Cadillac (left), and Ohta in the #93 Acura, led on debut at Daytona. Images: Kevin Dejewski
The entirety of the GTP field pitted during this caution. Ohta's stop took longer than most other cars and he dropped to the back, promoting Vesti to the lead and Tandy into second.
Tandy took took the lead for the time, from Vesti, on the lap after the restart. This was also Porsche's first time in the lead.
The next few hours were a flurry of lead changes. The pace was very similar between the front runners. We've calculated averages for each hour of the race for each car in GTP, taking the top 20% laps and averaging these out.
Above is each car's average across the first six hours. As is displayed, the #24 BMW was fastest for the first two hours. After this, it became a mixed bag, with different cars having fastest averages at different points within the first quarter of the race.
Tandy led from when he overtook Vesti to the start of the fourth hour of the race. He was briefly overtaken by Rene Rast in the #25 BMW, but took the lead back after a few laps.
As the race got older, the BMW performance declined to the point they were 'mid-table' in the hourly averages. But, they were still running at the sharp end, with Tandy and then his teammate Laurens Vanthoor leading for the majority, with Kevin Estre second and the BMWs third and fourth.
The four were only separated by less than a tenth in the fourth hour. Porsche were finally beginning to show the pace they'd been hiding for more than a week at Daytona; while BMW had displayed they had pace to challenge from the initial test sessions at the Roar.
Kobayashi's surge
The fifth hour, though, came a new challenger: the #40 Cadillac. The Porsches took a supporting role for the next hour, after leading for much of the previous 60 minutes, giving Cadillac the lead.
This was almost single-handedly down to Kamui Kobayashi in the #40 Cadillac. If you look at his average lap time here, he was more or less three tenths faster than the #6 Porsche of Kevin Estre.
It took Kobayashi to go from ninth, at the end of the race's third caution, with 4 hours 30 minutes to go, under 20 minutes to take the lead off Estre. His average lap time in this period was 1:38.709, two tenths faster than Estre, six tenths faster than both Drugovich, who'd been fighting for the lead, and L. Vanthoor.
While Kobayashi didn't pull away in the 14 laps he was in the lead, he was able to keep it and fend off Estre and L. Vanthoor until he pitted on laps 170, relinquishing the lead. The Japanese driver was a tenth and a half quicker on average compared to Estre, and almost three tenths faster than L. Vanthoor.
The next caution soon came about, and Kobayashi handed the car over to Louis Deletraz. Unfortunately, Deletraz would be slightly too eager to get on the power at the restart and would spin at turn 1, hitting the barriers and ricocheting back on track, taking out multiple lower class cars in the process.
The night hours
It was the under the cover of darkness when Porsche started to really stretch their legs.
The 963 is particularly condition-sensitive and has tended to work better in cooler air and track conditions in the past. This rang true again at Daytona.
In the week leading up to the 24 hours, Florida experienced an unusually cold snap of weather. Arriving at the track on Thursday, temperatures were in single digits. Needing a woolly hat and three layers of clothing was certainly not what The Racing Line expected on arrival at the iconic oval an hour or so from Orlando!
While it did warm up significantly for the race, it got cold again during the night. This was excellent news for Porsche, and it really showed in the timesheets.
For the purposes of brevity, we're going to skip forward to when Porsche took the lead in the middle of the ninth hour, with Nick Tandy in the #7 car and Mathieu Jaminet in the #6.
At this point, Tandy had a lead over Jaminet of around 12 seconds. Over the hour, the #7 Porsche was the second fastest in terms of top 20% averages, with only the #25 BMW, with Rene Rast at the wheel and down in seventh, faster.
The other #24 BMW, with Dries Vanthoor at the wheel, iinterrupted Porsche's 1-2, though, taking second off Jaminet.
Aitken, in the #31 Cadillac, overtook Jaminet as well. In terms of average lap times for the entire hour, the Frenchman was actually the second slowest car on track over the hour.
D. Vanthoor began to chase down Tandy as Aitken caught both of them. On lap 292, with the gap to Tandy having come down from 13 seconds to 4.3, Aitken took second off the BMW.
With D. Vanthoor now third, the two began to hunt down Tandy. For this entire period, from when D. Vanthoor overtook Aitken to when D. Vanthoor pitted on lap 302, both were substantially quicker in terms of average lap times than Tandy and Jaminet. In fact, over this period, Jaminet was a little quicker than his teammate, which accounts for why Tandy was caught so quickly by D. Vanthoor and Aitken.
Aitken overtook D. Vanthoor on lap 293 and proceeded to catch Tandy, closing the gap to just a few tenths when they pitted starting lap 302.
Cadillac and BMW have a turn in the lead
When the pit stop cycle had shaken out, the lead had changed, with Vesti once again in the lead for the second time in the race.
A caution, the sixth of the race, was called soon after the Dane took the lead through the pit stop cycle.
Unfortunately for Cadillac, at the restart, he later lost this at the restart, dropping down the order.
He later told media: 'I had a really good rhythm, just cruising along and trying to save my tires and then the full yellow came.
'Suddenly, I found myself in the lead and not having done any cold brakes, cold car stuff. From the lead, I didn't really know how much I could push and then I lost some positions.
'But I then got back into a good rhythm. So, we lost a bit of positions, but pretty happy with how I ended the stint. It's a learning experience.
'It is my first time out, and the goal is to be there at the end. It is a bit of practice, of course we're racing, but it's all practice and learning for the hours ahead.'
Eng, in the #24 BMW, now held the lead, and he did so Julien Andlauer took the lead off him on lap 333, putting the #5 Proton Porsche 963 into the lead for the first time.
At this point, the two factory Porsches were second — Estre in the #6 — and sixth, with Nasr at the wheel of the #7. However, the seventh caution of the race was called, putting a temporary halt on proceedings.
Porsche's formation flying
At the restart the #10 Cadillac of Filipe Albuquerque led, but not for long: Filipe Nasr surged through the field from sixth at the restart to lead by the end of the 11th hour.
His average lap time was significantly quicker than those behind him, one and a half tenths faster than Scott Dixon in the #60 MSR Acura and seven tenths faster than Albuquerque. It took Nasr just five laps to take the lead off the Portuguese driver, and from there, he simply ran away: 10 laps later the lead was almost four seconds and it kept growing from there.
But, Dixon was also on a charge and soon followed Nasr through to take second from Albuquerque. Behind, Nasr's teammate at Porsche, Estre in the #6 car, was around 2 seconds back from Dixon.
Estre pitted first, handing over to Campbell, with the positions otherwise unchanged. The Australian was around 8 seconds back from his fellow Antipodean, but the #6 Porsche driver was soon able to catch and pass Dixon, giving Porsche a 1-2, with just over 20 minutes until the half way point in the race.
In the next half of this analysis, we'll examine how Porsche consolidated their 1-2 and almost took it to the flag. It would have been the first Porsche 1-2 at Daytona since 1987.
In the meantime, why don't you read our analysis of how Chip Ganassi Racing won their final race with Cadillac last year at Petit Le Mans?
Phil Oakley
Feature image: Kevin Dejewski
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