Rolex Recap

January 29, 2026

Peter Hughes

Peter Hughes delivers a comprehensive recap of the Rolex 24 Hours at Daytona.

Remember when Elon Musk challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight? For a brief moment, a broligarch death match seemed like a tantalizingly real possibility.

Well, we never got that, but fans of billionaire-on-billionaire violence were treated to the next best thing this past weekend. Mere seconds into the 24-hour IMSA season opener, approaching the entrance to Daytona’s turn 1, the LMP2 car of AI mogul Naveen Rao (whose Unconventional Inc. startup is valued at $4.5B) tapped that of Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke (net worth: $12B), sending the latter into a spin that took out Rao and also collected CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz ($8B). Nuvei CEO Philip Fayer ($1.5B) managed to avoid the melee by diving into the runoff.

Unscathed, Fayer’s attempt to rejoin the action was then derailed when Lutke plowed directly into him, at which point all the stricken prototypes blithely headed back onto track, directly into the path of the entire field of thirty-six GT cars as they charged around the blind first corner. (That they somehow all made it through without incident was a small miracle.)

It was all too much for SunEnergy CEO Kenny Habul, an amateur himself but one seasoned enough that he elects to compete with factory teams in GTD Pro. Emerging from his AMG-Mercedes a couple stints later, he decried the needless aggression and reckless risk-taking of the LMP2s, recounted being “door-tapped three times [and] pushed into the marbles twice,” and, most memorably, called them all “a bunch of pelicans.”

My sources down under tell me this is a familiar Australianism, if a possibly dated one: “Sort of something old blokes would say.” As an old bloke myself, I thought it was funny as hell, and the internet seemed to agree. Nice one, Kenny.

IMSA is understandably coy about the fortunes of its amateur drivers; it is to them, after all, that the mantle of keeping the series alive will fall if economic tides reverse and the manufacturer involvement responsible for our current “golden age” recedes. Wealthy sportsmen and women have been a key part of endurance racing throughout its history, and the last thing you’d want to do is alienate them.

At the same time, I can’t help but feel like a marketing opportunity is being missed here. The old jokes about dentists are obsolete. These drivers are a different breed, intensely focused on optimization and competitive at a level that the so-called gentleman drivers of yore would consider downright ungentlemanly.

Ben Keating wasn’t too impressed with the driving standards on display either. Long regarded as one of the best bronze-rated drivers in the world, Keating sounded uncharacteristically angry after a long opening session in the Bryan Herta Autosport LMP2. Unlike Habul, though, it was toward the pros roughing him up in his last stint that he directed his ire. Perhaps they were just trying to dig themselves out of the holes their wayward teammates had put them in.

The race eventually calmed down, as the Penske Porsches settled into a metronomic rhythm at the front, pitting together and swapping the lead in carefully choreographed maneuvers. They were occasionally challenged by the Whelen Cadillac and the privateer JDC-Miller Porsche, which led on pace for an impressively long time. Not bad for a customer car running in 2025 spec, forgoing the latest updates enjoyed by the factory 963s.

Early attrition claimed a few victims in the third hour. The Risi Ferrari’s race ended when the Triarsi Ferrari of James Calado—self-appointed heel of the 2026 Rolex 24—forced his fellow factory driver Daniel Serra into the grass coming through turn 2. The favor was returned when, after bouncing through the infield, Serra’s stricken car found its way back on track in the International Horseshoe and sideswiped Calado.

The day was over for Risi at that point, but Calado was just getting warmed up. Over the course of three stints, he would also run both Jack Aitken in the Whelen Cadillac and Marco Wittman in one of the BMW prototypes off the track, as well as the number 4 Pratt Miller Corvette, the last as it attempted to pass him for position with two hours remaining. Besides a couple of drive-through penalties, Calado also earned the enmity of Nico Varrone, driver of said Corvette, who referred to him somewhat unimaginatively in a post-race interview as “a dirty driver.” Where’s Kenny Habul when you need him?

Calamity also struck early for the AF Corse USA LMP2 and Wright Motorsports Porsche. Contact through the kink with Misha Goikhberg in the Bryan Herta Autosport LMP2 spun Dylan Murry’s AF Corse car, generating a cloud of tire smoke that combined with the late afternoon sun to obscure it completely. That’s when Adam Adelson arrived on the scene in the Porsche. Race over for both of them.

Come evening the fog that had been forecast for the morning hours began to roll in, ahead of schedule. For a long while it hung in the air at grandstand level, making life difficult for rooftop spotters and camera operators while presenting little problem for those on track. But the mist continued to thicken, and by ten o’clock the fireworks show looked less like that scene in F1 and more like Apocalypse Now.

Just before 1 a.m. the race went yellow on account of the soup, and it stayed that way for a record six and a half hours. While Kaku Ohta resorted to TikTok dances to overcome the mind-numbing monotony of his stint behind the safety car in the 93 Acura, and Connor Zilisch reconsidered the life decisions that brought him here, behind the wheel of the Whelen Cadillac at a continuous 65 mph for four hours—”probably the most miserable…I’ve spent in a race car,” he later admitted—intrepid spectators occupied themselves by inventing a new genre of race photography: Liminal Daytona.

The action resumed just past seven in the morning, and it was in its final quarter that the race came alive, with close battles across all four classes. At the twenty-hour mark, a scrap for the lead in GTD Pro between Max Hesse in the Paul Miller BMW and Ayhancan Guven in the “Grello” Manthey Porsche was interrupted when the number 4 Corvette of Tommy Milner crashed the party from third, sweeping around both cars in a three-wide move as they sailed past the start/finish line at 180 mph. Heart-in-mouth stuff.

A frantic last hour saw Jack Aitken furiously stalking the leading Porsche of Felipe Nasr. At one point his Whelen Cadillac nearly got a nose inside the 963 after multiple attempts around the outside going into turn 1, but Nasr was able to close the door and keep a frustrated Aitken at bay. Nasr ultimately pulled away, earning his third straight Rolex 24 victory in the number 7 car, this time alongside new teammates Julien Andlaur and Lauren Heinrich.

A similarly valiant effort by Maro Engel also came up just short in GTD Pro, as the SunEnergy AMG-Mercedes closed to within a couple seconds of Dan Harper in the winning Paul Miller BMW in the final laps.

The wildest finish of all though was that in GTD. With twenty minutes remaining, Philip Ellis in the Winward Mercedes got up inside the leading Magnus Racing Aston Martin of Nicky Thiim coming out of turn six and shoved him high as they headed onto the banking. There was more contact during the side-by-side drag race down the back stretch, neither car gaining an advantage until Ellis, with the inside line, managed to outbrake and squeeze past Thiim going into the Le Mans chicane.

Thiim—knowing what was at stake for Magnus, a small, part-time team that last won at Daytona a full decade ago—was not about to give up so easily, however. After hounding Ellis for several laps, with ten minutes left the veteran Dane went high coming down the front straight. As the Aston pulled past the Mercedes, Ellis moved up on the 18-degree banking and the two cars touched, knocking them both loose and briefly sideways at—not to belabor this—one hundred and eighty miles per hour.

It was a move that Ellis later admitted he “misjudged,” and that Thiim called “just too much,” but it sealed the victory for Winward, their third Rolex 24 in a row as well. A philosophical Thiim added, “That’s just how it is, I guess—the American way, rock and roll!” Indeed.

Finally, it must be noted that despite spinning at least two more times completely on his own, George Kurtz actually went on to win in LMP2. Part of being a successful CEO is the wisdom and shrewdness required to assemble a top-notch team—how else do you build a company capable of bringing about “the largest IT outage in history”?—and the CrowdStrike/APR car’s squad of Alex Quinn, Toby Sowery, and Malthe Jakobsen proved more than up to the task of overcoming their amateur driver’s missteps. The two Interpol cars occupied the remaining steps on the podium.

Takeaways? The Penske Porsches are still the team to beat, and the Whelen Cadillac is right there with them. The WRT BMWs looked impressively strong, the 24 car even grabbing a surprise third overall. And while the fog might be gone, the dark cloud over Wayne Taylor’s head remains stubbornly parked above Florida.

Time will tell if it’s moved on by Sebring.

Rolex Recap

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