Audi Pictures from the Rolex 24 Hours at Daytona in 2013
My good friend Chris Wynne was fortunate enough to attend the 2013 Rolex 24 Hours at Daytona this year and got some excellent shots that he’s allowed me to share here. As you likely already know, Audi had their first ever victory at this race, finishing 1st and 2nd in the GT Class were the Alex Job Racing (WeatherTech) Audi R8 #24 and the APR Motorsport Audi R8 #52, respectively. APR had a second R8 there as well (#51) which finished in 11th and team RumBum had the fourth and final R8 entered in the race which finished in 7th place. Audi was also the pace car chosen for the event with a beautiful RS5 chosen for that honor.
The four R8s entered in the race were heavily supported by Audi, which was great to see. If there is any question about that, you can check out this amazing time lapse video from Audi of America showing how much work went into prepping the cars for the race – the Audi engineers literally took the cars apart and put them back together again to ensure they were in tip-top shape and ready for a 24 hour long endurance race like Daytona:
As one might expect with a 24 hour race, things were bound to go wrong no matter how prepared the cars and drivers were. The winning team, Alex Job Racing, suffered contact with another car that ripped their sideblade off. They had a 60 second penalty which made the race even closer than ever, and the team actually finished with the sideblade missing – a testiment to just how aerodynamic these cars are that they can still handle extreme speeds with parts of the car missing.
APR and Rum Bum weren’t without their challenges and setbacks either. Both teams suffered three minute penalties during the race. The teams kept racing hard, and at one point in the final two hours there were three Audis within 20 seconds of the lead. the Audi Motorsport Blog has a great recap of the final minutes, which you can check out over there.
All in all, it was a great showing for Audi, and one of hopefully many more to come in the Rolex series and American Grand-Am racing in general. I’ll let the pictures do the rest of the talking, and thanks again to Chris for the excellent photos.
Chris also captured plenty of pictures of the other marques racing, so I’ll share some of my favorites from that batch too. Although I’m a huge Audi fan, I can certainly appreciate the other brands and teams in the race.
All photos copywright Chris Wynne – do not share or distribute without linking back to this post and including the watermark included in the pictures. Thanks & Enjoy!