Max Esterson: Rolex 24 Recap

My first race at Daytona – and in a GT car – is in the books.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – While this weekend marked the 64th running of the Rolex 24 At Daytona, it marked my first driving in a 24-hour race as well as my first race ever in a GT car. The race is one of the biggest endurance events in the world – second only to the 24 Hours of Le Mans. For me, it’s also a special race as it was the first live car race I ever attended and an event that I’ve probably been to nearly a dozen times as a spectator starting when I was a little boy. Overall, we had a successful weekend – we didn’t get the results we wanted or were capable of, but in the context of the early days for the RLL Team McLaren effort, we made great strides with the new car and worked well together as a team.

Personally, I feel my transition as a GT driver is going smoothly, and while I still have some work to do to get fully comfortable, overall I think I compared favorably to my teammate Dean MacDonald, the McLaren factory driver who has years of experience driving this car. There’s some work to do on my end still, but I’m sure it will come as I get more time in the car. Perhaps bigger than the pure driving element of a GT car is the whole shift in perspective with having teammates and the greater team aspect necessitated by such a long event, changing conditions throughout, over 20 pit stops, and the strategy required to optimize the effort over the full week of running which culminates in the 24-hour race itself.

Unfortunately, our car spent rather too long on pit lane.

In the lead up to the event the team did a great job of working through a variety of ‘new car’ issues… Lots of adjustments and short in-and-out runs to work through normal problems and learning what the car liked. By Thursday’s afternoon qualifying session, the car was the quickest it had been all week and we were pleasantly surprised with our pace – good enough to secure a second place starting position for Saturday’s race after Dean put down a great qualifying lap. While being on the front row for our first race exceeded my realistic expectations, the race would be an entirely different challenge – but at least we learned that we had pretty decent ‘single lap’ pace.

Finally, the race got under way with 60 cars taking the green at 1:40 pm on Saturday. The strategy from the team engineers was to have me and Dean MacDonald in the car in succession at the end – me driving in hours 21 and 22, and Dean in for the 23rd and 24th hours to finish the race. Given that Dean would start the car, we would follow a sequence with my teammates Juri Vips followed by Nikita Johnson handing off to me, and then I’d turn the car back over to Dean after my double shift. Although we followed this sequence throughout, it became mooted when in the very first shift it became clear that we had an electronics/software issue with one of the systems on the car. While not an essential system to run, the system is required by the series to monitor and necessitated a lengthy stop to reset and reboot – costing us 21 laps in the garage. It was especially disappointing given when Dean came in to fix the problem after his first two hours, he was running with the leaders in fourth place.

The Rolex 24 is truly an iconic race on the world calendar.

With the lengthy pit stop early on, I finally got in after 9pm at night and ran for two hours. I had a lot of fun and was able to make a lot of fun passes after a restart and carve my way forward and really enjoyed the experience. My next two stints were less exciting… Shortly after I exited the car the fog rolled in and the race was slowed due to fog/poor visibility and run under safety car for over 6 and a half hours! My entire second shift from ~4am to 6am was under safety car – it was almost as hard to drive so slowly for so long as it was to go at our normal race pace! My last shift at the end was not so great – by the time I got in at around 12pm on Sunday the car had a slight braking issue and I struggled for pace. By this point long into the race, it also became apparent that the compromised seat made for the four of us was no longer working for me or for Juri Vips – both of us suffering with pretty severe comfort issues – something we’ll have time to remedy before the next race at Sebring set to run on March 18-21.

We finally ended up with a 12th-place finish in class, picking up the fastest lap of the race along the way and learned a lot about what’s needed to be successful in a 24-hour race Thanks to the team for such a great effort and I can’t wait for the rest of the season!
– Max Esterson