The IMSA championship roared into life with the Daytona 24 Hours – and Gary Watkins was present in the Florida sunshine to see the beginning of a new era for sports car racing

There were just 26min left on the clock, the green flag dropped and the four cars on the lead lap raced to the finish. Just 11sec separated them at the chequered flag. This could have been any other Daytona 24 Hours of the past 15 years or so; it probably looked like business as usual to the casual fan unaware of the seismic shifts in sports car racing. Yet it might just have been the most important running of the Florida enduro ever.

This year’s edition of the traditional opener to the North American sports car season on the last weekend of January was the first race for the new breed of LMDh hybrid prototypes. That’s where the significance lies, because these cars will race in the US in the IMSA SportsCar Championship and in the World Endurance Championship, which of course means the Le Mans 24 Hours. LMDh and the Le Mans Hypercar category already in place in the WEC are, combined, propelling endurance racing into a new golden age. The typical Daytona-st yle show the LMDhs put on in the closing stages of the race provided proof of concept.

Concerns that there would be problems across the board for these brand new and highly complex cars, particularly with the off-the-shelf hybrid system in the back of each of the nine LMDhs on the grid, proved ill-founded. Pre-race whispers that an entry from the secondary LMP2 protot ype class might be able to pick up the pieces and pinch an overall victory didn’t grow any louder as the event progressed. They had been well and truly silenced as the race drew to a close through a quick-fire sequence of safety cars that set up the de rigueur Daytona dash in the final hour.

Two of the four manufacturers present at the birth of the LMDh category got their machinery to the chequered flag without issues with the energy-retrieval system produced by Bosch, Williams Advanced Engineering and Xtrac. (They respectively provide the motor generator unit, the battery and the gearbox.) Acura and Cadillac provided the quartet of cars that raced after the final yellow-flag period.