Jon’s race notes 0007: 2026 Rolex 24 at Daytona
I can still hear them now
There will be talk about whether the 2026 Rolex 24 at Daytona was a “good race.” This is the sort of thing motorsports fans spend their time between races arguing about, and I do understand it. We are all here to process the lived reality of motor racing into its eternal form as lore, and since human beings can’t simply fathom all of eternity, that job requires filtering mechanisms like ranking and rating. We need to know whether this year’s Rolex is one we need to recommend to other students of the sport — whether it’s one to spend more time on after the fact. Plus, that’s just the psychology of racing — winners and losers — applied to racing itself.
As a motor race, I would rank 2026 behind 2025 — the other one for which I was present — as well as 2024 and 2023, the others I’ve watched in full. I would rate it a solid B; there wasn’t as much action as the Rolex has recently displayed, but nor was there as much stupidity (outside of LMP2). And yes, there was the matter of that 6.5-hour caution that, one could argue, deprived us of a quarter of the race. Would I recommend watching the 2026 Rolex all the way through in real time? Absolutely not.
But none of that bears on whether this race was good in the sense that matters: Was this race a good event? Was it good that this race happened the way it did? In order to answer that, there is so much more to incorporate than can be gleaned from timing and scoring.
And when I answer “yes,” I need you to empathize with me here as I strain to find a way to communicate how emphatically I mean it. I am often accused of being prone to exaggeration, and I don’t deny it, but it’s hard to find better ways to express how deeply I feel the things that ignite my furious passion than to just smother you in superlatives. And so, knowing that about me, understand that when someone asks me how Daytona was this year, I have to hold myself back from saying something like, “It was as powerfully good and important as any motorsports event I could possibly imagine.”
Why would I say this about a B-grade race that was only the fourth-best (out of four) Daytona 24 I have watched? Because I find that the better a race event is, the less the on-track quality can drag it down. The race can lift a great event up, to be sure, and given that this was a 24-hour, four-class race with a maxed out grid that had close racing at the front of each class to the very end, I’d say this race did that. But those five days in Daytona were some of the happiest I’ve spent doing anything, and it couldn’t possibly matter less to me that the race itself wasn’t among the greatest of all time.
First of all, there are many races during the Rolex gathering, and the other ones were all great. Both MX-5 Cup races were incredible. The four-hour Michelin Pilot Challenge race was tense in both classes. The historics… well, I don’t really pay attention to the racing in that series, but seeing all those legendary IMSA cars flying around Daytona was breathtaking. This trip would have been worth it to me as a race fan if there hadn’t been a 24-hour race at all.
But there was, and the bewildering array of cars, teams, and drivers from around the world made the “World Center of Racing” sign presiding over it all absolutely true. The fireworks at 10:00 p.m. during the Rolex 24 are the New Year’s celebration of the racing world. And more people watched it than ever before.
People talk about the amazing access at IMSA races, and they’re right. Honestly, I can’t believe how painfully NASCAR is shooting itself in the foot by not having exactly the same levels of access and length of event as its wholly owned sports car subsidiary does. But you have to see it to believe it; I’ve never felt more Part of Something than I do at the Rolex. I learned last year that I can simply plan ahead to meet the racing figures of my choice, and then it will happen exactly as planned.
This access and connection is not limited to the easy breezy moments. Dramatic things happen every day of a long race event like this. When one of my favorite cars — the 13 Autosport GTD Corvette — caught fire as Ben Green pulled it into the pit box at the end of night practice, we rushed to the garage area and — staying well out of the way, of course — got to be there with the team to express our sympathy and make sure everyone was okay (they were).
On a lighter note, the Rolex is such a who’s-who of racing that somebody is bound to know somebody, and that will get you into all kinds of adventures. In our case, the known somebody (known by Ginny and Dave) was Susan Jary of CSJ Motorsports who gladly took us on a tour of the McLaren parts hauler.
IMSA really rolls out the red carpet for fans, too, and it’s not just in the exclusive areas. I did not expect, for example, to get a chance to stick my head inside of the Porsche 963 RSP and see the cup holder for myself.
This year, there was also the small matter of it being the Valkyrie’s Daytona debut.
But more than anything else, the greatest thing about the Rolex is being surrounded by that many people who love racing just as much as you do, whether they have a hard card or not. We come from all over and experience the Rolex 24 in radically different ways, but we’re all the same. We’re racers. We may feel isolated sometimes in our day-to-day lives, but whether we’re in the hundreds of thousands at the track or the millions more watching online, we’re all together in Daytona at the end of January.
Nighttime at Daytona is the most singularly magical thing about the place, and we can’t talk about it this year without talking about the fog. The race was under caution for poor visibility for six hours and 33 minutes — 121 laps — the longest in the history of the 24 Hours of Daytona. I happened to be filming the high banks at NASCAR turn 3 just before the caution was thrown, and you can see how iffy the conditions were.
These weren’t the only foggy conditions of the weekend, so we wondered what was different about the overnight gloom, and we learned that it’s really a simple, binary call. Can every flag stand see its neighbors in either direction well enough to communicate visually? If yes, we stay green. If not, we go yellow and stay that way until the corner workers can all see one another again. The fog got too thick to see from one corner to another around 12:45 a.m., and it didn’t clear up enough to go green until 7:19.
I understand why people watching at home may have been bummed out by this, although if you were in the Western Hemisphere, I hope you took the opportunity to go to bed. Luke and I did not, however. We stayed up the whole time and wandered around a race track under conditions we had never imagined.
Real Daytona hours, who up
— Jon 🛞 (@jon.turningfortune.com) January 25, 2026 at 12:32 AM
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This fog was historic. I’m sure we’ll have more to say about it in future posts. But what I want to say to you now is that I loved every second of it. I loved the people we met and walked around with during it. I loved the amusing scenes of competitors struggling to keep their heads in the game behind the pit boxes. I loved sneaking around the track while anyone who cared was asleep. And I loved, loved, loved watching and hearing the cars going around. How often do you get hours to listen to your favorite race car motors motoring quietly enough to listen with your bare ears? I can still hear them now.
I suppose that two Rolexes in a row makes it a tradition. Luke and I went into last year’s Rolex wondering what it would be like to create some racing traditions together. Now we know. It’s the best thing ever.
We went into the 2025 racing season believing maybe we could make a real project out of this. We thought we would build a website. We even had a name for it. Well, we’ve entered the 2026 racing season now, and it’s all real. Daytona has left its mark on us, and we’ve left our mark on it.
