Feb 7, 2005 4 min read

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (AP) – From daytime to nighttime and back again, teams led by Tony Stewart and Max Angelelli fought for the lead in the Rolex 24 endurance race. Then, with just 123 minutes left in the 24-hour sports car event, the Pontiac Crawford that 2002 NASCAR champion Stewart shared with former race winners Andy Wallace and Jan Lammers had a gearbox failure.

That allowed Angelelli to protect what suddenly became a comfortable lead, and the Italian driver, Wayne Taylor and Emmanuel Collard claimed an 11-lap victory Sunday at Daytona International Speedway in their Pontiac-powered Riley prototype.

“I’ve never had such a big lead like that at the end,” Angelelli said. “I kept saying to myself, don’t make a mistake.”

Stewart had yet another heartbreak here: A year ago, he lost the lead and the race when his suspension failed with less than 25 minutes remaining.

“With a situation like we had last year and then this year, all that does is make it more gratifying when you do eventually win,” Stewart said.

With a field considered the strongest in the 43-year history of the event, with stars from NASCAR, the IRL and Champ Car dotting the lineup, it was a huge victory for the trio of sports car specialists who have been racing together around the world since 1998.

Taylor, a native of South Africa, also won the race in 1996; it was the first victory for Frenchman Collard and Angelelli, who combined with Taylor to win a three-hour event here in July.

While the very end wasn’t all that close, the race included a record 44 lead changes among eight cars. First place was up for grabs for 22 of the 24 hours.

The winners covered 710 laps, a total of 2,527.6 miles on the 3.56-mile road course that includes about three-quarters of the 21/2-mile NASCAR oval and a winding infield section. They averaged more than 105 mph.

A year ago, they took the lead when Stewart lost it, then fell back out because of a fuel pressure problem, giving the win to Terry Borcheller, Christian Fittipaldi, Andy Pilgrim and Forest Barber.

Sunday’s two front-running teams had been among the leaders from the start of the race. They were separated by less than 40 seconds when Wallace rolled into the pits with black smoke spewing from beneath his car.

At that point, the closest competitor was the Lexus Doran of Didier Theys, Fabrizio Gollin and Matteo Bobbi, 11 laps behind the leaders.

After the winners had pretty much sealed victory, the race for second place grew intense, with four cars winding up less than three laps apart.

The Pontiac Crawford of Jimmie Johnson – another of the nine NASCAR regulars in the lineup – and former Daytona winners Butch Leitzinger and Elliott Forbes-Robinson wound up second despite a long pit stop to fix an engine problem in the middle of the night.

“I figured at that time, maybe we could get a top 10,” Leitzinger said. “I forgot just how Daytona is, how cruel it is. Like last year, everything seemed to happen in the last two hours.”

A 25-minute gearbox change allowed the Stewart-Lammers-Wallace entry to come back and grab third place, just ahead of the Lexus Riley of Stefan Johansson, Cort Wagner and NASCAR’s Jamie McMurray and on the same lap as Johnson’s second-place car.

Theys, Gollin and Bobbi were slowed by engine problems and faded to fifth.

The Daytona Prototype division was introduced in 2003 with only six entries. Last year, there were 16, and this year 29.

Prototypes took the top nine spots in the two-class race, with the Porsche GT3 co-driven by Shawn Price, Pierre Ehrat, Wolf Henzler and Dominik Farnbacher taking the top spot. That car – the 24th GT class winner and the 59th overall class winner for Porsche in this event – wound up 46 laps behind the overall winners.

Last year’s champions, with Champ Car star Paul Tracy replacing Pilgrim, went out during the night with mechanical problems after challenging early.

Actor Paul Newman shared a Ford Crawford, but his team could not finish the race. Teammates Michael Brockman and Champ Car stars Sebastien Bourdais and Cristiano da Matta had several off-course excursions as well as engine problems. At 80, Newman was the oldest driver in the field.