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After four hours of racing in the Rolex 24 sports car race at Daytona International Speedway, the No. 8 Ford Riley of Starworks Motorsports, with Alan McNish at the wheel, had the lead in the Daytona Prototype category.

In second place in DP was the No. 60 Ford Riley of Michael Shank Racing which was being driven by Justin Wilson. Wilson was several seconds behind.

Third was the No. 2 Starworks Ford Riley, being driven by Michael Valiante.

The big story of the first part of the race in DP was the engine failure, and subsequent withdrawal, of the SunTurst Wayne Taylor Racing Corvette. The car, which qualified second fastest and with Max Angelelli at the wheel, pulled into the garages inside the first 20 laps. The crew went to work but a couple hours later, packed it in.

“We’ve never had an engine problem in all the time we’ve run the Chevrolet engine program, so this is the first time,” team owner Wayne Taylor. “There was truly nothing we were worried about.”

“It’s really disappointing, but at the same time this is what happens in this ,the driver, even though there was a statement that Max might’ve over-revved the engine – that’s absolutely not the case. There’s a problem in the valve train; quite honestly, we’re not exactly sure what it is, but there’s a problem enough for us to pull the car out.

“We clarified with Grand-Am that both Max and Ricky will get points based on the fact that he did do his 30 minutes and because of catastrophic failure, the second driver automatically gets points. We will go on here with [14th-place] points, [18] points down. But at the same time, we came into this weekend feeling very upbeat. Everybody, all of the support we’ve had from GM, SunTrust, Dallara and Corvette, everybody. We’ll just go back, regroup and we’ll go to the next event.”

In the GT class, Andy Lally of Magnus Racing had a 10-second lead over Dominik Farnbacher of TRG. Both are in Porsche GT3 cars.

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