The 12-hour race begins midmorning in daylight and concludes at night, and drivers must cope with its length, as well as traffic because the four classes of cars competing have large performance differences, and the fastest cars must drive around the slower ones.
“It’s a high-risk, high-reward circuit, and that’s what makes it special,” Louis Delétraz, of Cadillac Wayne Taylor Racing, said in an interview. “First of all, you have to survive, which with I.M.S.A. traffic is insane, so that’s one thing. It’s more like survive eight hours, and then in the last four hours [the aim] is get to the front, then the last hour is war.”
Teams try to optimize setup for the cooler nights, so cars and drivers must manage the hotter daytime weather.
“Being quick in the day is nice, but it’s not particularly useful, especially after a couple of restarts towards the end and things have reset,” Aitken said. “It’s quite an attritional race, we see mistakes through the years — including my car last year — and it’s not a very forgiving track. If you get off the circuit it’s very easy to end up in the wall, so it’s about taking care of the car, surviving through the heat of the day, then it all gets quite racy at nighttime.”
Delétraz won in 2024 after taking the lead with just five minutes remaining.
“It was my biggest win, especially the way it happened; at night the visibility is low, I had a 15-minute fight with Sébastien Bourdais, a legend, and it was amazing,” Delétraz said. “I was so stressed in the car, but I wanted it so badly, I remember I was screaming in my helmet when I passed him. When we won it was surreal, because it’s such a big race.”