Australia’s Ryan Briscoe Is a Rolex 24 Champion

It’s been a rough off-season for Australian Ryan Briscoe. A year after being – somewhat surprisingly – picked up by IndyCar Series powerhouse Chip Ganassi Racing to pilot it’s fourth entry, Briscoe was unceremoniously dumped from the seat in favour of young American Sage Karam after, admittedly, an uneven season that didn’t allow Briscoe to showcase his obvious driving talent.

As they say, one door closes and another opens because Briscoe, who came through the sports car ranks and impressed with Team Penske in the American Le Mans Series when Penske ran the Porsche Spyder RS prototype program, has turned back the clock, picking up a big-time ride for the endurance component – basically, Daytona, Sebring and the season-ending Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta – of the 2015 Tudor United Sports Car Series.

A drive with none other than the famous and formidable Corvette Racing squad, driving a C7.R Corvette in the GTLM class (Grand Touring cars with official factory backing), with regular season drivers Antonio Garcia and Jan Magnussen. And there was an instant payoff for Briscoe, whose ability behind the wheel of a sports car is unquestioned, when the No. 3 Corvette crossed the line at the head of the GTLM field, 0.478 seconds head of their nearest competitor, notching Corvette’s first Rolex 24 class victory in only their second year back at Daytona since 2001.

Briscoe, hailing from Sydney and married to the ESPN SportsCentre anchor Nicole Briscoe (nee Manske) is the first Australian to win one of the prized Rolex watches that are awarded to overall and class winners. Sadly, due to the lack of a television deal for the Tudor Series here, Australian viewers were denied the chance to see Briscoe’s triumph, and also the endeavours of V8 Supercars driver Shane Van Gisbergen, who raced an Alex Job Racing Porsche in the GT-Daytona category for the second year in a row.

This triumph was Corvette’s second ever victory at the famed Daytona twenty-four hour endurance classic, and, in a signal, perhaps, of things to come for the yellow American muscle cars, the pole-sitting Corvette of Tommy Milner, Oliver Gavin and Simon Pagenaud came home in third place.

You can make a solid case that the GTLM class, the cars that, prior to last season, ran in the GT class of the American Le Mans Series – the ALMS and Rolex Sports Car Series merged last year to become the Tudor United Sports Car Series – is the toughest category of the four that make up the Tudor Series, with apologies to the prototype class.

For a start, all the drivers in GTLM are classified as professional (unlike the GT-Daytona and the Prototype Challenge category) and it’s a stacked field. How’s this for a nice assembly of international driving talent? Patrick Long, Darren Turner, Emanuel Collard, Toni Vilander, Lucas Luhr, Patrick Pilet, Marc Lieb, Giancarlo Fisichella, Pierre Kaffer, Oliver Berretta and Wolf Henzler, quite aside from the six drivers the Corvette team field. These guys, in sports car terms, are about the best of the best. Then you’ve got guys like IndyCar star Graham Rahal moonlighting.

The efforts of those all-star drivers are backed by the full factory forces of some of the world’s most powerful racing marques. We’re talking Porsche, Ferrari, Aston Martin, BMW and, obviously, the Chevrolet team running Corvettes. That Briscoe, Magnussen and Garcia triumphed against that sort of competition is quite incredible. During the course of a twenty-four hour race, there’s so much that can go wrong – and so much that does go wrong.

Granted, Daytona isn’t as abusive on equipment as Sebring and Le Mans are, but to be running at the finish, on the lead lap, having battled an entire day against some of the best GT sports car drivers in the world is no mean feat, and sets the Corvette squad up for a shot at a rare Daytona/Sebring double, when the Tudor Series moves to Florida for the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours in late March.

Not long after that, too, is the famed 24 Hours of Le Mans, and Briscoe seems almost certain to have a seat with the Corvette squad, who have an impressive success rate at the French endurance race.  We will know for sure with the official announcement of the 24 Hours of Le Mans entry list in early June.

In the meantime, Briscoe hopes to compete at the Indianapolis 500 in May, and given his ability at the Brickyard – he is a former pole-sitter, and has shown flashes of speed there – it’s likely that a team will pick him up for the May classic, before he focuses on the high-speed Circuit de la Sarthe in France.

All in all, it was a fairly solid weekend for drivers from the southern hemisphere, with Brisbane-born New Zealander Scott Dixon a part driving roster, with fellow Indianapolis 500 champion Tony Kanaan, Daytona 500 winner Jamie McMurray and young NASCAR gun Kyle Larson, on the Chip Ganassi Racing No. 01 car that won the overall race. It is Dixon’s second Rolex 24 outright victory, the first coming in 2006.