Daytona 24 Hours class win for Albuquerque and Mortara

DTM Audi drivers Filipe Albuquerque and Edoardo Mortara claimed victory in the GT class of the Daytona 24 Hours. The DTM duo shared car with former DTM Audi driver Oliver Jarvis and 22-year-old Dion von Moltke.

The quartet drove an Audi R8 Grand-Am and won the class only 1.476 seconds ahead of Audi colleagues Baas/Basseng/Rast/Stippler after 678 laps.

“It’s been crazy, this race. We did a perfect race. We got penalized during the race – I don’t know why. That took away a little bit our hope. We didn’t believe we actually had a chance. The team decided that I had to do the last triple or perhaps quadruple stint. I just pushed like in qualifying, but for more than two hours. The team did a fantastic strategy. It was all about bringing it home. It was so emotional, everything was so tight. It was just crazy,” said Albuquerque.

Albuquerque was penalized with a 30 second stop-and-go as the stewards found him to have caused another car in to a spin in hour 20.

“Two hours before the end, I was not even thinking about victory. I was hoping for maybe a top five result. To win is absolutely incredible. Thanks to Filipe, to Olly and to Dion. They did a fantastic job, as did Alex Job Racing, all the number 24 crew and our sponsor Weather Tech. Wonderful!” said Mortara.

There was controversy between the #52 Audi and the #13 Audi towards the end of the race. Rene Rast and Markus Winkelhock collided, resulting in Winkelhock dropping from the lead down to seventh with the #13 Audi.