2021 Rolex 24 at Daytona: the Drivers, the Teams and How To Watch

Even though it’s going to look a little different this year, the 2021 Rolex 24 at Daytona may be a sign that things will turn out alright.

The green flag is scheduled to drop Saturday, January 30, at 3:40 p.m., with the checkered flag waving at the same time the following day.

The race will be broadcast across both NBC, NBCSN and …

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I signed up for the NBC Sports Gold Trackpass for three bucks and have been able to watch both MX-5 cup races so far with no problems.  In a little bit here, I'm going to tune in to the BMW Endurance Challenge.  It appears that the coverage with trackpass will be consistent, so no need to switch from one channel or platform to another.  I really can't believe that it's only $2.99/month for the imsa trackpass bundle and if I read it correctly, that does not also require a cable package. 

Watching this on TV is really making me realize how much I miss being down there.

In reply to wae :

I was pricing it earlier today just out of curiosity, and yeah, that's not a lot for what you are getting. Sure, it's a specific niche, but they didn't have to have to make it. They could have just as easily made you pay some crazy price for an IMSA + NASCAR bundle.

Side hint:  If you play IMSA Radio from http://player.radiolemans.co/ you can pause the audio and it will restart from the time that you paused it.  The player at imsa.tv seems to jump to "now" when you restart after pausing.  Trackpass is on a 15ish second delay (give or take) so if you pause IMSA radio for that 15 seconds and then mute trackpass, you can get that commentary synced up with the NBC broadcast. 

In reply to Colin Wood :

Or, they could simply show it on one channel, all the way through, and make it simple. 

We don't want to have to memorize a schedule and flip back and forth between channels, websites, and whatever else. We just want to watch the race. There are HUNDREDS of channels on cable, the vast majority with absolutely never anything on worth watching. Why can't there be just ONE dedicated for auto racing?

I miss SpeedChannel/Speedvision.   

What are the letters beside of the drivers' names for? ie: B P S G?

In reply to hybridmomentspass :

They are the FIA driver ratings; Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze. 

https://www.fia.com/fia-driver-categorisation

Looking forward to this.

But the start seems really late to me.  Hasn't previous races started near noon before?  Did they make the time change to be more like LeMans?

Interesting.

In terms of driving at night- this race is a lot harder than LeMans- which is raced on the longest day of the year in a pretty darned northern place- so darkness is pretty short.  This will have more than 12 hours with the sun down.

I too seem to remember start and end around 930 or so AM.  

alfadriver (Forum Supporter) said:

 

In terms of driving at night- this race is a lot harder than LeMans-

The lights at Daytona are really good, though. They don't run the full NASCAR light package, but you could easily drive the entire track without headlights if you had to. 

So is this some sort of Nascar race or will this pointless caution end some time in the next twenty minutes?

I must be living under a rock. I just discovered that the race was underway. 
 

It is a bit late this year but this thread could have been a sticky and a date in the title would have been great. 

The amount of ads and filler on nbcsn is crazy to me.  I get sponsors are required. But it must be close to 50% ads and another 25% is being spent on interviews and playing highlights from past races.  Guess I should have downloaded a vpn and figured out how to stream IMSA.tv.   
 

In reply to 20Ver :

The stream from the NBC sports Gold Trackpassinator has been pretty good.  Pair it with the IMSA Radio stream and the commentary stops fawning over NASCAR drivers while the video is almost non-stop.  Occasionally they'll cut away to some sort of special interest segment like the Tom Kristensen interview but no commercials and none of the long periods of "coverage will resume shortly".  All that for a whole three US dollars.  Not sure what next year will look like, though, because I thought I heard that nbcsports was going to cease to exist so maybe they'll only provide it if you subscribe to peacock.

Yep.  The coverage was so interrupted and crap that we got the NBC gold.  

Uninterrupted racing now.

Unfortunately, it's kinda boring...

In reply to wvumtnbkr :

It was getting exciting with them fighting for the overall lead while making their way through traffic but 15 more minutes of yellow for a piece of debris ruined that.

More series need to implement VSC like they do in F1, artificially bunching up the field with extended yellow flags takes it from being a race to being WWE and seems pretty pointless (aka NASCAR).

In reply to adam525i (Forum Supporter) :

What would that look like in multi-class racing, though?  If everybody reduces by 40% or whatever, they'd still have the GT cars going slower than DPis.  Unless they reduced everybody to a certain MPH.  But then there's so many cars spread across the whole track like that, you're not really going to get a clear spot to run out and grab debris or something.  I do agree that the number and frequency of full-course cautions really kills the action.  And with the way they close and open the pits and do the wave-arounds to group the classes back up it takes forever.  I wonder if they could get away with local yellows.

adam525i (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to wvumtnbkr :

It was getting exciting with them fighting for the overall lead while making their way through traffic but 15 more minutes of yellow for a piece of debris ruined that.

More series need to implement VSC like they do in F1, artificially bunching up the field with extended yellow flags takes it from being a race to being WWE and seems pretty pointless (aka NASCAR).

With the current F1 rules, if there's debris on track, that's a full safety car.  VSC will work for off track debris.

The reason it takes so long is that the grid has to be bunched up completely before a worker can safely cross the track for the debris.  This big of track and that many cars takes a long time.

The best way to prevent those random long yellows is to fine teams who have stuff fall of their cars.  And if their's a collision, fine both teams.  This is about corner worker safety.

In reply to wae :

Maybe I was doing something wrong.  I have trackpass but when the coverage went to nbcsn it was so many commercials.  We had nbcsn muted and imsa radio on and it was better.  But now I found a stream of IMSA.tv and it is night and day difference.  

In reply to 20Ver :

I actually stopped watching the race on NBCSN last night because it felt more like shopping TV with the race interrupting the commercials.

The implementation would need to be different than F1 but the key would be having all cars on track at the same speed which is actually better than what a normal safety car provides. With a normal safety car you have the field bunched up behind it all at the same speed but then anyone off the back, chasing back after a pit stop or waved by is going around at a high rate of speed to get back where they are supposed to be. With the VSC everyone is going at the same slow speed, the risk on the restart is reduced and the risk in pitlane is also reduced as fewer cars will be stopping at once.

The trouble is getting the gaps and providing the necessary safety margin for marshals to do their jobs. Maybe the VSC speed is actually very slow (pitlane speed limit?) with a safe period of time for the cars to get down to that speed (and to complete out of class passes), maybe they need to review the type of vehicle they put on track during these VSC periods (think of highway service vehicles with integrated crash absorbing barriers on the back that you buzz by at high speed everyday but modified to provide protection to an LMP3 driver that isn't paying attention) instead of whoever happens to be sponsoring the events pickup truck. Maybe as soon as they declare the track as wet they just default back to standard cautions due to reduced visibility.

Some of my idea may be good, some may be terrible but my point is the technology exists to do this better and keep the race green longer and as a fan that is what I would like to see.

And it may just be that I've jumped in to watch and had a bit of bad luck with yellows, it's been green for an hour now and I know there has been lots of long stretches of that as well.

In reply to adam525i (Forum Supporter) :

If you have to force a gap to form to safely give corner workers X time, then there are winners and losers in VSC.   How do you choose to make a gap in the field large enough to let a corner worker get on the track w/o cars going by?  And that is amplified when it's wet, when the danger to the corner workers is amplified by visibility and the total removal of run off area.  (Jules was killed under a wet yellow situation)

As I see it, the only way to prevent these is to make the rules so that stuff does not come off in a minor collision.  Since they can make straps to hold suspension near the car when it comes apart, they can do the same for wings, splitters, and body parts.  Someone has to make the rules, and then have drastic penalties when stuff comes off cars.

That Ferrari very much lost out on that one- but it was totally caused by him anyway- squeeze the Merc hard enough that he lost control and hit the Ferrari.

David- 

If you get a chance to talk to any of the teams- can you ask them about the time change?  

Specifically- how do they change the strategy and set up when the times cool-warm-hot times are changing a lot vs. the phases of the race.  With just about 4 hrs left, it was pointed out that the balance of one of the Acura's is changing- for the worse at it's getting hotter.  

Which made me wonder how they set the car up for the conditions- where it used to be cool-warm-hot-warm-cool-finish to hot-warm-cool-warm-hot-finish.

Especially when these cars are almost flat out all the time- but it's kind of a survival race up to the end when they really push the car.