DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Five-time Rolex 24 at Daytona champion Andy Lally stood next to a dissected Magnus Racing Aston Martin in the superspeedway’s garage late Saturday (Jan. 25) evening during the Rolex 24.
As the roar of cars echoed off the speedway’s grandstands, and the reflection of the field’s headlights zoomed by, Lally’s crewmembers worked on the vehicle. Then, one came out from underneath the nose, looked at his driver, and sliced his hand across his neck.
That confirmed what Lally already knew: an engine failure had ended the sports car racing legend’s final Rolex 24 prematurely.
“This is the first motor explosion that I’ve had in the 24,” Lally told Frontstretch. “So just lucky that I’ve had so many years before that where we’ve had good runs … So sad it ends like this.”
Lally and his familiar Magnus Racing team had begun the endurance event from 51st overall and 12th in the GTD class. His teammate John Potter had started the event for the team and had mostly maintained position. By hour five, the No. 44 was running ninth before handing it off to the 49-year-old racer.
But mere minutes after climbing in, Lally felt the car practically explode.
“I came across the start/finish, lifted off the gas just before going to brake, and it just let go,” Lally said. “So, quite a dramatic finish. Gigantic concussion inside the cockpit … We blew it to hell.”
Lally brought the car to a stop before being attended to by safety personnel. He leaned down to look underneath the car, stood back up and took one last bow to all of the IMSA sports car fans that have been watching him for the last quarter century.
“I just got to take a moment to thank everybody that’s been with me for the last 25 years of doing this,” the three-time Grand-Am champion said. “Not the way we want it to end, but again, I’ve been pretty damn lucky for the last couple of decades.”
On the grid before the Rolex 24 start, Lally had spoken to Frontstretch and shared that he had no nervous or emotional feelings going into his final 24 hours of Daytona. He was all focus.
Well, at least for the moment.
“It will sink in probably when he says, ‘One to go, loosen your belts,'” Lally had shared with Frontstretch earlier that afternoon. “That’ll be about it. And then maybe we’ll see. Maybe when I kick my feet over the wall and step over for the last time, I’ll take a big pause and try to reflect.”
In the end, Lally did still get some alone time in his final lap around the Daytona road course, but it wasn’t in his Aston Martin as originally planned.
“I had this handful of things I thought about in regard to my last lap and what that was going to feel like when they come over the radio and said, ‘One to go,'” Lally recalled with a slight smile. “But I got out of the car in turn 1, hopped in with the [safety] guys, and we did a full lap.
“So, I got to kind of look around, and maybe that was a little bit of my own private moment. I joked with the AMR guys and enjoyed my last lap as we came in here.”
But instead of climbing his leg over that pit wall one more time, Lally instead had to climb back into his team hauler with an oil-leaking race car right outside, and he’ll have plenty of time until the end of this year’s Rolex 24 to have some more final moments to reflect on.
Follow Dalton Hopkins on X @PitLaneCPT
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Dalton Hopkins began writing for Frontstretch in April 2021. Currently, he is the lead writer for the weekly Thinkin' Out Loudcolumn, co-host of the Happy Hour podcast, and one of our lead reporters. Beforehand, he wrote for IMSA shortly after graduating from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in 2019. Simultaneously, he also serves as a Captain in the US Army.
Follow Dalton on Twitter @PitLaneCPT