DAYTONA BEACH, Fla.—Extreme Speed Motorsports driver Luis Felipe “Pipo” Derani took the first stint in the team’s #2 Ligier JS P2 Honda racer, starting second on the grid at the 2016 WeatherTech SportsCar Championship Rolex 24 at Daytona. Derani passed the leader halfway through the first lap and led until he pitted for fuel 26 laps later.
Derani also drove the closing stint for ESM. He was ten seconds behind the leader when he took over the Ligier-Honda. A dozen laps later he was back in the lead, where he stayed until the checkered flag waves two hours later.
The win was the first for ESM as a team, the first for Honda as an engine supplier, and the first for an LMP2 car. Team principal Scott Sharp had won the Rolex in 1996—itroniocally co-driving with Wayne Taylor, whose team ESM beat for the 2016 Rolex win.
It was the first Rolex win for ESM co-drivers Ed Brown and Johannes van Overbeek
The 2016 Rolex 24 was Pipo Derani’s first North American sports car race and his first with ESM. The 22-year-old Brazilian drove in the European Le Mans Series in 2014 and the World Endurance Championship in 2015, scoring a win at Spa-Francorchamps.
That experience surely helped him cope with the pressure put on him by by Wayne Taylor Racing drivers Ricky and Jordan Taylor and Max Angelelli. On top of that pressure, Derani had to cope with constant warning alarms telling him his gearbox temperature and power steering were about to fail.
Derani—and the rest of the team—had reason to be worried. ESM and one other team, Shank Racing, were using a new-to-the-series 3.5-liter Honda turbo V6, and Shank’s engine had blown up in the ninth hour while that car was leading the race.
“It was a little scary,” he said after the race. “I was just asking the car not to give up on me in the last 30 minutes.”
Derani decided to act as though the failures were in the sensors and not the mechanical systems, and to focus on managing the gap over his pursuers.
The young driver ultimately crossed the finish line 26 seconds ahead of Max Angelelli in the Wayne Taylor Racing Dallara-Corvette, and almost an entire lap ahead of the third placed-car. He set fastest lap of the race as a bonus.
ESM also took the lead in the North American Endurance Championship, a subseries within the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.
