Coanda Simsport wins the 24h of Daytona iRacing

They are the undisputed masters of the place. Coanda Simsport scored its sixth victory in seven editions of the iRacing 24 Hours of Daytona, the car simulation game's first special event of the year.

The No. 217 Dallara P8 Dpi dominated the entire race, led by Mitchell de Jong, the only driver to have participated in all of Coanda's successes, Joshua Rogers, who claimed a third victory, and Mack Bakkum, the newcomer.

For a long time, the team even thought about achieving the double. Indeed, the No. 8 and the No. 18 of Coanda took the lead from the start, given more than four hours late due to an overload of the game's servers.

Behind them, the pilot of Formula 1 Max Verstappen (Team Redline) also achieved the best start in the GTE category with its BMW. But after less than two hours, his teammate Daniel Juncadella suffered an accident, which forced him to abandon the race.

In prototype, the n°8 remained in the lead, while the places on the podium rotated between the n°5 of Mivano, driven in particular by the Frenchman Maxime Brient and the Belgian Sacha Gorlé, the n°6 of Williams e-sport and Coanda Simsport n°18.

Five hours from the finish, it seemed to have secured its second position, until mechanical problems forced Charlie Collins, Tommy Østgaard, Dayne Warren and David Williams to abandon their hope of a podium, and Coanda to take a double .

His problems benefited the Mivano team of Maxime Brient and Sacha Gorlé, third in the end. The end of the race came down to a duel between the No. 8 Coanda and the Williams e-sport car driven by Moreno Sirica, Diogo C. Pinto, Josh Thompson and Michael Romanidis, which rose throughout the race.

Coanda finally won with 50 seconds ahead of Williams e-sport and 1'00 over Mivano. Winner of 24 Hours of Le Mans virtual last year with Rebellion, Williams e-sport offers itself a new podium in a major race of the endurance season. 

In GTE, victory went to the Triple A BMW of Chris Lulham, Rafaele Rezzag, Jackson Souslin Harlow and Andreas Jochimsen.

Another BMW took victory in GTD, that of Team Bank driven by Laurin Heinrich, Nils Koch and Kay Kaschube.

Note that this race represented the toughest series of the event, where the best simracers competed. But in total, thousands of people competed in the 24 Hours of Daytona iRacing across series of 55 cars. Present at the event, Fernando Alonso, Rubens Barrichello, Tony Kanaan, Antonio Felix Da Costa and Alex Palou took part in less challenging sessions.

The prototype classification:

The GTE ranking: