Grand American Rolex

One day after Pruett was victimized by a red flag that halted Daytona Prototype qualifying after only four minutes, the 2004 Daytona Prototype co-champion and teammate Rojas marched through the field. Pruett -- who drove for more than four of the six hours in the race -- led a race-high 39 laps en route to a 3.033-second victory over the No. 58 Porsche of Darren Law and David Donohue.

"Even though you call this a six-hour race, it's a sprint race," Pruett said. "It's a six-hour sprint race. I mean, you can talk to anybody out here, and nobody was laying down on the job. The way you had to cut through traffic and the way you had to get the job done, there was no relaxing. That's one thing that's been pretty impressive about these cars. There's no weak links. The transmissions are robust, and the engines are robust. In days gone by, you'd have one weak link in something. We just don't have that anymore and you can just drive the wheels off this thing, six hours, 10 hours, 12 hours. You can probably do it for 24. It's pretty impressive."

Although he never led, Rojas was also impressive in his driving stint aboard the No. 01 machine. In workmanlike fashion, the Mexican racer kept the car comfortably within sight of the leaders throughout his driving stint before handing the controls over to Pruett.

"I just took care of the tires and the car and wanted to hand the car to Scott, and things went well," Rojas said. "The way things worked out, Scott had to stay in the car for three hours (running the entire last half of the race). I don't know how he did it, because the conditions were very hot. I'm happy to be here again."

Both Rojas and Pruett are also happy to have once again extended their lead in the Daytona Prototype driver standings to 36 points over No. 91 Pontiac teammates Marc Goossens and Jim Matthews.

"It's been a dream season, but we're not even halfway yet," Rojas said. "We have to stay optimistic and keep working hard, because the competition is right behind us. It's just a consequence of hard work by everyone in this organization. I'm very proud of being part of TELMEX Chip Ganassi Racing. Hopefully, we'll keep this streak going. Like I said, it's not even halfway there yet. We have a lot of work to do still."

While the No. 01 team celebrated, it was a decidedly different atmosphere around the No. 3 Southard Motorsports Lexus Riley team and co-drivers Shane Lewis and Bill Lester. Lewis started the No. 3 machine from ninth on the grid, but the team quickly began to battle issues, including one severe enough to send the No. 3 machine back to the garage for lengthy repairs.

"We've been snakebit from the word 'Go' this weekend," Lester said. "In one of our practice sessions, we had an oil line fitting that loosened itself up and out of a 90-minute session, we lost a good half an hour out of it. Then, in the warm-up this morning, we had a brake bleeder back out. These things just don't happen to us. We noticed from the drop of the green flag in the race that we were losing water pressure, and sure enough, we had a heat exchanger fail on us, so that took us behind the wall. After that, it just becomes a test session. We just tried to work on things to see how we can improve the car and learn for the future."

Lester and Lewis came home 17th in the Daytona Prototype class, 14 laps behind the race-winning No. 01 team. While the No. 3 team has seen its share of adversity this season, Lester -- who is in his first full season of Rolex Series competition -- maintains that good things are right around the corner for the Southard Motorsports program.

"You can't quit," Lester said. "If you quit you're beat. All we can do is try to keep on going. There's only so many punches that are going to be delivered before we start delivering some of our own. It's been very trying this year, there's no question about that, but there's no quit here."