Motorsports: Audi R8 lines up as safety car for Rolex 24 at Daytona

Filed under: Motorsports, Coupe, Performance, Audi

This weekend a new era begins in American sports car racing with the Rolex 24 at Daytona to kick off the new United SportsCar Championship, the freshly inked union between the Grand Am and American Le Mans Series. There’ll be a wide variety of machinery lining up on the grid at the Florida speedway, including race-ready versions of the sports cars you can drive on the road, plus Daytona Prototypes, Le Mans Prototypes and even the DeltaWing. But at the front of the pack will be the Audi R8 5.2 FSI.

That’s because Ingolstadt’s flagship has been named as the official safety car for this, the 52nd annual Rolex 24 at Daytona. And so the R8 becomes the first pace car pressed into service for the United SportsCar Championship, although the model also paced last year’s race (pictured above) when it was under the auspices of the Grand Am series.

The car in question appears to bear little in the way of modifications over the showroom version, save for some requisite graphics and maybe some emergency lighting to make it more visible – because while you wouldn’t miss an R8 slicing its way through ordinary traffic on the road, it’s another story entirely in a field full of competition machinery. Audi points out that the road-going R8 shares a good 50 percent of its components with the R8 LMS competing in the race, including its 5.2-liter V10 engine that’s available this year with a new seven-speed dual-clutch transmission.

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Audi R8 lines up as safety car for Rolex 24 at Daytona originally appeared on Autoblog on Sat, 25 Jan 2014 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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