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DragonSpeed ORECA Tops Final Roar Before 24 Standings

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DragonSpeed ended the Roar Before the Rolex 24 with the quickest time overall thanks to Ben Hanley’s flying lap on Sunday.

The British driver submitted a 1:38.343s marker to put the American squad’s ORECA 07 on top of the timesheets at Daytona International Speedway.

He will share the car with team-mates Nicolas Lapierre, Henrik Hedman and Loic Duval during the Rolex 24 at Daytona, which opens the 2017 IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship season on January 28-29.

Hanley’s attempt was 0.020 seconds faster than Jonathan Bomarito in the #55 Mazda DPi, who also set his best time during Sunday’s penultimate session.

Roar Before the Rolex 24 Overall Results

Third quickest overall was Sebastien Buemi in the Rebellion Racing-entered ORECA 07, which previously topped both the Friday and Saturday runs with Neel Jani behind the wheel.

Toyota LMP1 star Buemi’s time of 1:38.408s set during the final session put the Anglo-Swiss squad 0.065 seconds off the pace.

Completing the top five in the Prototype category were the PR/1 Mathiasen Motorsports Ligier JSP217 and the #5 Action Express Racing Cadillac, which was the quickest of the DPi entries and 0.350 seconds off the leading ORECA.

In GT Le Mans, Ford led the way overall with its #67 and #69 cars residing in the top two positions on the timesheets.

A 1:44.380s effort by Ryan Briscoe during session six gave the #67 the edge, in a car shared with Richard Westbrook and Scott Dixon, whilst the sister machine driven by Tony Kanaan finished the weekend 0.265 seconds down.

Third quickest was the John Edwards/Nicky Catsburg/Martin Tomczyk BMW M6 run by Team RLL.

Much of the weekend had been dominated by Ford and Corvette, but a major fire on Sunday for the #4 Corvette C7.R (manned at the time by Marcel Fassler) spelled disaster for the Pratt & Miller-run GM team. Defending Rolex 24 winner Fassler was able to escape the blaze without injury during session six, but the car had to be written off.

Corvette finished the Roar with its cars fifth and seventh in the GTLM order.

The fastest lap in Prototype Challenge went to James French of Performance Tech Motorsports, while in GT Daytona it was Porsche factory driver Sven Mueller who led the way in the Manthey Racing 911 GT3-R.

There are now only three weeks to go until the 55th running of the Rolex 24 at Daytona, which kick-starts both the IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship and North American Endurance Cup seasons.

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