Plenty of sim racers will be celebrating the first big special event of the 2025 iRacing calendar, with more than 23,000 drivers competing across all splits. But the 2025 iRacing Daytona 24 is spoiled by a Ferrari controversy following a suspicious disconnection just under eight hours from the finish.
The early stages of the race saw a battle in the GTP class between the BMW M Team Readline 20 car of Max Verstappen, Chris Lulham and Diogo Pinto, the #5 Williams Esports Chillblast car of Jaden Munoz, Robin Glerum, Moreno Sirica and Matt J Farrow, and the #3 Scuderia Ferrari HP Esports Team of Michele Costantini, Niklas Beu and Ole Steinbraten. Wet weather, crashes and pit speed penalties played their part in the BMW trio eventually dropping down the field to fourth on track, behind the Apex Racing Team #44 car and the Grid-and-go.com eSports #001 Acura, which moved up from 12th on the grid over the course of the race.
As the first Daytona event to feature the still relatively new iRacing weather system, rain caught out a number of drivers, particularly as tyre marbles built up off the racing line. A fairly high number of retirements included polesitters Williams Esports Chillblast among 15 non-finishers in the GTP class. On track, the win eventually went to the #3 Ferrari F499P, but while there’s no official update yet from any of the organisers, the iRacing results now put the Grid-and-go.com team as the winner, from Apex and BMW M Team Redline in third.
With 7 hours and 56 minutes to go, Ole Steinbraten appeared to run off track passing LMP2 and GTD cars into the International Horseshoe. But before the Ferrari went onto the crash and faced an inevitable collision with the track barriers, the car disconnected and returned to the pits. Which meant that although it had a time delay whilst the virtual car was towed to the pit box, it escaped any potential damage from crashing.
And while disconnects can happen with any online sim, the timing suggested that someone had hit Alt and F4 to escape the situation.
We’ll update any details as any official information becomes available.
On a happier note, the LMP2 class was won by the Apex Racing Team 199 car (Dan Amor,Aaron Vazquezz, Jorden Johnson, Daniel Sivi-Szabo), which finished just 4.771 seconds ahead of the #223 WSR Esports Abruzzi machine after 24 hours of racing. And the GTD class saw a victory for the Team Redline 171 (Gustavo Arial, Florian Lebigre, Josh Thompson) from Williams Esports Racing Prodigy and SIMRC.
You can watch both parts of the full recording below.
And while we’ve focused on the top broadcast split, congratulations to every sim racer who took part. Especially the absolute lunatics who decided to take on the 24 hour challenge driving solo, and anyone experiencing endurance racing for the first time. Just finishing is a big achievement, in any split.
You can sign up to iRacing, here (and credit your referral to ORD, which we’d appreciate!). And see all vehicles included in your basic subscription, or what you can access by paying more, in our full official iRacing car list, here. Or check out all of the included circuits, and the others you can buy, in our full official iRacing track list, here. And keep up with all the latest iRacing news, updates and eSports, here.
Update:
The disqualification of the Scuderia Ferrari HP Esports Team has been confirmed by VCO:
Both Ole Steinbraten and Ferrari Esports have also posted regarding the incident:
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