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Shortly after Chase Elliott secured his first NASCAR championship in Phoenix last month, team owner Rick Hendrick quietly revealed that both Elliott and his fellow Hendrick Motorsports NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson would be challenging this year's Rolex 24 at Daytona. While Elliott's plans for the race have yet to be announced, Johnson's entry was revealed yesterday. Johnson is the headliner, but the driver lineup is among the most stacked to ever contest the race.
The Cadillac, the second entry by four-time IMSA champions Action Express Racing, will also be driven by current Penske IndyCar driver Simon Pagenaud, current Toyota LMP1/Hypercar driver Kamui Kobayashi, and current DTM and sports car driver Mike Rockenfeller. With the addition of Johnson, all four are champions of their respective series.
Rockenfeller, who won Le Mans overall with Audi in 2010, has been in Audi's DTM program since 2007 and won a championship with their program in 2013. He finished fourth in that category's standings this year, and has spent the past four years as an endurance driver for Corvette Racing's GTLM program. This race marks his first major endurance race in a top-level prototype since 2015, a season he spent as an endurance driver with the now-shuttered Spirit of Daytona team.
Kobayashi has been with Toyota's World Endurance Championship program since 2016, two years after his last of four seasons in Formula 1. He has seven overall wins with the team, a best finish of second overall at Le Mans, and won his first championship with the program this past season. He has also run the Rolex 24 as an additional driver in Wayne Taylor Racing's Cadillac the past two years; In that time, he has an average finish of 1st.
Because he won both races he entered.
Simon Pagenaud left sports cars for IndyCar in 2012, but he was a factory LMP1 driver for Peugeot before joining that series. He is an American Le Mans Series champion as a driver with Acura's one-year ARX-02a program, not to mention an IndyCar champion, an Indianapolis 500 winner, and a winner of fifteen total races with Penske Racing. He spent the past few years as a high-caliber endurance driver for the team's now-shuttered Acura prototype program, but he did not win a race in three seasons in that role.
Johnson, of course, is a seven-time NASCAR Cup Series champion who recently retired from that category to pursue IndyCar racing. He will be a rookie in Chip Ganassi Racing's #48 entry in that series, but has chosen to run with Action Express in this race rather than join CGR's newly-reopened Cadillac sports car program set to be headlined by current F1 driver Kevin Magnussen. Johnson provides the car's #48, and is likely the reason the car will be sponsored by Ally, his sponsor in the NASCAR Cup Series since former sponsor Lowe's left the category.
With Cadillacs the dominant force at Daytona since their debut and this entry having an argument for the best lineup at the Rolex 24 in quite some time, expect the #48 Action Express Racing entry to be among the favorites when the race is run late next month.
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