Champ Car’s Tagliani smashes Daytona record

After spending the week testing his new Panoz DP01 Champ Car with Rocketsports Racing in Sebring, Alex Tagliani jumped into his rental car and headed north to Daytona to join Blackforest Motorsports for the 45th Rolex 24 at Daytona on Thursday.

The three hour tour was well worth the trip, as less than five laps into his first practice session in the car, Tagliani pegged a time of 1:51.649 seconds in the new Rolex Sports Car Series GT-Class Ford Mustang Cobra GT, smashing the previous GT qualifying track record by nearly two seconds and proving to be quicker than the GT class pole-winning time set on Thursday.

“I was kind of surprised because we hadn’t had much chance to test the car and yet to go out and be that much faster than the track record was pretty encouraging," said Tagliani. “Brian Nott does an amazing job preparing Mustangs and I knew this was a great package with the Roush/Yates motor in the Mustang, but we didn’t expect that kind of result so fast, especially because most of the other cars in the class are a couple hundred pounds lighter than we are."