Daytona Beach, Florida
Roman De Angelis returned to Daytona International Speedway to open the 2026 season, lining up with The Heart of Racing for the Rolex 24 at Daytona — one of endurance racing's most demanding and unpredictable events.
Sharing the No. 23 Aston Martin Valkyrie Hypercar with Ross Gunn, Alex Riberas, and Marco Sørensen, De Angelis entered the weekend focused on execution, durability, and continuing the development of Aston Martin's groundbreaking hypercar platform.
A True Test of Endurance
From the outset, the Rolex 24 delivered everything it is known for: dense multi-class traffic, long green-flag runs, and the constant pressure of racing through the day-night cycle. The No. 23 Valkyrie settled into a steady rhythm early, logging clean stints as the team worked through race strategy and tire management in the ultra-competitive GTP field.
As the race moved into the night, the team faced technical challenges that required extended time in the garage. The Heart of Racing crew responded quickly, diagnosed the issues, and returned the Valkyrie to the track to continue the race and gain critical mileage under actual 24-hour conditions.
Despite further interruptions later in the event, the team remained committed to the bigger picture — keeping the car running, gathering data, and pushing through to the checkered flag in 10th.
Roman De Angelis : "It has been a tough week for us. The race definitely didn't go as planned as you can see, but that's part of it. I mean we look back at last year and we kind of had a year where we were expecting a lot of reliability issues and had nothing really. We don't want it to happen in general, but maybe we were due for it. The whole team, my teammates, engineers, mechanics, they stayed on it all day and night to try to get us across the finish line and we did just that. That's what makes it important. We got a lot of good mileage, and hopefully we can learn from everything that went wrong today." (courtesy of theheartofracing.com)
Building Toward the Season Ahead
While the final classification did not reflect the effort invested across the weekend, the Rolex 24 at Daytona provided valuable insight into the Valkyrie's performance over long stints and under sustained race stress. For De Angelis and the No. 23 crew, the opening round of the season reinforced the importance of endurance racing's fundamentals: patience, precision, and persistence.
With Daytona complete, attention now turns to the rest of the 2026 calendar as the Valkyrie program continues to evolve across IMSA and the World Endurance Championship.
