Twenty one hours and the counting stopped for Thomas Erdos and the Synergy racing Doran BMW. It had been, at times, a satisfying run for the Brazilian and his co-driving team-mates; Mike Newton and the two Frisselle brothers, but it all came to a premature end with transmission problems.

A relatively lowly starting position on the grid had been the team’s initial challenge, but three hours of steady running saw the red, white and blue Daytona prototype steadily gaining places, to be running just outside the top ten. Even to that stage, however, it hadn’t been a trouble-free run, but things were about to get steadily more difficult as the car encountered a succession of problems. “We had problems with drive-shafts, brakes and gearbox, which all combined to ensure we lost several laps, and that put us out of contention.” After that it was just a case of keeping going for as long as possible, and hoping that reliability would return. Sadly, it did not.

American Burt Frisselle had taken the race start, followed in the second stint by his younger brother Brian, with Thomas Erdos taking the third stint, and Mike Newton rounding off the quartet, before the sequence began again. “Our first delay came before even a quarter of the race had elapsed,” explained Tommy. “That dropped us to something like 42nd place. It was a problem with driveshafts.”