By Andrew Cutler
January 26 2009

Former Dreyer & Reinbold Racing driver Buddy Rice has made sure that his name will stay on alot of team bosses' minds as he works towards securing a new IndyCar seat for 2009. Rice was part of the winning effort at this weekend's Rolex Series 24 Hours of Daytona. The Brumos Racing Daytona Prototype car #58, a Prosche-Riley, won by a mere 0.167 seconds after 24 hours & 735 laps of racing.

Rice drove the Brumos car in shifts, along with Antonio Garcia, Darren Law and David Donohue, son of the late Mark Donohue, a legendary road racer from the late '60s/early '70s. Donohue was driving the final stint, allowing him to take the checkered flag in the same event that his father had won exactly 40 years before. The second place finisher was a Lexus-Riley from the Ganassi stable, co-driven by Juan Pablo Montoya. The Brumos win ends Ganassi's three year domination of the event.

As for the other IndyCar drivers "moonlighting" in the field, the Ganassi DP car driven by Scott Dixon, Dario Franchitti & Alex Lloyd came home in 5th spot. The Penske car co-driven by Ryan Briscoe lost several laps overnight while the crew replaced drive train parts, but rebounded to finish in 6th, 18 laps down. The RCR Pontiac, co-driven by Danica Patrick, was sidelined with mechanical issues right at the start but, after repairs, was able to claw it's way from dead-last up to an 8th place finish, 33 laps down.

On a "side note", during SpeedTV's coverage of the event, one annoucer noted that one of their on-location reporters had talked to Buddy Rice (appearently off-camera) & found him to be "excited" about his prospects for an IndyCar ride in '09 & hopeful that he could reveal his plans very soon.

And then there is this little "tidbit", comming from another direction: Curt Cavin, motorsports reporter for the Indianapolis Star, has stated on his blogsite that Pacific Coast Motorsports has merged operations with Rubicon Racing, normally a "one-off" Indy 500 squad. Furthermore, he reports that the new organization has released Mario Dominquez & is actively courting Rice.

None of this has been made official yet, but Cavin almost never gets these things wrong so, combine his report with Buddy's optimism, and...

I guess that we'll know soon enough.