DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. --- Car owner Chip Ganassi made his place in sports car history Sunday by winning the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona for the third consecutive year. But make no mistake, that won't be the race's legacy.

His all-star team of Scott Pruett, Juan Pablo Montoya, Dario Franchitti and Memo Rojas survived a day filled with crashes, mechanical problems and slow traffic to win by two laps. The winning distance -- more than seven miles -- appeared impressive, but it was as much about survival as speed.

Ganassi is the only owner to win the prestigious sports car race at the Daytona International Speedway three years in a row. And he vowed to return next year.

"I owe it all to the team, to the drivers, the guys who prepare the cars," Ganassi said. "I did absolutely nothing. It's all about the team. Up here on the stage, we've got the easy job."

By dividing 25 prototypes at the start, it created a wild start. There were fast cars up front, fast cars at the back and slower GT-class cars in the middle. The result: a lot of crashes and a lot of different strategies that seemed to cycle a new team into the lead every few minutes.

There were 60 lead changes among 15 cars, breaking the Grand-Am Sports Car Record of 44 lead changes in 2005.

The winning car led a total of 252 laps and traveled 2,460.3 miles -- or about the same distance between Jacksonville, Fla., and Los Angeles.

Franchitti won the Indianapolis 500 last year, then switched to Ganassi's stock car team for the upcoming season.

Through all the carnage, the Ganassi-led team rarely skipped a beat. The Lexus-powered Riley sports car was never out of the top five in the final 19 hours.

The Pontiac-Riley of Jimmie Johnson, Jimmy Vasser, Jon Fogarty and Alex Gurney was running third when the car broke a transmission. Despite spending about 20 minutes in the garage, the team finished second.

"It was crazy," Johnson said. "Too bad we didn't catch a caution (to fix the gear box). If we had, we could have only been a couple laps down, and we could have made it interesting."

Years ago, Ganassi turned the 24-hour race into an all-star affair. He used drivers from his NASCAR and IRL teams to keep his success in-house.

Indy-car drivers Scott Dixon and Dan Wheldon were part of a second car team for Ganassi at Daytona, and added with Montoya and Franchitti, the group decided last month to forgo any salary to keep their boss happy. But the winning drivers did get a new Rolex.

Brief showers hampered the first 18 hours of the race. The wet conditions on the 3.56-mile road course, added with a hard tire supplied by Pirelli, led to a myriad of spins and crashes.

In all, more than six hours of the race was run under caution.

Reach Don Coble at don.coble@morris.com.