It was always going to be a steep hill to climb for DeltaWing Racing; building a team from scratch a month out from its first race competition. Despite the fledgling team's efforts and preparations for the 61st Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring Fuelled by Fresh from Florida today, the revolutionary car was forced to retire with engine failure after completing 10 laps in the second hour of the race.

The DeltaWing, with its new elements and powered by an Elan Motorsports Technologies engine, had completed more than 50 laps over two days of testing at Road Atlanta on March 6-7 before the crew arrived in Sebring on Saturday. Andy Meyrick drove the entirety of testing on Monday at the Sebring International Raceway, with the team feeling as though it had made daily improvements in advance of its debut in the LMP1 class by Qualifying on Friday.

During its entire test and practice track time, the DeltaWing completed more than 100 laps of running and improved more than seven seconds from its fastest time on Monday to the cars fastest lap of the week set in Qualifying by Olivier Pla - a 1:53.866. The honour of starting the DeltaWings inaugural LMP1 race was given to Andy, from 15th position on the iconic endurance grid.

"Our goal was simply to finish the race," said Andy. "We didnt know what the car was going to do here and Sebring is notoriously difficult in terms of handling. We have made a lot of progress and come away with a good deal of data and information about the Bridgestone tyres and how the new evolution DeltaWing performs. We can see potential in the car and the team has done a fantastic job in a very short period of time. There were flashes of a potentially strong performance in warm up and so no doubt, given time, the car will be a competitive package. It is obviously a disappointing result, but personally I have loved being back at Sebring as its one of my favourite races and its great to be back in the American Le Mans Series."

The DeltaWing will race at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca in May 2013.