DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. - Looking around the garage area at Daytona International Speedway on Friday, it was impossible to miss the high-profile entries.

Nearly every garage had at least one all-star driver from NASCAR, American open-wheel racing or the international world of sports cars preparing for the Rolex 24 endurance race that begins Saturday at noon.

Sixty-seven cars are set to start America’s most prestigious sports car event and the lineup is probably the most star-studded since the race was first held 44 years ago.

“It’s a historic race,” said Indy Racing League phenom Danica Patrick, who will share the cockpit of a Pontiac Crawford Daytona Prototype racer with retired NASCAR star Rusty Wallace and sports car champions Jan Lammers and Alan McNish.

“There is so much history here, just like the Daytona 500 and the Indianapolis 500,” said Patrick, the first woman to lead at Indy. “It’s one of those races that everybody knows about and I couldn’t pass up the chance to get the experience.”

Wallace is just as excited as his young teammate.

“This is new for me,” the former NASCAR champion said. “I’ve been dying to run the Rolex 24 and this is a great team. I probably feel like I am one of the weakest links, but I’ve got 24 hours to figure it out and I’ll be working real hard to keep it on course.

“This will be a fun weekend,” Wallace added, grinning.

Another longtime NASCAR star, Kyle Petty, looked around Friday with a bit of wonder.

“When you walk through the garage area now, it reminds me of what sports car racing was at Daytona maybe 30 or 35 years ago when you had Bobby Allison, Cale Yarborough, A.J. Foyt, Mario Andretti and guys from Europe that came over to race,” said Petty, who will join Boris Said and Brian Tuttle in a Pontiac Riley, another of the record field of 31 Daytona Prototypes in the two-class field.

That’s a big change from just three years ago when the then-fledgling Grand American Road Racing Series had just five of the sleek, powerful prototypes in the field for its biggest event.

“All the chatter then was bad-mouthing the series,” noted Said, a veteran road racer who also runs in NASCAR’s top stock car series. “Now, this is going to be the premier road racing series in America.

“To see all these different drivers from all these different backgrounds just walking around the pits, there’s no other race in the world where you can see this many drivers and this many past champions.”

The list is impressive.

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The other drivers from NASCAR racing in the season-opening event are reigning Nextel Cup champion Tony Stewart, former champion Bobby Labonte and Casey Mears.

They are eclipsed by a phalanx of drivers from the rival IRL and Champ Car open-wheel series. Among them are defending IRL and Indy 500 champion Dan Wheldon, two-time defending Champ Car champion Sebastian Bourdais, Paul Tracy, Scott Dixon, Jimmy Vasser, Adrian Fernandez, Scott Sharp, Bryan Herta, Dario Franchitti and A.J. Allmendinger.

Add to that the defending Rolex champion team of Max Angelelli, Wayne Taylor and Emmanuel Collard, as well as other sports car endurance racing stars Scott Pruett, Max Papis and three-time Daytona winners Andy Wallace and Bruce Leitzinger.

And that doesn’t even take into account the team of Lucas Luhr, Patrick Long and Mike Rockenfeller that took the pole position for the twice-around-the-clock race in a Porsche Crawford prototype.

“The team that wins this race is the one that doesn’t have any unscheduled pit stops,” said Tracy, who led the final practice session on Friday with a lap of 122.135 mph in a Lexus Riley prototype. “Some of these guys, they might be tempted to make this into a sprint race and try to show how fast (they) are against all the all-stars. But, really, that’s not going to be what wins this race.”

Stewart, who has come close to winning this event each of the past two years only to go out with mechanical problems in the waning minutes, is again among the prerace favorites as he teams with Andy Wallace and Leitzinger.

“Andy said that we’ve been so close the last couple of years, it makes you even that much more hungry to win,” Stewart said. “But, at the same time, with disappointments like that, it will make it that much more gratifying if we do accomplish that goal this year.”