He's tasted success at the event several times - most notably when he won in 2006 along with the late Dan Wheldon and Casey Mears. That's in spite of the fact he's not exactly a regular when it comes to closed cockpit sports car racing.
Some big changes look set to make this year's race slightly trickier than usual, says Dixon: "We've gone from BMW to Ford engines, from normally aspirated V8s to a V6 - and that's been a steep learning curve. There's some driveability stuff we have to work on, some reliability things. There's also been a couple of changes to the rules. I think lap speeds and records will probably tumble a fair way this year."
The Kiwis are spread out over three of the four different classes in the race this year. Hartley and Dixon are going head-to-head in the Prototype class, with Stanaway in the GT Le Mans class and van Gisbergen and Bamber both in the GT Daytona category.
For Stanaway, Daytona is the end result of a successful first season in sports cars. After a relentless charge through single seat categories, the 22-year-old driver looked set for higher honours until a serious crash in Formula Renault 3.5 put him out of racing for around six months.
Failing to secure a single-seat drive on his return, he was snapped up by Aston Martin Racing on a race-by-race basis. Though he'd never raced sports cars before, he excelled, often outpacing former F1 team-mates Pedro Lamy and Bruno Senna. Now, with a full contract under his belt, Daytona looks set to be the start of a long partnership with the team.
"Yeah, last year was a sort of evaluation year," he says. "Racing sports cars took a bit of getting used to - especially when it came to not having as much down force - but now I'm pretty used to it.
"I've never done a 24-hour race before; the longest I've done is six hours and even that felt pretty long. Although you never really know how it's going to go until you're actually out there, the car feels pretty good. We're just going to do our best and hopefully win our class."
Unlike Stanaway, who is beginning his season next weekend, Dixon has a little more time before the IndyCar series starts on March 30 in Florida. He's made a couple of trips back home with the family, although he has also started testing the new car for his 2014 title defence.
He's also recently been in discussions with IndyCar race officials in an attempt to avoid the clashes with officialdom that occurred at the end of last year. A series of inconsistent calls went against him just as the championship race reached its peak, culminating in a furious Dixon labelling race director Beaux Barfield "not capable" and calling for his resignation. Barfield stayed, of course, and Dixon received a US$30,000 fine.
Although it took a while for him to calm down, Dixon now seems much more understanding when talking about Barfield and the rest of the IndyCar officials.
"Beaux is obviously working hard," he says. "I think it's a sticky situation, unfortunately; there needs to be a race control because if it was left in the drivers' hands, it could probably get out of control. So when they have to make the calls that they do, they get to look bad sometimes. You can understand the predicament they're in - it's a tough job and you've got to have big shoulders to handle a job like that.
"Everybody's always learning and everybody's always trying to make things better. I've got faith that they'll do a much better job this year and they'll constantly, like we do, keep working on things."
Whether the officiating has improved will become clear in a couple of months; for now, the eyes of Dixon and the four other New Zealanders remain firmly fixed on next weekend - a good one for New Zealand motorsport.
