How Ferrari overcame multiple threats to defend its Le Mans crown

A Ferrari victory, a narrow one over Toyota. A late problem in the pits for the former and one on track for the latter. It all sounds familiar. Yet the 92nd running of the Le Mans 24 Hours wasn’t quite a repeat of last year’s centenary edition of the World Endurance Championship blue riband. This wasn’t just a two-car fight. The new golden era of sportscar racing has really kicked on this season, and the French enduro produced a multi-marque battle through its duration.

Ferrari notched up its 11th outright victory in the big race but there were an unprecedented number of entries on the lead lap and in with sniff of victory as the clock ticked down to 4pm. Four manufacturers - Ferrari, Toyota, Porsche and Cadillac - provided nine cars to be precise. To put that into context, never have more than two cars been in the hunt at the start of the final lap of the majestic 8.47-mile Circuit de la Sarthe.

The other difference between this year and last was the identity of the two Hypercar class entries fighting it out at the very front in the final hour. Nicklas Nielsen, Antonio Fuoco and Miguel Molina prevailed in the best of the factory AF Corse Ferrari 499P Le Mans Hypercars by 14 seconds from the Toyota GR010 HYBRID LMH shared by Kamui Kobayashi, Nyck de Vries and late stand-in Jose Maria Lopez. The second cars from this pair of manufacturers ended up third and fifth, with the best of four Porsches to finish in the lead pack between them. Last year’s winners James Calado, Alessandro Pier Guidi and Antonio Giovinazzi took the final podium spot, Sebastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa fifth, but it could just as easily have been this Toyota once again duking it out for the win with Ferrari.

The Ferrari and the Toyota were evenly matched - there was probably less in it than last year - over the course of a race interrupted by rain on multiple occasions and six hours’ worth of safety car running. The Toyota probably had the slightest of edges, a reverse on last year, though the GR010 was undoubtedly the quicker car in wet conditions. That Ferrari ultimately prevailed came down to the fact that in the final stages of the race it wasn’t the quicker, the less problem-free of the Toyotas in the hunt for victory.

Lopez’s spin at the Dunlop Chicane bang on the 23-hour mark as he hunted down Nielsen wasn’t the defining Toyota off on Sunday afternoon. Exactly an hour before Hartley had spun at Mulsanne Corner after getting a helping hand from Pier Guidi, a misdemeanour that resulted in the Italian getting a 5s penalty at his next stop.

The time loss for Toyota was significant as he waited to rejoin after spinning to the inside of the tight left-hander and then took to the gravel on the outside. He lost circa 35s on the lap he spun and another five on the next lap as he got his wet-weather Michelins back up to temperature. The deficit of the #8 car at the chequered flag was 63s, but it is important to point out that Hartley dropped down in the pack, to sixth in fact. That undoubtedly played a part in his ability to mount any kind of fightback.

Hartley's #8 Toyota team-mate Buemi watches on in despair as his charger is tipped into a spin by Pier Guidi

Photo by: Rainier Ehrhardt

The crew of the #8 car were adamant that the incident cost them the victory. “I guess without that spin after that little touch, we would have won the race,” said Buemi. “We lost something like 40s and we were some way ahead of #7 at the time.” For Hartley, it felt “like the victory just slipped away from us”.

Hartley was just behind the winning Ferrari at the time of the incident and would have assumed the lead when Nielsen had to make an unscheduled pitstop. The right-hand side door came open in the wake of the car’s penultimate pitstop and the Dane had no option to pit because he was being shown the black-and-orange warning flag. He came in with an hour and 40 left on the clock, or two times a normal 50-minute stint on the car’s energy allocation. Lopez, chosen to finish the race in #7 despite this being his first time back in a GR010 since last November’s WEC finale in Bahrain, was 36s behind after making his own second-to-last stop.

His progress towards the Ferrari was halted when he looped it with an hour to go. The time loss was more or less the 14s by which he lost the race, but it would be wrong to say that Toyota missed out on the win as a result of an incident that Lopez suspected was caused by some kind of powertrain issue. Nielsen was backing off at the end; the gap stood at 22s with a couple of laps to go, so Lopez was almost certainly correct when he said the spin didn’t define the race for the #7 crew. The only caveat to that is the fact that Nielsen was in a pretty aggressive fuel save mode as the race approached its conclusion. Nielsen’s early stop gave him no margin for error on the fuel as he strived to avoid the need for a splash. He knew it would be tight even with the wet conditions and a brief slow zone, a temporary 80km/h (50mph) speed limit. Official data showed that he had less than 2% of his energy remaining when he took the chequered flag.

"If we wanted to go for the win we only had one option - to save fuel. I just asked the team to give me an energy target per lap, and that’s it" Nicklas Nielsen

“I did quite a bit of fuel save but I didn’t think about it much,” said Nielsen. “If we wanted to go for the win we only had one option - to save fuel. I just asked the team to give me an energy target per lap, and that’s it.”

The #7 car had what might be deemed a messy race. It had to come from the back of the 23-strong Hypercar field after Kobayashi went off at Virage Corvette (formerly Karting) as he tried to improve his time in first qualifying. WEC rules demand a driver loses all his lap times if he or she causes a red flag stoppage.

There were multiple issues along the way for the #7 Toyota, though their effect were to a greater or less extent mitigated by the three safety cars that interrupted this race. There were two slow punctures that resulted in unscheduled stops and it lost power on Sunday morning when Kobayashi lost turbo boost and therefore power as a result of a sensor issue that took some time to resolve out on track. It explained why the Japanese driver had to cede position to the sister car, putting #8 in the pound seats as Ferrari’s nearest challenger at this point.

The #8 Toyota had initially been set to be Ferrari's biggest challenger for the win due to a series of minor delays that hurt the #7's progress

Photo by: Alexander Trienitz

Another engine issue, during Lopez’s final stint, cost the car time. This one was “related to communication”, explained Toyota Gazoo Racing Europe director Rob Leupen. The driver had somehow ended up with the wrong settings leaving the pits and had to be talked down by the team to cycle through the systems to address the problem, all the while trying to make up time on a wet track.

It all went to backing up Buemi’s claim that #8 should have won this race. “I think we had the cleanest race of everyone,” he said. “This was one that got away.”

Ferrari insisted that it didn’t go into the race believing it would win, merely that it could win. That’s why the marque’s boss of sportscar racing, Antonello Coletta, described the repeat victory as a surprise. Between the Test Day on the Sunday ahead of the race and the start of practice and qualifying on the Wednesday, Ferrari was talking down its chances.

It made mention of its loss of straightline speed since last year, a function of the new power gain component of the Balance of Performance that cut the 499P’s maximum power above 250km/h (155mph) by 10bhp or so. It reckoned it had only the third fastest car and it could only win the race, said Ferrari technical direct Ferdinando Cannizzo, by “minimising its weaknesses and maximising its strengths”. The rhetoric looked empty long before the race start: Giovinazzi and Fuoco qualified fourth and fifth (and started third and fourth) and the cars were quicker through the speed trap than any of the other members of the big four in which Toyota, Porsche and Cadillac joined Ferrari.

Last year’s winners weren’t quite a match for the winning #50 car at the weekend, Calado was happy to admit. In the dry #51 was the quicker, but in the wet the advantage flipped around. “We were flying in the dry but really struggling in the wet,” confirmed the Brit.

He also bemoaned some incorrect strategy calls. Putting the car on mediums on Sunday morning when the sister car was on the soft looked like the wrong choice, though Cannizzo insisted it wasn’t. “We made a few wrong decisions, a few too many,” said Calado. “That dropped us back so that we were always trying catch up. We were pretty on the back foot through the race.”

The yellow customer or satellite entry from Ferrari and AF was a genuine contender in the hands of Robert Kubica and factory drivers Robert Shwartzman and Yifei Ye, even if it didn’t quite have the same pace as the red cars from the same stable. Its race came to an end right at the conclusion of the 20th hour with a hybrid problem. Smoke billowing from its brakes hinted at the issue with the motor generator unit on the front axle and the extra reliance that its failure put on the conventional brakes.

Last year's winners #51 Ferrari lacked pace in the wet but also lamented some strategy calls

Photo by: Alexander Trienitz

Porsche only came away with fourth place, though as Urs Kuratle, who oversees the 963 LMDh project, pointed out it fell just 38s short of overall victory number 20 at Le Mans. The German manufacturer and the factory Penske Porsche had strengthened its status as a genuine contender after its strong run in the WEC so far this season by ending up 1-2-4 in the Test Day times, though pole or no pole for Kevin Estre, it didn’t look quite such a competitive proposition as the temperatures progressively fell as the race approached.

“We’ve been chasing tyre temperatures and tyre temperature control all week,” said PPM boss Jonathan Diuguid on Friday. He went on to say, however, that he felt confident about the race pace of all three PPM cars and stated that PPM would use three divergent grid positions of its expanded three-car squad — first, 10th and 19th - to cover off all the tactical bases. That tactic arguably worked against Porsche.

Changing to wets on the pole-winning car when the rain arrived for the first time late in hour two was a call that ensured that Estre, Laurens Vanthoor and Andre Lotterer were behind the eight ball until after a rain-induced safety car from just before 4am on Sunday morning that lasted for three and a half hours. More telling, however, was the decision to leave Frederic Makowiecki out on slicks and then sticking to the plan in the face of logic provided by the stopwatch when it rained again on Sunday morning.

Jota set to rebuilding the #12 entry around the new chassis...the full powertrain, all the running gear and bodywork were transferred over to the new tub in 36 hours, a build-up that the team had never previously managed in under three weeks

But for this call the car, which Makowiecki shared with Matt Campbell and Michael Christensen, would probably have been in the fight for some silverware given the Australian driver’s pace in the wet at the end. The podium on which Vanthoor missed out on by less than 2s after a dogged pursuit of Pier Guidi might have come the way of the #5 Porsche.

“Certainly there were some decisions that could have been different,” said Kuratle. “It was not a perfect tactical race for us, that is clear.”

The extra Le Mans entry from PPM’s IMSA SportsCar Championship squad seemed to attract the lion’s share of PPM’s bad luck. Contact out on track resulted in damage to an illuminated number panel and a trip into the box for repairs before Felipe Nasr crashed out after losing the back end at the fast right at Indianapolis in hour 18.

Porsche made some strategy missteps but only just missed out on the podium

Photo by: Shameem Fahath

Campbell and his team-mates ended up sixth, one place up on the best of the Cadillac V-Series.R LMDhs fielded by the factory Ganassi team. Full-season WEC drivers Earl Bamber and Alex Lynn had IndyCar sensation Alex Palou as their co-driver for this one but not the pace to ultimately challenge the top two. “Ferrari and Toyota in particular had a bit more pace on us in every condition,” said Lynn. “It wasn’t a lot, but ultimately that’s what it came down to.”

Ganassi tried rolling the dice a couple of times, pitting early when Bamber got in on Sunday morning to gain track position and then going to wets at the end a lap before anyone else. But it wasn’t enough for the General Motors brand to repeat its 2023 podium.

The other two cars had issues. Pipo Derani crashed the Action Express Racing Caddy, also visiting from North America, in a near-identical hour-19 accident to Nasr’s. The difference was that he could crab the American car for repairs lasting an hour and 50 minutes. The second Ganassi entry, which finished fourth last year, was hit by bad luck in hour 19, a punctured oil tank putting it out of the race.

British Porsche privateer Jota took eighth and ninth with its pair of 963 LMDhs, the last two cars on the lead lap. As close as the team was to the front, it never looked like it was going to topple the Ferrari/Toyota hegemony, nor beat the factory Penske squad. But there was no disappointment for a team that took the laurels the previous time out in the WEC at Spa in May.

“Two cars on the lead lap, even taking into account the safety cars, and first and second in the FIA Endurance Trophy [for privateer Hypercar teams] can’t be a disappointment,” said Jota team principal Sam Hignett. “You’d have to say we had a good day.”

That the winning car from Spa was even in the race could be described as a miracle. Callum Ilott had an innocuous-looking off in the Esses at the end of final free practice on Thursday night, just a few hours after he’d taken - or rather inherited - a place in Hyperpole. The impact damaged a lower front right wishbone mounting on the monocoque.

After a shakedown in the adjacent airfield, the rebuilt #12 Jota Porsche made it through the Le Mans 24 Hours in eighth place

Photo by: Andreas Beil

Porsche brought in one of the two spare tubs it carries to each European WEC race and Jota set to rebuilding the #12 entry around the new chassis. Le Mans rules, like those of the series, preclude the use of a T-car. Hignett described the process as “effectively just a chassis swap”. The full powertrain, all the running gear and bodywork were transferred over to the new tub in 36 hours, a build-up that the team had never previously managed in under three weeks. Getting the car ready for a shakedown on the bumpy runway of the airfield adjacent to the circuit on Friday evening was an impressive feat.

So too was getting the car home without problems in eighth. Hignett conceded that it “wasn’t perfect” and was never likely to be given the hasty rebuild and pointed out that it was the sister car shared by Jenson Button, Phil Hanson and Oliver Rasmussen that was the quicker of its Hertz-liveried entries. It finished 34s behind after a less straightforward race.

Proton Competition, the other Porsche privateer competing in the WEC, never looked like emulating its race-leading form from Spa. The reason for that was a repeat of the bizarre problem it encountered in Belgium. Four stops were required in the opening couple of hours to make sure the drivers’ side door on the car shared by Neel Jani, Harry Tincknell and Julien Andlauer could be properly secured, putting it three laps down early on. The Porsche, running a livery that tipped its hat to the 1991 Daytona 24 Hours-winning Joest Porsche 962, showed decent performance thereafter before driveshaft failure intervened. “We haven’t got that wallop one-lap pace, but we were pretty strong over a stint,” reckoned Tincknell. The driveshaft issue stranded Tincknell on pit entry early in the 21st hour before he managed to get some drive to make it back to the pits. After effecting repairs, the team waited until 20 minutes to go before sending Tinknell out to ensure a classified finish and a distant third behind the Jota cars in the Trophy points.

"Today was difficult to swallow. We’ve made steps, we had a good car and this was the first time that you have seen us able to fight for top positions" Vincent Vosse

BMW appeared to be a dark horse coming into Le Mans, and reinforced that position in first qualifying. Dries Vanthoor led the way in the #15 M Hybrid V8 when it mattered on Wednesday evening in the one-hour session from which the fastest eight cars in each class went through to Hyperpole on Thursday. Come the race, however, the German manufacturer and the factory WRT squad endured a nightmare. The Bimmers completed fewer than 200 laps between them after a pair of accidents, one which was the driver’s fault and one that most definitely wasn’t.

It was a case of what might have been for BMW after Vanthoor’s qualifying heroics on Wednesday. The performance pointed to the M Hybrids being able to do something serious in the race. The Belgian, who partnered Raffaele Marciello and Marco Wittmann, set his time on the soft Michelin slick whereas the majority of the opposition ran on the medium. The weather forecast, which eventually came to pass, was suggesting cool conditions and rain for the race, which meant the soft was more often than not going to be the tyre to be on. What the M Hybrids might have achieved on BMW’s return to the top class at Le Mans 25 years after its only outright victory will never be known.

Wittmann had an off in the Esses as early as lap six and more or less got away with it. When Robin Frijns went off at the second apex of the Ford Chicane in hour two aboard the sister car in which he partnered Rene Rast and Sheldon van der Linde, he wasn’t so lucky. Despite significant damage he was able to get the car back to the pits for repairs.

BMW appeared to have the pace to challenge at the front in practice, but its race unravelled due to offs and incidents

Photo by: Shameem Fahath

Van der Linde subsequently reported something was awry with the handling and the car received further attention. A plan to go out again on a data-gathering mission was aborted given the conditions. The latest in a line of BMW ‘Art Cars’ wouldn’t return to the track until the final minutes.

Vanthoor was running in the top 10 in hour seven when on an out-lap he was tagged by Kubica, having already gone straight at the first Mulsanne chicane. The video footage publicly available suggested that it was an error of judgement on the ex-Formula 1 driver’s part. That didn’t ease the pain for BMW, however.

“Today was difficult to swallow,” said WRT boss Vincent Vosse. “We’ve made steps, we had a good car and this was the first time that you have seen us able to fight for top positions.” He went on to express disappointment with the move by Kubica, an alumni of WRT, but not the performance of the M Hybrid V8.

Lamborghini and its Iron Lynx squad were not expecting to challenge on the Italian brand’s first Le Mans campaign in the top flight. But it did make the finish with both its SC63 LMDhs, getting the best of them, the full-season WEC entry shared by Mirko Bortolotti, Daniil Kvyat and Edoardo Mortara home in 10th and ahead of both Peugeots. Its two entries sandwiched the French cars, the IMSA chassis of Romain Grosjean, Andrea Caldarelli and Matteo Cairoli taking 13th.

Two clean finishes was a significant achievement for a manufacturer that endured a difficult development phase with the SC63, a shunt early on that put a six-week hold on testing last summer and then rain during its single pre-Le Mans endurance simulation earlier this year. Neither car had any problems, save for a bit of repair work to the bodywork after Grosjean and Cairoli both spun on out-laps on Saturday evening.

“This is a great success,” said Emmanuel Esnault, racing director of the Iron Lynx factory squad. “Finishing the race without major issues was our first goal, and we did it without a single trip to the garage, and scoring our maiden points finish in the WEC. I'm proud of how our team managed the race.”

The only real hiccup for the team came at the start of the week. A vibration reported by the drivers of the WEC car on the Test Day resulted in a decision to change the brand-new chassis on #63 that had previously only completed a shakedown at Magny-Cours.

Following its struggles and delays on getting its LMDh car up and running, Lamborghini was content with a top 10 on the SC63's Le Mans debut

Photo by: Marc Fleury

The Test Day in particular proved that Lamborghini is continuing to make steps with the SC63. It was difficult to judge the significance of the times, but Bortolotti was fourth in the morning and Kvyat seventh in the quicker afternoon session. Come the race, the Lambos were both just under a couple of seconds off the ultimate pace in the dry. The SC63 remains a tad overweight so an increase in minimum weight by 4kg to 1039kg, allied with a little more power, was more significant than it looked.

The rhetoric from Isotta Fraschini was similar to Lamborghini’s. The garagiste’s Tipo 6 LMH Competizione run by the French Duqueine team came through the 24 Hours without issue as the last classified finisher in Hypercar, albeit nine laps down. “We are happy because we didn’t have to bring the car into the box or take off the engine cover one time,” said Isotta motorsport boss Claudio Berro.

There were a lot of happy people at Le Mans last week. Looking beyond those manufacturers looking to put a positive spin on their race there should have been 329,000 individuals with smiles on their faces. That was the crowd figure put out for what was another classic edition of the Le Mans 24 Hours on the Circuit de la Sarthe.

It was wet and wild at times, but the 2024 Le Mans 24 Hours delivered

Photo by: Rainier Ehrhardt