When the moribund GTE Pro class stole the show at Le Mans

It seems hard to imagine the Le Mans 24 Hours without GT cars. Road-going machinery is an important part of the history of the place, but for a short period straddling the late 1980s and the early 1990s the grid was entirely made up of prototypes. That changed in 1993. The Sportscar World Championship had been axed, and the French enduro was crying out for cars. The reintroduction of GT classes saved the day.

The grid at Le Mans in 1992 in the final year of the ailing SWC numbered just 28 cars. The following year there were 49 entered, and just over half of them were GT cars.

The landscape of GT racing has been in almost constant change since then, and the names of the classes have followed suit. What became GT1 cars in the mid-2000s were originally GT2 cars when the premier category included low-volume exotica such as the Porsche 911 GT1-98 and the Toyota GT-One.

The GT1 class that provided the battleground for the amazing Chevrolet-versus-Aston Martin fisticuffs over the second half of the noughties disappeared after 2010, and a new order was created. The place of the amateur was enshrined in the GT ranks in 2011 on the disappearance of the GT1 category; GT2 was renamed GTE and split in two.

The two halves of the class have for the past 12 seasons done more or less what they say on the tin. GTE Pro is realm of the manufacturer teams and cars packed with professional drivers; and GTE Am is for pro-am line-ups, where the rules mandate a single pro and at least one bronze-rated driver according to the FIA system of driver categorisation. Most GTE Am line-ups are made up of either a platinum or a gold, plus one silver and one bronze.

GTE Pro peaked over the second half of the 2010s when class stalwarts Porsche, Ferrari and Aston were first joined by Ford and then rejoined very briefly by BMW. The Ford GT arrived in 2016 and stayed for a four-year cycle of the programme, while BMW, which had raced at Le Mans in 2010 and 2011 with the M3 GT2, came back with the M8 GTE for the WEC superseason in 2018-19, which meant a pair of Le Mans participations.

BMW made two Le Mans appearances with the M8 GTE during the 2018-19 WEC 'superseason' at the peak of GTE Pro manufacturer involvement

Photo by: Rainier Ehrhardt

The GTE Pro entry peaked at 17 cars in those two years prior to the disappearance of both marques. They were followed out of the class by Aston Martin, which axed its Pro participation after winning the title in 2019-20. The decision of Ferrari and Porsche to also end their factory GT programmes at the end of this season as they switch focus to their respective Le Mans Hypercar and LMDh prototype programmes has effectively drawn a line under GTE Pro.

Whatever happens, with no Porsche and no Ferrari the glory days of GTE Pro will be in the past after this year. But they were magnificent and gave us some classic racing on the hallowed asphalt of the Circuit de la Sarthe

New GT rules will come into force at Le Mans and in the WEC in 2024, it was announced at last year’s race. They will be based on the GT3 class, and we have been promised more news at Le Mans this week. What we do know is that from 2024 there will be no Pro class. The logic of WEC promoter the Automobile Club de l’Ouest is that the prototype ranks are for factory teams and GT racing is for privateers.

What happens next year isn’t entirely clear, except to say that GTE Am will remain part of the grid. There has already been a vote by the FIA World Motor Sport Council to discontinue GTE Pro, though it was not made public. A statement from ACO president Pierre Fillon that the class could continue for a final year if there is sufficient interest – two manufacturers and four cars – appears to have been a red herring.

Whatever happens, with no Porsche and no Ferrari the glory days of GTE Pro will be in the past after this year. But they were magnificent and gave us some classic racing on the hallowed asphalt of the Circuit de la Sarthe.

2020 – Aston versus Ferrari

Aston Martin took its last GTE Pro victory in the 2020 race after forgoing a brake change

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

The 2020 GTE Pro battle was a cracker. First it was an Aston Martin against two Ferraris, and then just one. The contest raged the whole way and, even when it looked to be done and dusted, the Italian manufacturer’s AF Corse team didn’t quite believe it was over.

The ability of the British marque’s Vantage GTE to go through the race without a change of brake discs and pads proved decisive, and its rivals couldn’t take it on board.

The winning Aston Martin Vantage GTE shared by Alex Lynn, Maxime Martin and Harry Tincknell swapped positions back and forth with the Ferrari 488 GTE Evo driven by James Calado, Alessandro Pier Guidi and Daniel Serra from the seventh hour when the other Italian car lost contact with the lead battle during a safety car period. There were no fewer than 27 lead changes over that period. 

“It was flat-out from lap one,” remembers Tincknell, who came into the Aston line-up for Le Mans. “My big memory is the two cars being out of synch in our double stints on the tyres right through the night and into the morning. So when we had new tyres, they were on old tyres and vice versa. 

“We would catch and pass them when we had the new rubber and then they’d pass us back. There was pressure on us to sort of hold them up when they had the tyre advantage, and for us to clear them quickly when we had that advantage. The lead was yoyoing around like crazy.”

The race turned in hour 18. Ferrari made what was at the time regarded as the de rigueur stop for new brakes, and the Vantage broke away. The presumption in the Italian camp was that the two cars would come back together when the Aston required a brake service. But it never happened. 

“The team was confident we could do it and be hard on the brakes right through the race,” recalls Tincknell. “I’m not going to lie, the pedal was getting a bit long at the end. That was a bit unnerving at somewhere like Indianapolis, but the brakes still had good performance.”

Tincknell remembers incredulous looks from the mechanics at AF, who were just a few garages down from the Aston Martin Racing pit at the final stops. 

“You could tell they were expecting us to have to change brakes,” he says. “I could see the Ferrari guys watching our car when it left – they were shaking their heads.”

2016 – Ford’s anniversary gift 

Hand, Muller and Bourdais won on Ford's return in 2016, 50 years on from its inaugural triumph, although it was not without controversy

Photo by: Sutton Images

The Ford-versus-Ferrari Le Mans confrontation was reconvened in GTE Pro in 2016, 50 years on from the American manufacturer’s famous 1-2-3 victory in 1966. This one raged pretty much for the whole race — and then kicked off again in the stewards’ room afterwards. But the might of America eventually prevailed over its Italian challenger to take a symbolic victory in the first year of the Ford GT programme.

The winning Chip Ganassi Racing Ford GT shared by Joey Hand, Dirk Muller and Sebastien Bourdais prevailed over a Ferrari 488 GTE, the works-supported Risi Competizione entry rather than one of the full-factory AF Corse cars, driven by Giancarlo Fisichella, Toni Vilander and Matteo Malucelli. The battle between two cars that led all but two dozen of the 340 laps raged deep into the race. It made for compelling viewing, though anyone involved with Risi’s campaign will tell you it wasn’t as close as it looked. 

It was clear that the Ford was the faster car. But the efforts of Fisichella, Vilander and the underrated Malucelli plus sterling pitwork by the Risi crew kept the Ford boys honest. Only in the final three hours did the winning car eke out some breathing space after Vilander spun on the exit of the Porsche Curves. 

"They were playing with us, no question. They’d been keeping in a window because they didn’t want to get blasted by the ACO" Rick Mayer

The Ferrari had hit the front in the 10th hour after the Ford stopped just before a safety car, and then another period of yellow flags pushed its lead up to over a minute. The American car was penalised on Sunday morning when an electronic glitch meant its engine wasn’t switched off during refuelling. Fortunes were swinging the way of Ferrari, or so it seemed. But Ford was able to pull back the deficit in the space of an hour when Hand went up against Malucelli. 

“They were playing with us, no question,” says long-time Risi engineer Rick Mayer today. “They’d been keeping in a window because they didn’t want to get blasted by the ACO, but when they wanted to they could just drive past us on the straights. They had pace in hand because they hadn’t shown anything in the run-up to Le Mans.”

Mayer is suggesting that the two arms of the Ganassi squad, one racing in the WEC and one in the IMSA SportsCar Championship, played a long game that season with an eye on the big prize at Le Mans. By keeping a lid on the pace of the carbon-chassis GT, a car designed to race and then reverse-engineered for the road, they ensured a favourable Balance of Performance for the most important race of the season.

It got messy in the closing stages and after the race. The Ferrari’s lap-leader lights, which indicate whether a car is running in the top three in class, had failed and Ford demanded that the car be brought in for repairs. When race control suggested that wasn’t the way they did things at Le Mans, Ford reappeared with the rulebook and, it is said, lawyers to push their point. The Ferrari was black-flagged, but Risi told Fisichella to stay out.

“If we’d brought him in, that would have been it, but leaving him out gave us a chance to argue our case,” says Mayer.

Those arguments were unsuccessful, although a slender 20s penalty offers an insight into race control’s thoughts on the matter. The Ford was penalised too, for speeding in an 80km/h slow zone. With 50s added to its time, a margin of victory that had originally stood at a minute was recalculated to just 10s. 

2017 – The late decider

In the car he shared with Turner and Serra, Adam (middle) overhauled Taylor's Corvette in the final laps to win in 2017

Photo by: Rainier Ehrhardt

Finishes at Le Mans don’t come much closer than this one. The outcome of the GTE Pro battle in 2017 was decided at the end of the penultimate lap in favour of Aston Martin. The race boiled down to a straight fight between Jonny Adam in the Vantage GTE and Jordan Taylor in the best of the Chevrolet Corvette C7.Rs. 

Adam and Taylor left the pits with just under an hour to go nose to tail. The Aston, co-driven by Darren Turner and Daniel Serra, had been propelled onto the back of the ’Vette by a quick turnaround: Adam took only a splash of fuel, while Jordan took over from Jan Magnussen in the blazing heat as part of a full service on a car in which Antonio Garcia completed the line-up. 

Adam made a bid for the lead into Indianapolis with two laps to go. Taylor just hung on, the two cars rubbing door to door on the exit. Next time around, Taylor locked up at the second chicane on the Mulsanne Straight. He flat-spotted a tyre, which gave up the ghost in the Ford Chicane as the cars swept onto the start/finish to begin the last lap. Aston Martin Racing had finally reprised its GT1 victories of the late 2000s at its sixth attempt with the Vantage. 

“It was a phenomenal race,” remembers Adam. “The key was a new soft tyre that Dunlop introduced for Le Mans. It worked in practice and qualifying and even with the high temperatures.”

Aston had switched to Dunlop from Michelin for the last season of the first-generation Vantage in GTE Pro. It was looking for what it called at the time “a differentiator” for the ageing machine. Victory was a fitting send-off for the long-serving car, which had its roots in a machine that first raced in 2008.

A golden rivalry

The face-off between Aston Martin and Corvette was a high point of the GT1 years in the mid-to-late 2000s

Photo by: Sutton Images

In the days before GTE Pro and Am, GT1 was a category where full-house manufacturer teams went head to head. Think Corvette Racing against ORECA’s Chrysler Vipers and then Prodrive-run Ferraris and Aston Martins. GT2, meanwhile, was the home of the private teams and wealthy amateurs buying a Porsche, a Ferrari or whatever, hiring a couple of professionals and bidding for victory at Le Mans and beyond. Think BAM Motorsport winning the class at the 2005 24 Hours, with media mogul Leo Hindery sharing an Alex Job-run Porsche 911 GT3-RSR with Marc Lieb and Mike Rockenfeller.   

It was a classic era for the top GT class, which was known as GTS until the reintroduction of the GT1 moniker in 2005. The greatest rivalry came between Chevrolet’s Corvettes and the Aston Martin DBR9 developed by Prodrive. They went head to head four times and it ended up as a 2-2 draw. 

The first big battle between the ’Vette and the Aston at Le Mans set the tone for what was to follow. The British car was only in its third race, but on Sunday morning looked set to pull off what many considered an unlikely victory. 

Pedro Lamy and Stephanes Sarrazin and Ortelli were leading the class in 2006 when the clutch failed in the 20th hour. Or rather it was burnt out by one of the drivers, who Howard-Chappell still refuses to name

“I remember sitting on the pitwall and thinking this is unbelievable,” recalls George Howard-Chappell, who headed up the AMR programme at Prodrive. “We’d given the car a debut at the Sebring 12 Hours and beaten the Corvettes, then we won at the Tourist Trophy at Silverstone [a round of the FIA GT Championship] and now were looking good to win Le Mans. It seemed too good to be true somehow.”

It was. A broken front splitter and then a fuel issue, which Howard-Chappell can reveal today was simply the car running out of the stuff, did for the DBR9 that was shared by Tomas Enge, Pedro Lamy and Peter Kox. Chevrolet won the race with Oliver Gavin, Jan Magnussen and Olivier Beretta at the head of a Corvette Racing 1-2.

Twelve months later, Aston came close again. Pedro Lamy and Stephanes Sarrazin and Ortelli were leading the class when the clutch failed in the 20th hour. Or rather it was burnt out by one of the drivers, who Howard-Chappell still refuses to name. 

A burned out clutch proved costly for Aston Martin in 2006 as Corvette did the double

Photo by: Dave Friedman / Motorsport Images

That put the tally at 2-0 to Corvette Racing, but Aston Martin Racing hauled back the score over the next two years before Chevrolet left the class to race in GT2 and Aston concentrated on its LMP1 prototype programme. 

AMR’s only race of the year with the DBR9 was Le Mans in both 2007 and 2008, but it came away with GT1 honours both times. David Brabham, Darren Turner and Rickard Rydell took the victory in the first of those years with a car liveried in British Racing Green. The next year Antonio Garcia joined Brabham and Turner to make it two in row for a car now in the emotive colours of Gulf Oil. 

The winning DBR9 won in 2007 courtesy of a faultless race. “It was just fuel and tyres, and a bit of oil every six hours all the way through the race,” remembers Howard-Chappell. Staying out of the pits was also the key the following year, because the Corvettes didn’t manage that feat. 

The GT1 era was coming to an end, but Chevrolet and Aston would meet again on the creation of GTE Pro in the first year of the reborn WEC in 2012.

Aston Martin won out in 2007 and repeated the feat in 2008 to level the scores in its GT1-era Corvette squabble at 2-2

Photo by: Jeff Bloxham / Motorsport Images