Why the anticipation in the run-up to the Le Mans 24 Hours feels a bit different this year

First it’s a broad smile, then a tightening of the stomach. My reaction is the same each year, and it pretty much happens at the same place. I’m on my way to the Le Mans 24 Hours, nearly there in fact, and I’m on a road that Google Maps tells me is called the D323. It’s a bit of dual carriageway that takes you alongside the top of the circuit. The familiar signage, a long concrete wall that separates public highway from race track, and a vista of trees I recognise from my trips up to Tertre Rouge to watch the cars mean I know I’ve arrived.

My sense of excitement is always tempered by an element of foreboding, hence the knot in the belly. Le Mans, as the most important event on my annual schedule, creates the biggest workload. As I travel along the said D323, I’m always contemplating who might win the race, who I think is going to win the race, and whether the predictions I’ve committed to print are going to turn out to be correct. That’s something I’m not facing this year.

I’d group up my emotions as I arrive in Le Mans as a sense of expectation for all that the event brings in terms of positive and negative feelings. But I’m not sure I have any expectations this year, except that I’ll be putting in the miles around the paddock. It’s not just on the basis of the Spa 6 Hours round of the World Endurance Championship in May that I’ve decided that it’s impossible to make predictions.

Any number of cars might have won in the Ardennes. There are just too many unknowns. There’s what we don’t know because we aren’t being told (the Balance of Performance), and what we can’t know until there has been extended running on track (how the new range of Michelin slick tyres is going to perform on each of the cars). 

But if the BoP does its job, then the latter is going to be all the more important. Can someone make the tyres go four stints and gain an advantage? Will an early switch of compound – presumably from the medium to the soft – as night falls do likewise? That is the way it’s meant to be these days. The rulebook closely controls the performance of the cars and then the BoP smooths out any differences. That means the race should boil down to execution by the drivers on the race track, the mechanics in the pits and the strategists on the pitwall. 

Last year’s runner-up Porsche reckoned it had done everything right to win the race

Photo by: Alexander Trienitz

That wasn’t the case last year. Penske executed to perfection with the Porsche 963 LMDh shared by Kevin Estre, Laurens Vanthoor and Matt Campbell. Yet it could only finish second, 14 seconds in arrears of the winning Ferrari 499P driven by Robert Kubica, Yifei Ye and Phil Hanson. Porsche argued that it should have won given that it did everything right and Ferrari most definitely didn’t. That feeling was implicated in its decision to quit the Hypercar ranks at the completion of the season when it had to make a choice between the continuing in the WEC or the IMSA SportsCar Championship.

Years back, a particularly sage engineer I’ve known for ages used to get slightly exasperated with my line of questioning as I tried to ascertain the trends and work out who, on the balance of things, should win the race ahead. On more than one occasion his reaction to my enquiries went something like this: “If we know who’s going to win, there wouldn’t be a lot of point going out on track for the race.”

As good a point as it was 10 or however many years back when he first shot that line towards me, it seems even more relevant today. I’d prefer it if the cars were doing different things, of course. I always think back to Le Mans 2011, and one of the great editions of the big race. Audi and Peugeot went at it tooth and nail all the way.

There are reasons to believe that tactics and strategy are going to decide the outcome of Le Mans this time. I’m hoping for an outlandish gamble giving someone the victory

The German manufacturer’s R18 TDI could go four stints on a set of Michelins (and famously put in a quintuple at one point); its French rival, the 908, just the three. But the Peugeot went a lap longer on a tank of diesel. It made for a race that was both exciting and intriguing, and downright bloody close. Just 13.9s separated the winning Audi from the chasing Peugeot at the finish. 

That remains the closest timed finish in Le Mans history, even though we’re a good few years into the Hypercar era when everything is that bit more homogenised, artificial even. Audi won it that weekend with a bit of sublime execution. Andre Lotterer, who triumphed with Benoit Treluyer and Marcel Fassler, picked up a slow puncture after his penultimate pitstop. The pressure in the tyre somehow stabilised and the Joest Audi team gambled on leaving him out on track until he could make it to the finish on one more fill of fuel. 

There are reasons to believe that tactics and strategy are going to decide the outcome of Le Mans this time. I’m hoping for an outlandish gamble giving someone the victory. But, for now, just don’t ask me who is going to win.

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The close-run battle between Audi and Peugeot in 2011 was both exciting and intriguing

Photo by: Jeff Bloxham / Motorsport Images