Ferrari Wins The Race Of The Century!

It’s a story that will reverberate throughout every corner of the motorsport world, and will live long in the memory for the next 100 years: Ferrari has won the centenary edition of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Alessandro Pier Guidi, James Calado, and Antonio Giovinazzi piloted the #51 Ferrari AF Corse 499P to victory […]

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It’s a story that will reverberate throughout every corner of the motorsport world, and will live long in the memory for the next 100 years: Ferrari has won the centenary edition of the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Alessandro Pier Guidi, James Calado, and Antonio Giovinazzi piloted the #51 Ferrari AF Corse 499P to victory in the most anticipated and hyped endurance race in many, many years.

Part of the reason why this race was so hotly anticipated was Ferrari’s decision to return to the premier class of endurance sports car racing in 2023, to challenge Le Mans as a full-fledged factory effort, for the first time in 50 years. And on the first time of asking, all of the 499P’s potential came together in all the right ways to deliver a storybook victory in the race of the century.

This is Ferrari’s 10th overall win at Le Mans and the first since 1965, when Masten Gregory and Jochen Rindt drove their NART-run Ferrari 250 LM to victory.

And the winning trio had to fight for almost all 24 hours to claim victory in the end. The first half of the race was impacted by intermittent rain showers, incidents, and Safety Car interventions. Driving through monsoon conditions at times was tough enough with sunlight. At night, the wet conditions were equally as tough to work through.

Even Pier Guidi, who was otherwise faultless every time he got in the cockpit of his red missile, made a small mistake when he spun off at the first Mulsanne Chicane eight hours into the race, dropping them to fourth place.

“To be honest, it was a difficult moment. I tried to avoid a collision, I went on the wet, and I went in the gravel trip,” Pier Guidi said of his incident in the race. “I was just hoping the marshalls were quick. And at the end, they did an amazing job!”

Pier Guidi got back on track without losing a lap in the process.

“With the next Safety Car, I was back in the game. Of course, in that couple of minutes in the gravel trap, it was not a nice feeling at all. I said, ‘Everything is lost.’ I was in the lead, and it was a shame. But there was still a long time to go, and in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, anything can happen.”

“I didn’t give up. I tried to push, and when I was back in the game, I said, ‘Okay, let’s do it!'”

There were a couple of occasions where the #51 Ferrari wouldn’t fire up right after finishing a pit stop, including one moment with six hours to go when the car needed a full reset as its nearest rival drove off to the lead. And even on the last pit stop with half an hour left, it took some time for the car to start up before it went out.

The win is the pinnacle for Pier Guidi, who cut his teeth through GT racing with Ferrari customer teams including AF Corse, and eventually formed an electric duo with the once-vaunted single-seater prospect Calado. Together they won the GTE Pro class with AF Corse in 2019 and 2021 – they’ve been to the top step of Le Mans’ podium before, but never as the overall winners.

Their place in history is theirs for eternity, and it is as well for Giovinazzi, the least experienced endurance racer of the trio but a valuable contributor to the #51 Ferrari team’s success. He’s ensured that his legacy will be defined not by unrealised potential in Formula One, but as part of the team that brought Ferrari back to the summit of Le Mans.

“It’s just special. We ran the car less than a year ago for the first time. To be here is fantastic. We didn’t expect to survive for 24 hours, but the whole team did a fantastic job. We are all here, after 50 years we are back and we need to be really proud,” he said after the race.

One has to wonder if Ferrari would have swept the top two places. The #50 Ferrari of Antonio Fuoco, Miguel Molina, and Nicklas Nielsen won pole position and was quick, but the fortunes of this team turned sour after midnight when the car was brought into its garage. Thirty precious minutes were lost as the team worked to fix a leak in the 499P’s brake system.

Fuoco, Molina, and Nielsen fought to the end to consolidate fifth place overall. Their time, surely, will come – perhaps later this FIA World Endurance Championship season, perhaps next year at the 92nd running of the Le Mans 24 Hours.

Ferrari won the day, but four other manufacturers led the race too at various points.

Starting with the outgoing Le Mans winners, Toyota Gazoo Racing. Did they prove without a shadow of a doubt that five years of Le Mans victories were nothing but the product of thin competition? Did they show that they can’t win against real competition? Even in defeat today – absolutely not.

The #8 Toyota Gazoo Racing GR010 HYBRID of Sebastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley, and Ryo Hirakawa finished second, yes, and its result was ultimately determined by an unforced error for Hirakawa, Toyota’s least-experienced driver at this stage.

But from the start of this race, Toyota gave the leading Ferrari all the challenge it could ask for, beginning from the start of the race when Buemi passed the two Ferraris on the opening lap to take the lead. Buemi and Hartley were particularly excellent for most of the race, even if the FIA and ACO’s controversial BoP adjustment put the two GR010 Hybrids on the back foot with 37 kilogrammes of added weight which left all three drivers running on the ragged edge.

“We had to overdrive, obviously, to just keep up with them,” said the four-time Le Mans winner Buemi. “They were faster than us from, I wouldn’t say the beginning, maybe the first stint. We were still there, but then we couldn’t keep up. They had more pace.”

“We did everything we could, and there is no regrets there. Congratulations to them, they’ve been very impressive from qualifying onward.”

“We threw everything at it, honestly,” added Hartley.

“We tried to triple stint – I’m not sure if anyone else tried that, but we went for it.”

“At the end of the race when the track temp got hotter, our car seemed to come alive a bit. We came back into the window and for a while we were able to put them under a bit of pressure.”

“For a moment, it was getting exciting.”

“They made the right calls…they won the race.”

Hartley also stuck up for his co-driver Hirakawa, who was dejected by his mistake at the Arnage Corner with 105 minutes left.

“He’s being hard on himself right now. But everyone watched this race today – and the amount of crashes and difficult conditions. He was in the most difficult conditions during the night, actually. He was trusted at the end with the most difficult situation possible. He was told to go full risk. Give it all, that’s what he did. It didn’t work out.”

That misfortune feels eerily reminiscent of the years when Toyota kept finding new ways not to win at Le Mans – but it was nothing compared to the awful luck that struck down the #7 Toyota just after midnight.

Kamui Kobayashi was hit in the rear by two cars in an awkward collision approaching a Slow Zone near Tertre Rouge. As the driver/manager of Toyota Gazoo Racing explained the moment from his perspective: “I was in the ‘Next Slow’ zone which is the preparation area ahead of the slow zone. The guy ahead, an LMP2, braked for whatever reason.”

“If I overtake him there, I will get a penalty, so I braked and the cars behind, an LMP2 on the right-hand side and a GT car on the left, just crashed into me. I had both tyres punctured on the rear, and the left rear driveshaft was broken, so I had no drive to return.”

“It is frustrating,” he said. “This is a hard Le Mans 24 Hours race.”

Kobayashi, Mike Conway, and Jose Maria Lopez had won Le Mans before in Toyota’s run of five in a row, and multiple World Championships – but in six years together, the 2021 victory has been their lone slice of fortune in this race as a trio.

If fans of Toyota can take heart in one thing, it’s that the outcome was not defined by the BoP adjustments which irked many of Toyota’s top management – including Kobayashi, Pascal Vasselon, even Chairman Akio Toyoda himself. And as the established force in top-level prototype racing, they will be back to challenge for the win next year.

Rounding out the podium was Cadillac, for the first time overall in the marque’s history – 21 years after General Motors’ premium brand last challenged Le Mans with the flawed Northstar LMP project.

The #2 Cadillac V-Series.R, the “blue deuce” of Earl Bamber, Alex Lynn, and Richard Westbrook may not have been the quickest Hypercar but it ran a near-flawless race and was rewarded with third overall.

A spin from Westbrook seven hours into the race was really the only major setback the #2 Cadillac crew faced all race.

“I’ve finished third five times now. It’s not a record I’m proud of,” said Westbrook. “But this one, honestly – I’m proud. We were the best of the rest.”

“In those conditions where it was so bad at certain times of the night, and we saw so many cars go out. On merit, I think we deserved third.”

“We were fast in certain conditions but came up a little short. Still, the gap to the leader wasn’t huge. It gives us plenty to work on and come back next year that much stronger.”

This puts three different manufacturers on the overall podium for the first time since 2016, the last time that – in another class in the same race – Ganassi and another American manufacturer collaborated for a factory-run Le Mans programme.

The formation finish of all three Cadillac prototypes tells a story of two colleagues who had more difficult outings at Le Mans.

Just two hours into the race, an incident between Slow Zones caught out the gold #3 while Le Mans native Sebastien Bourdais was at the wheel.

“The real bummer is the GT car that got it all wrong in between the slow zones, drove right through and hit us in the right rear,” said Bourdais. It was a miracle that the car never dropped off the lead lap.

Bourdais, Renger van der Zande, and Scott Dixon powered on to finish fourth.

Action Express Racing’s Le Mans debut, the fruit of all of this team’s success in IMSA, started terribly when Jack Aitken got it all wrong on a wet track and crashed at the first Mulsanne Chicane on the first lap.

Immediately, Aitken, Pipo Derani, and Alex Sims were out of the fight for victory. But save for another less severe incident from Aitken and a spin for Sims, it was trouble-free from that moment forward. For all they’ve won in IMSA, finishing this Le Mans 24 Hours in itself was an achievement.

There’s one thing that is nearly constant throughout the history of Porsche: Even some of their most brilliant race cars have had trouble in year one – the 917, 962, even the 919 Hybrid.

If the Porsche 963 goes on to have a marvellous run of form at Le Mans in the coming years, it will have done so after a very, very difficult first-year effort in 2023.

All three Porsche Penske Motorsport factory-run 963s encountered major mechanical problems throughout the race. The #6 alone had a puncture, a high-voltage system problem, and required a hybrid system change – and to top it off, Kevin Estre spun off, ironically, at the Porsche Curves and binned it in the tyres.

The #5 suffered a cooling system leak after midnight and then spent most of the final hour puttering around slowly with a suspected electrical issue.

They at least finished, but the same couldn’t be said of the #75, crewed by Porsche Penske Motorsport’s IMSA effort. Mathieu Jaminet and his teammates’ race came to a halt due to a terminal fuel pressure failure.

In the first six hours, it was looking good for Porsche customer team Hertz Team JOTA to carry the banner for Porsche, particularly with Yifei Ye’s spirited driving after a Safety Car restart in damp conditions – only for it to all go wrong when Ye crashed out at the Porsche Curves.

Between that and a spin and crash at the exit of Indianapolis for Antonio Felix da Costa, the “Mighty 38” was in the garage quite a bit for repairs.

Porsche showed flashes today of the potential that many see in the 963 and have seen since it began testing.

But the biggest and most pleasant surprise of the lot, despite the final result, was Peugeot. They were given pitifully modest expectations and surpassed them.

Yes, the #93 Peugeot TotalEnergies 9X8 was delayed by a hydraulic system problem and Jean-Eric Vergne spun off track on slicks in the rain, and the #94 likewise had an unfortunate problem with the steering rack and an even more unfortunate crash from Gustavo Menezes.

But before it went sour as many of the Peugeot’s 9X8’s races have done to this point, The #94 of Gustavo Menezes, Nico Muller, and Loic Duval genuinely led or were fighting for the lead once the first heavy rain showers arrived. The #93 of Vergne, Mikkel Jensen and Paul di Resta was running in the overall top five later into the race than any would have hoped!

This was a showcase of what was possible, what the French fans clamored for over the past few days in Le Mans.

And though so many would expect Peugeot to tuck their tail between their legs in defeat and scurry away like they’ve done so many times, surely the French manufacturer has seen enough to stick around for the long haul – if not with this streamlined, ground effect-heavy design, then perhaps with something which could build on the lessons learned over the past 12 months.

Any prospect of a titanic fight for top honours between Glickenhaus and Vanwall were done even before the #4 Vandervell 680 ground to a halt with smoke billowing from its engine cover. That was typical ByKolles under any name, unfortunately – the team’s efforts at Le Mans haven’t produced a classified finish since 2009 with a customer Audi R10.

Glickenhaus Racing finished sixth and seventh overall with its two SCG 007 prototypes. Neither car had a clean race, with some incidents, minor mechanical gremlins, and more pitfalls along the way for both the #708 and the one-off #709.

But the dramas were relatively minor compared to the misfortunes that fell upon the other manufacturers we’ve spoken of. The two cars prepared by Joest Racing ran the full distance with some bumps and bruises – and fared better than at least one entry each from Cadillac and Toyota, and all of the entries from Porsche and Peugeot.

It’s another feather in Jim Glickenhaus’ famous hat. Love him or loathe him, the team which bears his name has had another solid Le Mans outing to follow the third-place overall finish from a year ago.

Roll on Monza!

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