Reckon I must be getting greedy in my old age. I’ve just witnessed a classic Le Mans 24 Hours and the closest timed finish in its history, but I left the track wanting more. That’s more cars in the hunt for victory, not necessarily duking it out as the clock ticked inexorably towards four o’clock, but showing the kind of pace necessary to win some time over the course of the race.
Five cars could realistically have won last weekend’s 94th edition of the great race and seven finished on the lead lap. You’d think that was some kind of embarrassment of riches. In the old world it would be, but not in the new. Now we have a strictly controlled rulebook, cars designed to fit into so-called performance windows and little or no technical development, and then it’s topped off by the Balance of Performance to provide that final bit of levelling up. A polish, if you like.
They come together to explain why we have eight manufacturers - and more to come - fighting it out in the World Endurance Championship’s Hypercar class. Or rather, competing. No, I’m going to change that again. Participating is probably the word I’m looking for. That’s pretty much all Peugeot did last weekend from where I was standing. Maybe Ferrari was competing for something, but the winner of the previous three editions of the French enduro barely had a sniff of some silverware this time around. Its 499P was only the fourth fastest car and the better part of a second off the pace.
Do we need every manufacturer to be competing for the win at Le Mans or any other WEC race for that matter? The answer to that one is no, but it’s actually the wrong question. What needs to be asked is whether every manufacturer needs to be competing for the win. They probably do. Because that’s what the motorsport bosses promised to their respective boards when they sat in front of them to pitch for the cash to undertake a WEC programme.
Take Peugeot. On pole at the Spa WEC round little more than a month before Le Mans, the French team was then absolutely nowhere at the 24 Hours. To say it was just participating is to demean the efforts of the whole team - drivers, mechanics and engineers - to extract the maximum from their package and to execute to perfection. But from where the car-buying public - call them fans if you will - were sitting, it must have appeared that they were merely along for the ride. That’s not a good look for a marque with such a rich sportscar heritage.
And what about Ferrari? On another day it might have won on home turf at Imola back in April and was in the mix on the way to third next time out at Spa the following month. Come Le Mans, it wasn’t really in the game. That’s also not a good look, not just for Ferrari but also Le Mans and the WEC.
Ferrari vented frustrations about the way in which its Le Mans streak ended
Photo by: Marc Fleury
How do you explain that to the fans? You can’t, not fully anyway, because it has been decided by the powers that be at the FIA and the Automobile Club de l’Ouest, the two bodies that run the WEC, to keep the BoP a secret. It’s actually a kind of double secret. The power and weight at which each car is running at a WEC race is from this year no longer published, and the ban on manufacturers and teams talking about the BoP remains very much in place. So we are in the dark about the BoP numbers every time out. The manufacturers, meanwhile, remained in the dark about how the BoP was calculated for Le Mans. All very opaque, I would say.
Can we say that Ferrari was hamstrung by the BoP last weekend? Not with any certainty. But the car was clearly lacking in acceleration, more so than in straightline speed. Remember the two-stage BoP means that there are different power levels for each car above and below 250km/h (155mph). Or at least that was the figure at which power-gain kicked in last year. Maybe it has changed. If it has, we wouldn’t be told. Then, there was Ferrari’s inability to make much use of the soft-compound Michelin slick. That suggests that the Ferrari was a heavy car at Le Mans this year.
It would be easy to sit at my desk and cynically suggest that the FIA and the ACO - or should that be the ACO and the FIA in the case of Le Mans? - didn’t want Ferrari to win this year. That it wanted to somehow share the love.
We could have had a three-way fight in the final hours, and here am I complaining that there weren’t enough competitive cars at Le Mans this year! But my gripe is a real one. If we have the BoP as a means of levelling everything up, it’s got to work correctly and to be used fairly
Hopefully that wasn’t the case and Ferrari’s lack of pace can be explained away by imperfections in the BoP process. But there have been plenty of series down the years where the organisers appeared to have decided that it would allow its competitors to take turns at doing the winning, one manufacturer one year, another the next, and so on. Some suggested that at Le Mans this year, it was the turn of not one manufacturer or another, but of a car built to one set or rules rather than the other. It would have been easy to draw that conclusion after qualifying: LMDh cars took the first six spots on the grid. It was actually the same last year, but Le Mans Hypercar machinery prevailed in the race each time.
Toyota Racing, based in Cologne, once again proved its credentials as one of the all-time great endurance teams. Not only was it on point strategically, but it was able to overcome issues on the way to second and third positions. Its execution was impressive, but it did have problems and the second-placed BMW did not. The German car had no technical problems and no penalties.
Scroll back 12 months, and that was the case for another second-placed machine, the factory Penske Porsche that finished only 14s down on the winning Ferrari. The German manufacturer argued that given it had the near-perfect race, hindered only by a solitary slow puncture, it should have beaten a car in the AF Corse satellite Ferrari that didn’t. If all the cars were equal under the BoP then the destination of the winner’s laurels would be decided on execution. Porsche’s failure to win Le Mans last year was implicated in its decision to end its participation in Hypercar when money needed to be saved in the face of falling car sales.
The Hypercar class was missing Porsche this year
Photo by: Stefano Facchin / Alessio Morgese / NurPhoto via Getty Images
BMW didn’t go into ‘we deserved to win’ territory after the event, perfect race or not. Far from it. It suggested that it was very much satisfied with second and could walk away from Le Mans with no regrets and its head held high.
BMW almost certainly would have reprised its 1999 Le Mans victory with the V12 LMR but for the second safety car. It reset the race and allowed the winning Toyota to make up the time it had lost with its technical issues earlier in proceedings. It would be a little waggish to suggest that the Japanese manufacturer prevailed in the Le Mans 5 Hours last weekend. But it kind of explains how Kamui Kobayashi and co won Le Mans this year.
The winning Toyota was the fastest car over the final leg of the race, but only just. The fourth-placed Cadillac wasn’t far behind, but never recovered from losing time when it had to make an emergency pitstop under a Full Course Yellow with just under three hours to go.
So we could have had a three-way fight in the final hours, and here am I complaining that there weren’t enough competitive cars at Le Mans this year! But my gripe is a real one. If we have the BoP as a means of levelling everything up, it’s got to work correctly and to be used fairly.
That wasn’t the case last weekend. But just don’t ask me which of those two possibilities I think it was.
Toyota took its first Le Mans victory since 2022
Photo by: Marc Fleury
