Two Toyota hypercars were the first to cross the finish line at Le Mans, and the Japanese automaker’s factory team added another winning double to its long list of sporting achievements.
Anniversary, 90th Le Mans marathon won by a trio consisting of Sebastien Buemi, Brandon Hartley and Rio Hirakawa; a little more than two minutes they lost to the second crew of Toyota – José-Maria Lopez, Kamui Kobayashi and Mike Conway.
Pipo Derani, Frank Melieu and Richard Westbrook of the American Glickenhouse team also took the podium, although their conventional, non-hybrid car certainly cannot keep up with the Japanese hypercars. According to the results of the 24-hour race, the sports prototype No. 709 lost five laps to the leaders.
The second Glickenhouse car lost time during the race due to technical problems, but in the end, crew #708 managed to bounce back and finish in 4th place, although already ten laps from the leader.
In the LMP2 class, the race was won by the JOTA team, for which this is the first victory since 2017, but today Roberto Gonzalez, António Felix da Costa and Will Stevens deservedly received congratulations. Their car #38 crossed the finish line in 1 minute. 48 seconds ahead of the Prema sports prototype, but in any case, the second place taken by Robert Kubica, Louis Deletraz and Lorenzo Colombo is a very worthy result, especially since this is the debut Le Mans for the Italian team.
In the GTE-Pro category, American Corvette sports cars were considered the favorites, but both of their cars fell out of the race for various reasons, so nothing prevented the Porsche factory team from celebrating the victory: an international crew of Italian Gianmaria Bruni, Austrian Richard Lietz and French Frederik climbed to the top of the podium Makoveki.
The second place in the class went to the AF Corse crew, who claimed victory for quite a long time, but with less than five hours of the race left before the finish line, Ferrari No. 51 had to visit the pits again due to a punctured tire.
In the “junior” GTE-Am class, the race was won by the TF Sport team, driving an Aston Martin sports car, a trio of Ben Keating, Enrique Chavez and Marco Sorensen, who were trusted to cross the finish line.
Of the 62 cars that started, only 53 completed the race distance, with the last of the classified GTE-Am crews losing 56 laps to the winning Toyota trio.