Le Mans – Writing the pages of history at 350km/h

I see a problem with this text. It’s a newspaper and what I write is not news. It happened almost two weeks ago. But be patient, I promise to make it interesting. Unless you’re a die-hard Toyota fan, in which case you better move on now.

Anyone who has traveled the planet Earth for the last week and a half knows that Ferrari won the 24 Hours of Le Mans. That might sound pretty standard because Ferrari is the biggest name in the motoring world, a name synonymous with motorsport, and Le Mans is the biggest race on the calendar.

However, this is not the case. Ferrari may be permanently linked to racing, but it hadn’t contested the top class at Le Mans for exactly 50 years. Fifty years. Most people in the world today weren’t even born. But that’s not all. He hadn’t won for 58 years, and this was the centenary edition of the historic race, first launched in 1923. It would take another 100 years for such a momentous occasion to happen again. And who knows what the world will look like, less alone in the race, in 100 years.

If I say it was the most important car race of the 21^st century, you may think I’m exaggerating, but think about it: the celebration of 100 years of the sporting event National geographic say themselves that it is the largest in the world. Bigger than the FIFA World Cup; bigger than the Wimbledon final; even bigger than the Olympics.

Like so many other incredible stories of overcoming adversity, this one started almost purely by chance. When Formula 1 introduced the cost cap rule for the 2021 season, putting in place a spending cap of $145m per team, the biggest outfits – i.e. Ferrari, Mercedes and Red Bull – all found themselves with one major problem: what would they do with all the redundant staff of engineers, designers, technicians and more, which made up a large part of the overall racing effort but, if it was maintained, would push the spending cap well beyond the limit?

At Maranello, Mattia Binotto, then sporting and technical director of Scuderia Ferrari, convinced the board of directors to keep everyone within the brand, assigning all those who could not stay in F1 to a new program in the Championship. World Endurance Championship, with the ultimate goal of winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans again. Eventually.

That was in 2021. All of Ferrari’s technical expertise would surely produce a competitive car, but I’m absolutely certain no one at Maranello – NO ONE – believed the team could win Le Mans for the first time.

In fact, it’s pretty rare to see a driver or a member of any team taking part in the event talking about winning. Le Mans is so random, so unpredictable that many surefire winners have fallen by the wayside throughout the race over the years. When the Toyota TS050 lost power on the last lap in 2016, after dominating rival Porsche for 23 hours and 59 minutes, the legend of Le Mans choosing its winners and not the other way around became even more palpable.

In 2023, before the 24 Hours, Ferrari had lost the first three WEC races to Toyota and the money wise was on the Japanese manufacturer winning Le Mans for the sixth consecutive year – which would have been more than fair, as Toyota has given more to motorsport as a whole over the past decade than any other manufacturer, beating every one of its rivals at Le Mans, the World Rally Championship and the Dakar Rally.

Arriving in La Sarthe, the reality was this: Toyota was in its second full year of competition under the new Hypercar rules, now the top category in the WEC and Le Mans, while all the others were none. still only in the infancy of their efforts.

Peugeot had done some racing in 2022 but was still learning how its revolutionary 9X8 racer works; Scuderia Glickenhaus cars, no matter how competitive, could never afford to beat a factory builder; and Ferraris, Porsches and Cadillacs were objectively in their fourth race with their respective machines.

A year before Le Mans 2023, Ferrari was still testing the 499P chassis at Maranello. The car then made its first outing on the Fiorano test track in July. Toyota was winning races with its hybrid GR010 when the 499P was still only a project on paper. And remember, one is the biggest car manufacturer in the world, the other a small company in a small Italian village.

So you see how winning Le Mans in 2023 was nothing more than a dream for Ferrari. A dream that a Hollywood screenwriter would consider too impossible to be credible. But the reasons why Ferrari is the biggest name in motoring history are made up of these kinds of things; magical moments that create mythical stories and pass on the passion for these cars and this badge from generation to generation.

Remember this: in 1967, when Ferrari was only 20 years old as a manufacturer, it had already built the most desirable cars in the world, it was already the Ferrari as we know it today. How? By doing these things. By playing with people’s emotions and then turning them into four-wheeled works of art.

The brand’s Le Mans race car, the 499P, combines the V6 engine of the 296 GTB road car, producing 680 horsepower, with a highly complex hybrid system that adds an additional 272 electric ponies. The weight is kept very low at 1030 kg, thus generating brutal performance and speed. Plus, it’s stunningly beautiful, a mix of modernity and classic Le Mans prototype lines that give it an even greater aura.

And now having won the most important Le Mans race of all time (again, that’s no exaggeration), the 499P has instantly become an icon of Ferrari lore and one of the most successful racing Ferraris. important and the most important ever built. Obviously, it is also one of the greatest racing cars in the history of the world.

When it comes to drivers, I don’t think I’ve been more jealous of anyone in my entire life. Alessandro Pier Guidi, James Calado and Antonio Giovinazzi put together a performance that will live on in the hearts and minds of tifosi, well, forever. Overnight, these three joined an exclusive and illustrious list of the greatest Ferrari drivers of all time. A list that is made up of names like Schumacher, Lauda, ​​Villeneuve, Hill, Surtees, Bandini, Scarfiotti, Fangio or Ascari.

The two Italians, joined by an Englishman of Portuguese origin, at the wheel of the Ferrari 499P n°51, made such a good duo that less than a tenth of a second elapsed between the fastest lap of each one – precisely 0.092 seconds over a 13.6 km course. knees! That’s how you win a race. That’s how we make history.

Huge congratulations to AF Corse too, of course. The Italian team, responsible for the Ferrari GT program in the WEC and at Le Mans for the past decades, stepped up their game in the Hypercar class and duly beat everyone else, achieving a clear round for the duration of the 342 laps.

It was a magnificent race, with five different manufacturers and six different cars leading in the first three hours – unheard of in 100 years of racing on the Circuit de la Sarthe – and with Ferrari and Toyota going head-to-head throughout the 24 hours until the #8 Toyota crashed and lost over 3 minutes to the Ferrari, 90 minutes before the end.

From there, the #51 red car just had to manage the pace and make sure it didn’t have any electronic issues. And it is not. Tom Kristensen, the driver with the most overall victories in the history of Le Mans, with nine titles to his name, gave up the checkered flag to Alessandro Pier Guidi, the Italian who was surely the happiest man of the planet at that time.

Kristensen himself, the day after the race, admitted that it was, according to him, if not the greatest 24 Hours of Le Mans in history, at least surely the greatest. Ferrari twice overtaking the Toyota on track to regain the race lead, taking their 10^e victory in the general classification, on their return after 50 years of absence and on the centenary edition – it was just one of those days that writes the history of the world and makes the prancing horse a cultural phenomenon like no other the same in automotive terms.

Me? I watched it all, only dozing off for a few brief moments in the middle of the night and crying like a baby by the end. The last time Ferrari won at Le Mans, in 1965, with a painfully beautiful 250 LM, my father was 10 years old and my mother was a three-year-old toddler. I didn’t even have an idea yet. And yet, I read over and over again about this victory. This one will surely achieve the same results today and tomorrow and, inevitably, will be a point of reference for younger generations of Ferraristi around the world.

They will talk about AF Corse, Alessandro Pier Guidi, James Calado, Antonio Giovinazzi and the incredible 499P for the rest of their lives.

Guilherme Brands

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