Le Mans

It’s been a month since Ferrari announced that its future LMH (Le Mans Hypercar) racer will begin its testing session in July. And today, while Ferrari engineers were busy unveiling the design of the future LMH – well kind of, we’ve only seen a picture of a camouflaged car - the company also took the first prototype to the Fiorano test track for the initial track shakedown, and we must admit: the engine sounds insane. Behind the wheel was two-time world endurance champion Alessandro Pier Guidi.

Le Mans is one of the greatest tests of endurance where man and machine are tested for 24 hours at speeds in excess of 200 mph. Almost a century ago, the race began as a showcase for manufacturers to prove their vehicles’ sturdiness in competition. The race was then staged annually without fail, apart from the hiatus during the Second World War. Ever since, thousands of teams have flocked to the French countryside to brave the elements. Racing dynasties also flourished and faded during the years resulting in great stories, legends, and victories that are currently being told. The following are some of the best cars to compete at the Circuit de la Sarthe during the past century.

Cadillac Racing fans can rejoice. Following in the footsteps of Audi, BMW, Ferrari, Peugeot, and Porsche, Cadillac has now announced their own program in endurance racing, with plans to participate in the 2023 Le Mans 24 Hours.

Throughout the years, automotive history has recorded many worthy achievements. Some of them praise the car, others praise the driver, and sometimes both. This was exactly the case with British racing driver Andy Wallace and the Toyota TS010, both of which literally share blood…or cracked bones. The most fanatic of car enthusiasts find some romantic aspect about a car that can hurt you, but was it really the car, the racetrack, or a combination of both that resulted in the incident?

Henri Pescarolo has been there and done it all. After a three-decade-long career as a driver, that yielded a plethora of sports car victories including four at Le Mans in the overall classification, he turned to team management and his Pescarolos were tantalizingly, better yet, painfully close to winning Le Mans in both 2005 and 2006 and ending Audi’s stranglehold on the legendary French race. It is, then, easy to see why when Pescarolo speaks, people listen and the 78-year-old was particularly dismayed at the Lagardere Group’s decision to put the car he drove to victory in the 1972 edition of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, a Matra MS670, up for public auction.

The 88th running of the mythical 24 Hours of Le Mans, the world’s most famous endurance race, may not have been the most exciting of the lot. The much-anticipated rain failed to make an appearance and the classes we expected to put on a show for us hardly did.

So, while the race itself can be considered a letdown, the news that dropped on the build-up to Saturday’s and Sunday’s showdown have been particularly interesting. We now know more about Peugeot’s LM Hypercar program, as well as ByKolles’, and more details have emerged about the upcoming LM Daytona Hybrid ruleset. Read on to also find out whether or not a hydrogen-fueled future is still on the cards at Le Mans and also to find out more about Toyota’s upcoming halo hypercar.

"Racing is life," said Steve McQueen’s character Michael Delaney in the 1971 movie Le Mans. "Everything before or after is just waiting."

So what do you do when you can no longer go out and race? You keep on racing, virtually, from the comfort of your home, of course. That’s what most pro drivers did during the lockdown period but how does a real race compare to one you do in a simulator?

The 24 Hours of Le Mans is one of the most grueling tests for both man and machine in the whole of the racing world.

Organized each year around the scenic country roads near Le Mans, the race’s long history is an undying resource of amazing stories and today we’re looking back at some of the most amazing moments we celebrate this year such as the 30th anniversary of Jaguar’s last outright win or the 50th anniversary of Porsche’s first. 2020 also marks the 40th anniversary of Rondeau’s one and only win by a man driving a car bearing his own name.

Each year for the past nine decades, a laid-back town in the south of France becomes the world capital of speed and endurance. It all happens over the length of one weekend in June but, due to the ongoing pandemic, 2020 will see a different sort of race take place around Circuit de la Sarthe. While the real 24 Hours of Le Mans is bound to take place come autumn, a virtual twice-around-the-clock event will fill the gap on June 14-15 and basically everyone that matters in modern sports car racing is readying to take part.

The last two outright Le Mans wins scored by the Blue Oval were scored by John Wyer’s team, the same team that brought together Jacky Ickx and Derek Bell for their first victory as a duo at Circuit de la Sarthe.

Linking all these three victories, beyond the team, is one emblematic engineer, John Horsman, who in a long and storied career also helped Porsche dominate the world of sports car racing with the 917. Let’s take a look back at Horsman’s career and his intrinsic association with those gorgeous orange and powder blue machines.

Peugeot, the proud manufacturer that stopped at nothing to win the grueling 24 Hours of Le Mans in the early ’90s and again in the late ’00s and early ’10s, will be back at Le Mans in the summer of 2023 as part of a fully-fledged assault on the FIA World Endurance Championship from 2022 onwards. Peugeot, like Toyota, will compete with a bespoke hybrid hypercar not based on a current production model and the work will be carried out in-house by Peugeot Sport, although it’s believed outside partners such as ORECA could offer some assistance. Peugeot will thus make its debut in the FIA WEC in the third season of the new ’Hypercar’ regulations that come into effect next year for the 2020-2021 season.

Peugeot Sport, first with Frenchman Jean Todt at the helm and then with his pal Olivier Quesnel, has won the 24 Hours of Le Mans three times since it first took part in the French race all the way back in 1926. The company has also enjoyed success as an engine supplier, powering the early Pescarolos as well as the WM P88 Group C car, the fastest car to ever race at Le Mans that reached a top speed of 253 mph in 1988. With almost a century of history at Circuit de la Sarthe by the time Peugeot Sport’s new hypercar will debut in 2022, it’s safe to say the French automaker set its own bar very high for its comeback. In the light of this challenge - one that the French engineers most definitely relish - let’s take a quick look back at Peugeot’s history at Le Mans and in endurance racing as a whole.

We first saw the Koenigsegg Jesko at the 2019 Geneva Auto Show. There, the replacement of the Agera RS, the current world’s fastest production road car, gathered quite the crowd, not least because of the Swedish automaker’s insane performance claims: that the Jesko puts out 1,578 horses on E85 biofuel or that a low-downforce version could reach 300 mph. Soon, though, we may see the Jesko do other things that the Agera RS never dreamt of doing besides traveling at 300 mph, such as going to the races. What races? The ones in the World Endurance Championship.

The Koenigsegg Jesko, a limited-run hypercar that could reset our standards for what’s fast and what’s outrageously fast, is merely the latest proof that Christian Von Koenigsegg and his motley crew means business. The Swedes thought that having a car in their stable that could do 278 mph on a public road (not on a gimmicky oval like Nardo) is not enough and, as such, the Jesko betters the Agera RS in almost all conceivable ways. It’s so incredible that if Koenigsegg does decide to turn it into a racing car, it won’t race with the likes of the Ferrari 488 GTB, the Aston Martin Vantage, the Chevy Corvette and all of the other GTs, instead gunning for the overall honors courtesy of the new Prototype Hypercar rules that will come into effect in 2020.

The 87th edition of the legendary of the 24 Hours of Le Mans brought tears of joys in the eyes of a few and tears of despair in the eyes of many. It was a race jampacked with thrilling battles in the GT ranks as well as some truly dramatic moments in the prototype classes, and we even got a topsy-turvy finish at the sharp end of the field. This may not be one for the history books, but there are plenty of stories emerging from France after last week’s 24-hour race that ended the FIA WEC 2018-2019 Super Season.

The FIA WEC is for the world what the IMSA Weathertech Championship is for North-America, namely the premier sports car racing series. lsoBorn from the ashes of the ill-fated Intercontinental Le Mans Cup that only survived two meager years, the WEC (which stands for World Endurance Championship) wishes to continue the decades-old tradition of the original World Sports Car Championship (turned World Manufacturer’s Championship at one point) that debuted in the mid-’50s but perished in 1992 due to the rising costs of the F1-derived Group C prototypes.

The current World Endurance Championship has also been through some dark days and, in more ways than one, these dark days are bound to continue. Scroll back just three years ago, and you’ll find a healthy and exciting LMP1-Hybrid class with three works programs ducking it all out on the track. Then Audi left. Then Porsche left. And the FIA and the ACO (the Automobile Club de l’Ouest, organizer of the 24 Hours of Le Mans) found themselves without two the headliners of the show. Board meetings followed board meetings and discussions with interested parties, and it was agreed that privateers could compete in the top class, LMP1, with non-hybrid cars and they’d be roughly on par with the lone works team, Toyota Gazoo Racing.

However, the Japanese giant, who’d tried to win Le Mans since the ’80s, was in a position of power and pushed rule makers to dance to its own music and the end result was the lackluster 2018-2019 Super Season we just saw come to an end last weekend.