Night has fallen on the Le Mans circuit. On the track, no notable change with Toyota largely at the forefront, as in 2020 and 2021. Alpine has chained technical problems and has nothing more to hope for except carnage among the Hypercar leaders.
From the start, the two GR010s from the Japanese team took off with Sébastien Buemi at the wheel of the n°8 and Mike Conway in the cockpit of the n°7. The positions were reversed after the first pit stop and last year’s winning crew (Conway – Lopez – Kobayashi) moved into the lead. Since then, the two Japanese cars have been driving together well ahead of the rest of the peloton.
Drifting Alpine
The highlight of this start of the race in the Hypercar category is the lack of pace of the Alpine, qualified in third position but disturbed by a readjustment against the BoP. Race management took power away from it (32 MJ) and the blue car no longer has the energy displayed on Thursday evening during the Hyperpole. It had a difficult start, overtaken by the Glickenhaus and even an LMP2, and its driver Nicolas Lapierre could only see the flight of his adversaries. A three-minute pit stop briefly put a Glickenhaus within range of the Alpine, then the gap widened again. Until a pit stop of 13’33” by the French car which was returned to the garage for an intervention on the clutch. It came out on the track before returning to the pits for a new intervention. Then a passage in André Negrao’s gravel trap has knocked the French team out a bit more, now eight laps behind, while Glickenhaus is currently in third and fourth place with unfailing reliability, but a deficit 709. The sister car was left behind after Olivier Pla left the track at Tertre Rouge, a mishap that caused him to lose four laps.
In LMP2, already several incidents since the start. One of the favorites (United Autosport n°22) was sandwiched from the first acceleration before ending up in the gravel pit of the Dunlop.
Similar events continued in this category renowned for the homogeneity of the field. The Vector Sport team (which notably includes Sébastien Bourdais) for example managed a solid comeback after a qualification which had sent it to the back of the grid. She was in the top 10 when her driver Ryan Cullen made a mistake on the first lap of his stint! The classification is flown over by the Jota n°38 which has nearly a minute and a half ahead of its pursuers (Prema and Penske).
In GT-Pro, a hard blow for the No. 64 Corvette, which suffered a puncture shortly before 11 p.m., then led the category. She lost a lot of time to get to her pit and then go through a technical check in the garage. The American team, which had outclassed its opponents in qualifying, could hope for a first victory since 2015. It is now left behind by the Porsches!