H+8 Cool Racing leads after one third of an unpredictable race
Lots happened during the first part of the 2024 24 Hours of Le Mans, most particularly weather-wise. After eight hours of track action, Cool Racing’s #37 ORECA 07 is leading the race, which was under safety car for quite a long time. At 12am, it remains very hard to predict which ORECA 07 will cross the checkered flag first in the LMP2 class. Who knows.
LMP2:
At 4pm, Zinedine Zidane waved the flag to signal the start of the 92nd edition of the twice around the clock in Sarthe. Since then, the drivers have been battling it out on track, in the pits as well as in terms of strategy. In the LMP2 class, the ORECA 07s also faced multiple intense yet short spells of rain – thunderstorms that contributed to making the event even more unpredictable.
Following on a major incident involving BMW’s #15 hypercar, the race was neutralized for over one hour and a half. The safety car eventually went back into the pits at the one-third mark.
As the race resumed, all of the cars rushed into the pits to switch to wet-weather tires. Cool Racing’s #37 ORECA 07 (Lorenzo Fluxa, Malthe Jakobsen, Ritomo Miyata) came back out first, ahead of Nielsen Racing’s #22 ORECA 07 (Fabio Scherer, David Heinemeier-Hanson, Kyffin Simpson). AF Corse’s #183 (François Perrodo, Ben Barnicoat, Nicolas Varrone) was third.
Having started in pole position, AO by TF (PJ Hyett, Louis Delétraz, Alex Quinn) is now fourth ahead of Vector Sport (Ryan Cullen, Patrick Pilet, Stéphane Richelmi were in the lead for quite a while).
After eight hours, only one ORECA 07 is missing on track as Proton Competition’s #16 was forced to withdraw.
Hypercar:
None of the Alpine A424s remain on track. Just before the five-hour mark, the #35 car suffered an engine failure while Ferdinand Habsburg-Lothringen was behind the wheel and had to retire. Around ten minutes later, Nicolas Lapierre, Matthieu Vaxiviere, and Mick Schumacher’s #36 car also faced an engine issue and had to withdraw.