This weekend, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, one of motorsport’s three biggest races, takes place in France.
The annual endurance race, along with the Indianapolis 500 and the Monaco Grand Prix, makes up the ‘triple crown,’ an unofficial achievement that only the late Graham Hill can claim to have won, with 62 different cars taking the start, racing on a mix of permanent race track and public roads that locals use to get to the supermarket or the local McDonald’s.
The 24 Hours of Le Mans is not the oldest race in the world, but it’s been around since 1923.
The race was started as a way to give the automotive industry a grueling test for their new machinery and has remained the area of motorsport with the most road relevance, with disc brakes, for example, crossing over from aerospace to road cars at Le Mans, and better brakes continue to be tested there today.
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The 62 cars are split across three different classes, each crewed by three drivers who take shifts at the wheel, with some of the drivers being pros, among the world’s very best, but plenty are amateurs.
The top class, with the fastest cars, is called Hypercar, contested by factory teams and all-professional driver lineups, with cars like the Ferrari, Peugeot, and Toyota, which were designed completely in-house to a set of regulations called LMH.
Under LMH rules, the cars can have temporary all-wheel drive above 93 mph, but the bulk of Hypercar cars, including Alpine, BMW, Cadillac, and Genesis, are built to LMDh specifications, which is a cheaper approach than LMH.
LMDh cars use the same transmission, hybrid motor, and hybrid battery, and the automakers design the bodywork and bring their own engines and software to the party, but an LMDh car has yet to win Le Mans.
To keep performance levels between the different cars equal, the sport uses a process called “balance of performance” to handicap machines into equality, with a maximum power output of 670 hp.
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LMP2 cars are sports prototypes one step down from the Hypercars, and they all use the same 4.0 L Gibson V8 engine making 600 hp, with no hybrid system, and nine of the 19 LMP2 teams racing this year have a mix of professional and amateur drivers, including some Silicon Valley entrants and younger drivers who have yet to level up the bronze/silver/gold/platinum ranking system.
Doriane Pin is one of two women racing at Le Mans this weekend, along with Lilou Wadoux, and the final category is for cars that started life as true road cars, and it’s called LMGT3, which was created back in 2005 by Stéphane Ratel as a way to make sports car racing less expensive for amateurs, with 25 LMGT3 cars in this year’s race, all from pro-am teams that must have at least one bronze and one silver driver among the crew.
Under the LMGT3 rules, each OEM builds their new car, then it’s benchmarked against the class, and the power and weight are adjusted to keep it in the right range, using a process called “balance of performance”, and the race begins at 4 pm local time tomorrow.
The race can be watched in the US on HBO or Tru, or via the FIA WEC streaming service, and for those who want to learn more about the history of Le Mans, Richard Williams’ recent book 24 Hours is highly recommended, written for the race’s centenary year in 2023, and for a different type of racing, fans can look forward to the action of other events.