Last weekend, Ferrari contested the top category at the Le Mans 24 Hours for the first time in 50 years, and they took me along for the ride.
The greatest endurance race in the world celebrated its centenary, and the grandstands and campsites were even more packed than usual – 325,000 fans descended on France’s La Sarthe region, many of them Brits making the journey over in their sports cars and motorhomes.
For petrolheads, it’s Glastonbury with wheels. They come to see more than 60 cars, and their tag teams of three drivers each, driven to their limits and often beyond from 4pm on Saturday till 4pm Sunday. Durability – both human and mechanical – is the watch word here, as well as speed. Cars are run by both manufacturer and privateer teams, and there are three classes – hybrid Hypercars, which are the fastest, then the LMP2 prototypes, and then the GTE cars, which are based on road-going supercars.
Ferrari took the GTE class victory as recently as 2021, finishing 20th overall, but the last time the Italians competed for outright victory was 1973. They were second on that occasion. In 1965, with Americans Masten Gregory and Ed Hugus and Austrian Formula One legend Jochen Rindt at the wheel of the 250LM, Ferrari secured their sixth and last victory in the 24 Hours. Then Shelby-Ford arrived with their awesome GT40, and if you’ve seen the film Ford v Ferrari (aka Le Mans ’66) you know what happened next.
Having spent the last half-century concentrating almost solely on F1, Ferrari returned to Le Mans in 2023 with the 499P. Its red bodywork with yellow stripes is an ode to the 312P they raced in ’73. The no. 50 car would be driven by Italy’s Antonio Fuoco, Spain’s Miguel Molina and Dane Nicklas Nielsen, the no. 51 car by Britain’s James Calado and Italians Antonio Giovinazzi and Alessandro Pier Guidi.
I had secured the key to an automobile more than worthy of this pilgrimage and made my way over on LeShuttle. Like the 499P, my wheels are a hybrid, mid-engined and rosso corsa Ferrari. A truly mighty road-going hypercar, this (borrowed) SF90 Stradale boasts almost 1,000bhp (which is considerably more powerful than the restricted Le Mans machines). Top speed (if the gendarmes gave me a get-out-of-jail-free card): 211mph. Zero-62mph: an orthopaedist-bothering 2.5 seconds. Cost new: £523,460.
A house cannot do anything I just mentioned. Some people might read this and tut-tut about the cost of living crisis, speed limits, air quality, noise pollution… the hordes of young men waiting at the Chunnel exit with their cameras urging me to blip the twin-turbo V8 engine cared not a jot about any of that. Every bridge we passed under on the 265-mile journey from Calais to Le Mans had a handful of car lovers primed to share my good fortune on the ‘gram. If only one of them would run for Mayor of London.
The best car-spotting was at the track, courtesy of 100 years of the 24 Heures du Mans distilled into a priceless parade. Among the field of swooping and wedge-shaped machinery, demonstrated by the likes of Derek Bell, Jacky Ickx, Mark Webber, and the most successful driver in the history of Le Mans, Tom Kristensen, were such gems as the 1966-winning Ford GT40 MkII, 1988-winning ‘Silk Cut’ Jaguar XJR-9 and 2003-winning Bentley EXP Speed 8.
For the past five years, Toyota has taken the waved chequered flag every time, and it’s been boring. This is why everyone was hyped for the Hypercars this year: The sexiest marque in motordom, Ferrari’s return would be box office gold. Champions Toyota were still considered the team to beat, but there were several other brands now vying for the top spot, including Cadillac, Porsche and Peugeot. Spectacularly, Ferrari locked out the front row of the grid with the no. 50 car on pole position – a lap Fuoco, 27, called ‘one of the best of my career so far’.
I caught up with the drivers in the team motorhome to see how they were feeling on the eve of the biggest race of their lives. ‘I will try not to think about [the pressure], but it’s difficult,’ admitted Molina, 34. Calado and Pier Guidi had won class honours two years ago with the Ferrari 488 GTE Evo, but the Scuderia’s entry in the Hypercar programme is a whole other level, not only when it comes to lap times but also in terms of fulfilling a lifelong dream.
‘None of us thought we’d be doing this,’ said Pier Giudi, 39. Ferrari’s entry was confirmed in February 2021, but the drivers weren’t announced until six months ago. ‘I think we’re driving for Ferrari in the right period.’
James Calado, 34, adds his name to a very select list of British Ferrari-driving champions: Peter Mitchell-Thomson, aka Lord Selsdon, had been the only Englishman to do so outright in the 24 Hours, in 1949, and he did so as a privateer. Meanwhile, its union flag-touting F1 champions total two: Mike Hawthorn (1958) and John Surtees (1964).
I’d first met James in 2011 when he was racing in GP3, an F1-feeder series in which he finished runner-up to Valtteri Bottas and was particularly impressive in the wet. He was possessed of a quiet modesty not unlike a young Damon Hill, and this makes him particularly well-suited to works sports car racing where the emphasis is on team work rather than solo stardom.
Here, his ability not just to set up but develop a car would pay dividends. Having come third in GP2 in 2013 and test driven for the Force India F1 team, he switched from single-seaters to closed wheels and plotted a new course with Ferrari AF Corse. It led to victory in the LMGTE Pro World Endurance Championship in 2017, 2021 and 2022, and class Le Mans wins in 2019 and 2021, finishing second in 2020 and 2022. ‘Ferrari is Italy, but being British and being in Ferrari – I feel very lucky. I’ve got a great opportunity to show them what I can do,’ he told me in the Le Mans paddock.
It took a lot of sorting to make the 499P into the P1 and P2 starter we witnessed on Saturday. ‘When it came out of the factory for its first run, we thought ‘oh my god’. It started accelerating itself, the brakes didn’t work,’ sighed Calado. ‘We thought it would be a tricky car to get right, but we knew the performance was there. The numbers told us it could be phenomenal.
‘It shows that Ferrari is still passionate about sports cars after all these years. It’s not just about Formula One. We don’t know if we’re fastest. Reliability is the biggest fear. We know Toyota has performance in hand. Let’s see.’
It’s a test of endurance just to watch Le Mans, never mind compete. Twenty-four hours sat in a grandstand, or even from the comfort of your sofa, pushes my stamina beyond comprehension (plus, when at a track and benefiting from the perks of hospitality, I always say: 24 hours is a long race, and it’s an even longer open bar). But last weekend’s 24 Hours was the most dramatic and exciting in decades, and I only allowed myself to steal two hours of sleep.
The Toyotas snuck past the Ferraris at the start, and the circuit was wet in parts and dry in others, which caused plenty of cars to spin off and quite a few comings together. French favourites Peugeot even managed to lead for a while (they were slow in the dry, but very rapid in the rain), as did Porsche, yet the Ferraris were always there or thereabouts.
After a chaotic first half of the race, things settled down once the sun rose. While the no. 50 car of Fuoco, Molina and Nielsen had been the leading Ferrari at the start, it was the no. 51 car of Calado, Giovinazzi and Pier Guidi that came to the fore over the 342 laps. The Englishman proved to be the most consistently fast and error-free driver out there.
It became a duel between no. 51 and the Toyota of Sebastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa and anything could happen. With 90 minutes remaining, Hirakawa pushed too hard and slid into the barriers, damaging the GR010’s rear wing. Repair work left the Toyota more than three minutes behind its quarry, and it looked like it was in Maranello’s bag. But there was time for a final twist with 22 mins left on the clock. At the final pitstop, the 499P refused to pull away. Calado, in the garage, had his head in his hands. After a nerve-wracking minute, the headlights flickered back on and it pulled away on its date with destiny.
Ferrari took an unexpected and deserved victory at their first attempt in 50 years. Pier Guidi drove the final stint in glorious sunshine, with the no. 8 Toyota just over a minute behind. After taking the chequered flag and slowing, Calado and Guidi climbed onto the sills for a victory drive-by. The last time Ferrari did this, Lyndon B. Johnson was in the White House and the Beatles were still working on Rubber Soul.
This has heralded another golden era of endurance racing. Lamborghini, which started building sports cars 60 years ago essentially to spite Enzo Ferrari when the two founders had a falling out, will enter the Hypercar class next year. Like Le Mans ’66, Ferrari will go head-to-head with a sworn enemy. For now, though, they can take stock of an historic achievement, and I can enjoy the blast back to Blighty in an automobile engineered by the best in the business.
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