Cadillac Clear at Hour 18 as Overnight Attrition Reshapes the Le Mans Fight

Adam Prescott
3 minutes ago
5 min read

With six hours left at La Sarthe, the #12 Cadillac Hertz Team JOTA machine of Louis Deletraz, Will Stevens and Norman Nato leads the 94th 24 Hours of Le Mans by close to a minute. A night of relentless attrition has thinned the Hypercar pack, eliminating the polesitting BMW, the sister #38 Cadillac and a works Ferrari 499P. The fight for second between Sheldon van der Linde's BMW and Brendon Hartley's Toyota remains alive, but the American manufacturer looks well placed to end a drought that stretches back further than most in Maison Blanche care to remember.

Image - Rick Kiewiet - Prescott Motorsport

How the night built

The first eight hours of the 94th 24 Hours of Le Mans were as competitive as any the event has produced in the Hypercar era. Toyota's #8 GR010 Hybrid, starting from fifteenth after a dramatic qualifying week, cut through the field to take an early lead before the two Cadillacs and the #20 BMW waded in. What followed was a four-way battle that changed hands on strategy, tyre choice and, on at least one occasion, sheer audacity, Jack Aitken threading the #38 Cadillac past Sheldon van der Linde's BMW through the Ford Chicanes in a move that drew gasps from those watching on.

BMW's polesitting #15, shared by Kevin Magnussen, Raffaele Marciello and Dries Vanthoor, never featured. Magnussen gave ground from the start and matters unravelled entirely when Vanthoor made contact with a LMP2 car at the Porsche curves, shredding a tyre and costing the car irreplaceable time. By the eighth hour the #15 was four laps adrift and out of the reckoning for the overall win.

The first safety car period arrived at the eighth hour, following a collision between the #54 Vista AF Corse Ferrari 296 GT3 Evo and the #88 Proton Competition Ford Mustang at the Forest Esses. The Ferrari retired on the spot, the first of several cars to leave the circuit for good during the night, and the intervention wiped the strategic gaps that had accumulated over eight hours of racing. When the green flag reappeared, fourteen cars were on the lead lap and the fight was, in effect, reset.

Ferrari's night to forget

The safety car was bad news for AF Corse, who were already watching one of their Hypercar entries fall out of contention. The #50 Ferrari 499P required twenty-eight minutes of work in the pits around midnight after a problem with its fire extinguisher system. When Alessandro Pier Guidi's #51 entry and the #83 AF Corse car, crewed by Robert Kubica, Yifei Ye and Phil Hanson, were the only Ferrari Hypercars still running with any realistic prospect of points, the gap from where the team had been in previous years was jarring. Kubica was candid in the middle of the night, acknowledging a lack of acceleration on the straights that he said was beyond the team's control.

The rise and fall of the #38

Around the twelfth hour the #12 Cadillac assumed the lead it has not since given up. Its sister car, the #38 of Sebastien Bourdais, Earl Bamber and Jack Aitken, had been part of the front-running group all night and moved briefly back in front during the fourteenth hour through the rhythm of the pit cycle. Then came the moment that changed the shape of the race. Power steering failure called the #38 in while running second, and this time there was no quick fix. The garage shutters came down and that was that, a brutal conclusion for a crew that had produced some of the most compelling racing of the whole event.

The loss promoted the #20 BMW into second, where van der Linde has been measured and consistent throughout his stints. Behind him, Brendon Hartley in the #8 Toyota has maintained contact, though an uncharacteristic moment at Mulsanne Corner earlier in the night, where Hartley briefly took the escape road, allowed the gap to the Cadillac ahead to close to four-tenths of a second before order was restored. Sebastien Buemi later underlined the Toyota's raw pace by setting the fastest lap of the race at three minutes twenty-five point nine six eight seconds, a marker that keeps pressure on the leaders as the morning wears on.

The #101 Cadillac WTR, sharing the pit lane with the leading entry, has endured a punishing night of its own, accumulating three drive-through penalties for slow zone and yellow flag infringements, while Filipe Albuquerque added an excursion through the gravel at the pit lane entry to proceedings. Genesis Magma Racing, making their Le Mans debut, continued to impress even as their night grew difficult. The #17 GMR-001 eventually retired with front-right suspension failure in the early morning hours, ending what had been a remarkably disciplined introduction to the world's greatest endurance race.

Six hours to run

In LMP2, the #30 Duqueine Oreca of Doriane Pin, Julien Andlauer and Richard Verschoor has held the class lead since the twelfth hour, the Mercedes F1 junior Pin among the outstanding individual performances of the race so far. Behind her, the two Inter Europol Competition entries have traded places depending on strategy, with Vector Sport fourth and Proton Competition fifth.

The LMGT3 class has been dominated by the #33 TF Sport Corvette Z06, where Nicky Catsburg's overnight stint was commanding enough to stretch the lead to one minute thirty seconds over the #78 Akkodis ASP Lexus. The Heart of Racing Aston Martins, who qualified on pole, sit third and fifth, separated by a Ferrari, and with the top fifteen still on the same lap at the halfway mark, any further safety car could reset the picture entirely.

Six hours remain at the Circuit de la Sarthe. The #12 Cadillac has navigated the night in better shape than any of its rivals. Whether it can hold on until fifteen hundred hours this afternoon is the question that will keep La Sarthe watching until the very end.

CLASS STANDINGS AT HOUR 18

Hypercar

Pos	#	Car / Drivers	Team	Gap
1	12	Deletraz / Stevens / Nato	Cadillac Hertz Team JOTA	Leader
2	20	Frijns / Rast / van der Linde	BMW M Team WRT	approx. +55s
3	8	Buemi / Hartley / Hirakawa	Toyota Racing	approx. +65s
4	7	Conway / Kobayashi / de Vries	Toyota Racing	+2 laps approx.
5	51	Pier Guidi / Calado / Giovinazzi	Ferrari AF Corse	+2 laps approx.

LMP2

Pos	#	Car / Drivers	Team	Gap
1	30	Pin / Andlauer / Verschoor	Duqueine Team	Leader
2	343	de Gerus / Garg / Mueller	Inter Europol Competition	n/a
3	43	Inter Europol Competition	Inter Europol Competition	n/a
4	26	Cullen / Fittipaldi / Lomko	Vector Sport	n/a
5	9	Proton Competition crew	Proton Competition	n/a

LMGT3

Pos	#	Car / Drivers	Team	Gap
1	33	Keating / Edgar / Catsburg	TF Sport (Corvette)	Leader (+1m 30s)
2	78	Akkodis ASP crew	Akkodis ASP (Lexus)	approx. +1m 30s
3	27	James / Robichon / Drudi	Heart of Racing (Aston)	n/a
4	75	Ferrari crew	Ferrari 296 GT3 Evo	n/a
5	23	Newell / Barrichello / Adam	Heart of Racing (Aston)	n/a