Toyota Ends the Wait: No.7 Wins the 2026 24 Hours of Le Mans
- Adam Prescott
- 5 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Three years of near misses, mechanical heartbreak and questions about whether their moment had passed are over. Toyota Gazoo Racing is back on the top step at the Circuit de la Sarthe, the No.7 GR010 Hybrid of Kamui Kobayashi, Mike Conway and Nyck de Vries winning the 94th running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans after one of the closest and most strategically charged editions in recent memory. It is Toyota’s sixth Le Mans victory and its first since 2022, and it arrived not through outright dominance but through patience, opportunism and a faultless final few hours.
How the race was won
For most of the 24 hours, the No.7 was the quieter of the two Toyotas, shadowing a race that Cadillac, BMW and its own sister car took turns to lead. The turning point came at the start of the 19th hour, when a Safety Car closed the field up and dragged the No.7 back onto the lead lap of the fight. A Full Course Yellow in the 22nd hour then handed Kobayashi the launchpad he needed, and he carried an 18-second cushion over the sister No.8 of Sébastien Buemi into the final hour. From there the veteran Japanese driver was untroubled, managing the gap cleanly to the chequered flag.
It is a second Le Mans triumph for both Kobayashi and Conway, while de Vries claimed his maiden victory at the event. The win caps a remarkable recovery for a car that, on pure pace, had been beaten by its garage-mate for much of the weekend.
Hypercar podium and the chasing pack
The fight for second was the race’s closing drama. Robin Frijns, sharing the No.20 BMW M Hybrid V8 with René Rast and Sheldon van der Linde, hunted down Buemi and went around the outside of the No.8 on the approach to the Porsche Curves with 47 minutes left to run. He was 22 seconds adrift of the leader at that point and, despite closing, could not bridge the gap, taking the flag 10.981 seconds behind after 381 laps. Second place is BMW’s best Le Mans result since its outright win in 1999, a genuine landmark for the Munich programme.
Buemi, on significantly older rubber, gambled on fresh tyres at his final stop and could not recover the position, bringing the No.8 he shares with Brendon Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa home third. Cadillac Hertz Team JOTA, so commanding for the first 18 hours, ultimately came up short and finished fourth with the No.12 of Louis Delétraz, Will Stevens and Norman Nato. The No.51 AF Corse Ferrari of Alessandro Pier Guidi, James Calado and Antonio Giovinazzi led the Prancing Horse home in fifth, marking Ferrari’s first Le Mans defeat since its top-class return in 2023. Alpine, Aston Martin, a second Cadillac and the privately entered No.83 Ferrari filled out a competitive top ten.
Hypercar final classification (top ten)
Pos | Car / Team / Drivers | Result |
1 | No.7 Toyota GR010 Hybrid – Toyota Gazoo Racing (Kobayashi / Conway / de Vries) | Winner, 381 laps |
2 | No.20 BMW M Hybrid V8 – BMW M Team WRT (Frijns / Rast / van der Linde) | +10.981s |
3 | No.8 Toyota GR010 Hybrid – Toyota Gazoo Racing (Buemi / Hartley / Hirakawa) | 3rd |
4 | No.12 Cadillac V-Series.R – Hertz Team JOTA (Delétraz / Stevens / Nato) | 4th |
5 | No.51 Ferrari 499P – AF Corse (Pier Guidi / Calado / Giovinazzi) | 5th |
6 | No.35 Alpine A424 – Alpine Endurance Team | 6th |
7 | No.83 Ferrari 499P – AF Corse (Kubica / Ye / Hanson) | 7th |
8 | No.007 Aston Martin Valkyrie – Aston Martin THOR Team | 8th |
9 | No.101 Cadillac V-Series.R – Wayne Taylor Racing | 9th |
10 | No.36 Alpine A424 – Alpine Endurance Team | 10th |
Gaps and laps per official timing. Peugeot’s 9X8s finished 11th and 12th, ahead of the surviving No.19 Genesis GMR-001.
Key moments across the 24 hours
The night belonged to Cadillac. The No.12 emerged from the small hours with a healthy lead once the sister No.38, an earlier front-runner, was retired at around 08:00 with a power steering failure. But the American challenge unravelled through Sunday morning, a drive-through penalty and a poorly timed neutralisation eroding the advantage and inviting BMW and Toyota back into contention.
BMW threw everything at it. The No.20 led after a bold tyre gamble built a 20-second cushion, only for a Safety Car to wipe it out, and a Frijns lock-up at pit entry briefly dropped the car to fourth before its late recovery to the podium. Ferrari’s hopes of a fourth straight win were dismantled piece by piece: the No.50 lost almost half an hour overnight to a fire extinguisher problem before stopping for good at Tertre Rouge with suspected electrical trouble, leaving the No.51 to salvage fifth.
Notable retirements and drives
Tertre Rouge again proved unforgiving, also claiming Genesis’ No.17 to a suspension failure on the Korean marque’s debut, though the sister No.19 soldiered on to complete the programme’s first Le Mans finish. The No.15 BMW, sidelined in its garage since the morning, was officially retired before the flag. Among the standout drives, the No.7 crew’s composure under pressure and BMW’s relentless pursuit of second deserve special mention, while Alpine ran a quietly accomplished race on its self-styled “Last Dance” at La Sarthe.
LMP2: Inter Europol completes a one-two
LMP2 went the way of the defending class winners. Inter Europol Competition scored its third Le Mans class victory in four years, the No.43 of Jakub Smiechowski, Nick Yelloly and Tom Dillmann pulling more than 20 seconds clear of the sister No.343 of Nico Müller, Reshad De Gérus and Bijoy Garg in the closing stages. Forestier Racing by Panis took third with the No.29 after an impressive recovery from a lap down overnight. The story of the class, though, was its heartbreak: the No.30 Duqueine of Doriane Pin, Julien Andlauer and Richard Verschoor led for much of the night, with Pin on course to make history, before a brake failure on Sunday morning ended the run. In the Pro/Am sub-class, CrowdStrike Racing by APR’s No.4 cruised to a dominant win, having led by more than a lap since Sunday morning.
LMP2 final classification (top three)
Pos | Car / Team / Drivers | Result |
1 | No.43 Oreca 07-Gibson – Inter Europol Competition (Smiechowski / Yelloly / Dillmann) | Class winner |
2 | No.343 Oreca 07-Gibson – Inter Europol Competition (Müller / De Gérus / Garg) | +20s |
3 | No.29 Oreca 07-Gibson – Forestier Racing by Panis (Gray / Masson / Rousset) | 3rd |
LMGT3: TF Sport Corvette charges from 17th
The bright yellow No.33 TF Sport Corvette Z06 of Ben Keating, Jonny Edgar and Nicky Catsburg won LMGT3 from 17th on the grid. Keating, still recovering from an elbow injury that kept him out of the season’s opening rounds, banked his minimum drive time early, freeing Edgar and Catsburg to build a comfortable cushion as the sun rose. The race’s second and final Safety Car erased that lead, but the crew held its rivals at arm’s length to secure TF Sport’s first Le Mans win since linking up with General Motors in 2024. The No.78 Akkodis ASP Lexus of Tom van Rompuy, Hadrien David and Jack Hawksworth took second, with the No.23 Heart of Racing Aston Martin of Gray Newell, Eduardo Barrichello and Jonny Adam third after Barrichello held off the No.87 Lexus by under two seconds.
LMGT3 final classification (top three)
Pos | Car / Team / Drivers | Result |
1 | No.33 Corvette Z06 LMGT3.R – TF Sport (Keating / Edgar / Catsburg) | Class winner |
2 | No.78 Lexus RC F LMGT3 – Akkodis ASP (van Rompuy / David / Hawksworth) | 2nd |
3 | No.23 Aston Martin Vantage – Heart of Racing (Newell / Barrichello / Adam) | 3rd |
What it means for the FIA WEC championship
Le Mans is round four of the World Endurance Championship and, as the season’s blue-riband event, it reshapes the title picture for the full-season entries. Going into the weekend, BMW led the Hypercar manufacturers’ standings on 59 points from Toyota on 52 and Ferrari on 42, while in the drivers’ table Rast and Frijns topped the order on 35, ahead of the No.8 Toyota crew on 26 and the No.7 trio level on 25 with van der Linde.
Toyota’s win with the No.7 and third place with the No.8 represents a substantial haul that swings momentum firmly back towards the Japanese manufacturer and tightens, if not overturns, BMW’s lead at the top of the manufacturers’ fight. For the drivers, Kobayashi, Conway and de Vries vault up the standings with maximum points from La Sarthe, while Rast, Frijns and van der Linde bank strong points for second to defend their advantage. Ferrari, fifth on the road, loses ground to both, and Cadillac’s fourth place offers encouragement without the points its early-race pace deserved. The championship now heads onward with the German and Japanese camps separated by the finest of margins.
Closing reflections
This was a Le Mans decided not by the fastest car but by the team that made the fewest mistakes when it mattered. Cadillac led longest, BMW was arguably quickest in the closing stages, yet Toyota read the race, took its chances and was there at the end. After three years in the wilderness, the No.7 crew has its name back on the trophy, and the 2026 World Endurance Championship has been blown wide open in the process. As ever at La Sarthe, the clock is the only judge that matters, and this time it favoured Toyota.
Report compiled after the chequered flag, Sunday 14 June 2026. Prescott Motorsport – Adam Prescott
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