Yahoo Autos 2019 24 Hours of Le Mans - The Live Blog
Hour 00:14: Despite a purported advantage of as much as 10 MPH of top end speed on the Mulsanne, neither privateer LMP1 entry was able to get anywhere near the Toyotas to start the race. The gap from first to third overall is already fifteen seconds, meaning it's accelerating at about three times the rate qualifying times would have implied.
Hour 00:01: Green. Toyota #7 has to block a Rebellion and Toyota #8 has found it sway to the lead. A few LMP2 cars taking a quick shortcut on the way up to the Dunlop bridge, but no issues. The Toyotas run as they qualified, with the #3 Rebellion and #11 SMP Racing cars rounding out the top four.
GTE-Pro, as ever, an absolute dogfight. Every single one of these seventeen cars can win this race in class, but currently the #95 Aston Martin has a slim margin over the #63 Corvette, #67 Ford GT, and the #93 and #92 Porsches. The #82 BMW makes it five manufacturers in the top six.
TDS Racing leads Signatech Alpine, a sort-of factory team in a class that's explicitly supposed to be completely unrelated from any factory, in LMP2.
GTE-Am is happening, too. That's a class with a car called "Car Guy Racing" in it,
Hour 00:00: Both the 2019 and 2020 24 Hours of Le Mans, strange victims of a restructuring for the FIA World Endurance Championship from a Summer series to a Winter series and from a series headed up by LMP1 to one led by a new Hypercar class, are strange, almost lame duck races.
In LMP1, this is an odd bird. Toyota, most assume, had won this race overall the very day Porsche closed its 919 Hybrid program. There are other cars in the class, but they have not historically been fast enough to pressure those cars into mistakes, let alone to pressure them to win races on pace. The gap in qualifying was shockingly small, however, given that the Toyota is the lone factory hybrid in the field; Toyota #7 is on pole by less than a second over custom entries from both Rebellion and SMP Racing. The top six are within a respectable second and a half over a gargantuan eight mile lap. Is that pace real, something that will be reflected in the race? If so, will it be enough for a non-Toyota to compete?
GTE-Pro has a bit more of a sense of finality to it. We know this is the last Le Mans for both BMW and Ford's factory-run programs, and the last before Aston Martin turns more focus to its 2021 Hypercar program that will compete for an overall win than to their GTE program that will continue at least through Le Mans next year. This, as a result, may be the last great race of an era, with additional entries from Porsche, Ferrari, and Ford's IMSA programs supporting two factory entries each from those three and Aston Martin, plus two stalwart entries from Corvette Racing. The Fords and BMWs may be back with different teams in a one-off next year, but this is likely the most factory or factory-backed entries this race will see in a GT class for quite a long time.
Both LMP2 and GTE-Am will provide what they always have, a shocking length of quality entries in classes that have always technically been meant for the amateur drivers, but every year seem to have more and more cars skirting driver rating rules to feature two or three professionals.
Twenty four hours sit between each of these sixty-some entries and the ultimate prize. Can Toyota win a race that may as well be its birthright? Can a private manufacturer do something closer to unprecedented than not in the modern history of this ancient race and steal a win from a factory program? Can some combination of poor luck and the notorious unreliability of those private LMP1 cars give some LMP2, or even GTE-Pro, team the upset of the century? Only time and patience will tell.
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