The other car to cross the line, remarkably, was the No. 5 TRSM Racing Ginetta G60-LT-P1, which completed 289 laps through the 24 hours in a race, let’s not forget, that marked the car’s competition debut.Charlie Robertson, Mike Simpson and Leo Roussel and the highly-motivated crew in the garage powered through the various problems that hit the car during the race to bring it home after the sister car’s race ended early, grinding to a halt on the Mulsanne Straight during the night.
It wasn’t the run that six months ago the team would have hoped for, but after the trials and tribulations of the team’s issues since the pre-season Prologue, this will feel like a win — and rightly so.The rest of the field didn’t make it, the most heart-breaking of the lot being the No. 11 SMP Racing BR1 of Jenson Button, Vitaly Petrov and Mikhail Alehsin, which retired in the final hour after the engine blew with Button in the car. It would have been a top-five finish for the crew, which hit trouble in the opening stages of the race and lost more than two hours with two major spells in the pits.
The sister car didn’t fare much better, the car’s race ending at the Porsche Curves in spectacular fashion after Matevos Issakyan went flying into the tires backwards — before the engine blew while the Russian was trying to get the car back to the pits.DragonSpeed’s BR1 and the ByKolles CLM failed to make the finish, too, Ben Hanley and Dominik Kraihamer having big offs at the Porsche Curves respectively, ending a tough race for both teams.