LM24, Hour by hour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y160BCjZ34
--------------------------------------------------------------2023 LM24, Hour 5: Ecstacy, Then Agony, For JOTA!
Yifei Ye drives to the lead, only to crash at Porsche Curves; Ferrari AF Corse 499Ps back up front
10 June 2023, 8:17 PM
At 8:18 PM, a long Safety Car necessitated by barrier repairs and medical cars reporting to the scene of a multi-car crash at the Porsche Curves escape road was lifted and the 24 Hours of Le Mans was back to green flag racing.
And the restart gave us yet another new leader at the top of the hour: The #38 Hertz Team JOTA, which started this race 60th out of 62 cars, rocketed to the lead!
Yifei Ye had to restart from sixth, cut through four other cars, then had to wrestle with the #94 Peugeot TotalEnergies 9X8 of Gustavo Menezes on the first lap after the Safety Car was withdrawn. But after swapping the lead three times, the Chinese driver and his gold Porsche took the lead through Indianapolis and drove off from the field.
But just minutes ago, it all went wrong – with a 15-second lead, Ye got it all wrong exiting the Porsche Curves, spun off, and crashed rear-first into the tyre barriers! He struggled to bring the car back to the pits without crashing again, where it has gone to the garage for repairs.
Dane Cameron passed both Ferrari AF Corse 499Ps with a brilliant three-wide manoeuvre down Les Hunaudieres on the restart, it would eventually bring him to second place.
But his #5 Porsche Penske Motorsport 963 was given a drive-through penalty for overtaking under the Safety Car intervention. And to top it all off, the #6 Porsche picked up a rear-right puncture during Andre Lotterer’s stint – it’s almost all gone wrong for the Porsche fleet.
Ye’s crash and the debris that it spilled brought out a Full Course Yellow (FCY) to end this hour.
Hypercar is now back to a Ferrari 1-2, with Antonio Giovinazzi leading in the #51, ahead of Miguel Molina in the #50.
Cameron served his drive-through penalty and is still running third in the #5 Penske Porsche, and Nick Tandy is now fourth in the #75.
The #94 Peugeot has settled back into fifth with Loic Duval now aboard, once Menezes finally came in for a full-service stop and driver change – followed by the two Toyota Gazoo Racing GR010 HYBRIDs, the #8 of Brendon Hartley and the #7 of Jose Maria Lopez.
In LMP2, the #41 Team WRT Oreca-07 Gibson leads its class with Louis Deletraz holding off the #23 United Autosports Oreca of Oliver Jarvis.
JOTA still has one more challenger for victory – in LMP2. The #28 Oreca, now piloted by Oliver Rasmussen, is in third place after a pit stop.
AF Corse’s #80 Oreca leads LMP2 Pro-Am and is seventh of all in LMP2. Francois Perrodo is doing his drive time very early, which sets up nicely for Ben Barnicoat and Norman Nato to do most of the heavy lifting to the chequered flag.
Under the FCY, AF Corse’s #54 Ferrari was leading GTE-Am again, the silver car’s fuel strategy cycling the car up and down the class. Francesco Castellacci’s lead had been ten seconds before the FCY, but the #911 Proton Competition Porsche closed the gap to four seconds at the green flag, Martin Rump enjoying solid and extended seat time. Sarah Bovy’s #85 Iron Dames Porsche was third, closing in on the #911 car.
As the race approaches quarter-distance, damage assessment in the GTE-Am class seems appropriate. The rate of attrition in GTE-Am is unusually high at this stage of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, with five retirements.
A further casualty of the wet weather carnage was Lilou Wadoux in the Richard Mille AF Corse Ferrari. Any chance of a repeat of the form that landed the French woman driver a historic victory at Spa dissipated as the Ferrari was one of the early casualties of the standing water in the braking zone for the right-hander at the entry to the Porsche Curves.
The #83 car had a high-speed loss of grip, with a resulting heavy backward impact. A WEC spokesperson confirmed, as mentioned in our previous hourly report, that Wadoux was not injured although the crash necessitated the intervention of medical vehicles.
Wadoux is currently undergoing precautionary checks at the circuit medical centre.
Further to the retirements of the #16 Proton Competition Porsche, the #77 Dempsey-Proton Racing Porsche that was heavily clouted by the United Autosports prototype re-joined the race having lost seven laps under the safety car.
Similarly, Nicolas Varrone was now aboard the #33 Corvette, the dominant form of the C8.R currently in the restraint of a five-lap deficit due to a front damper failure.
Jenson Button presses on in the Garage 56 #24 Chevrolet, out on his own on track, a minute behind the ninth-placed car in GTE-Am, 50 seconds ahead of the recovering Floyd Vanwall Hypercar, and gaining ground with every consistent stint.