Porsche takes dramatic third straight Le Mans win

After losing to Porsche on the final lap past year, Toyota is back in force at the 24 Hours Le Mans with superfast cars.

The only other LMP1 entrant is the number four ByKolles Racing ENSO and that retired in the second hour after Britain’s Oliver Webb made contact with the wall on the opening lap.

The number 38 auto had looked on course for a shock victory when it inherited the lead after the number one Porsche retired with an oil pressure issue around 21 hours into the race.

Behind the #38 vehicle was the #13 Vaillante Rebellion Oreca-Gibson LMP2 of Nelsen Piquet Jr, David Heinemeier Hansson and Mathias Beche to complete the overall podium, while the #37 Jackie Chan auto driven by David Cheng, Tristan Gommendy and Alex Brundle completed the LMP2 top three. Once the Toyotas faltered, that team kicked into high gear, and the projected time for that auto to pass the LMP2 leader moved from the end of the race to the middle of hour 23. Toyota said the issue was a clutch problem.

And the night went from bad to worse for Toyota, who had already had their #8 vehicle ruled out of contention, when #9 suffered a major puncture to the left rear and was unable to make it back to the pits before the damage became too severe.

Slow zones threatened to hamper Bernhard’s progress, but the inevitable happened with just over an hour from the end, when the German overtook Tung and raced towards the chequered flag.

Le Mans is a precious laboratory in which we can continue to take up the challenges related to the technologies involved, putting such technologies to the test in an extreme environment. At that point the only LMP1-H auto with a shot of victory – the #2 team of Timo Bernhard, Brendon Hartley and Earl Bamber – was running fifth and five laps behind. Third place overall also went to an LMP2 vehicle, the #13 Vaillante Rebellion. Porsche, at one point, held a 13 lap lead, which dissolved into a 5 lap deficit instantaneously.

They had to make up the lost ground to the fastest of the LMP2 cars and Bernhard didn’t take the lead until the end of the 2nd to final hour.

Jackie Chan bought an ownership stake in DC Racing previous year, and the Hollywood star would have been jumping for joy at the sight of the leaderboard, with two of his team’s cars making the top five as the race headed towards its conclusion.

The GTE Pro class came down to the very final lap.

Kobayashi tried to get the auto back to the pits but a full lap of the 8.5-mile circuit proved too much and he was forced to abandon the vehicle.

Only the number eight Toyota remained on track, in 15th place and 28 laps behind the leading Porsche of former winners Neel Jani of Switzerland, Britain’s Nick Tandy and Germany’s Andre Lotterer.

Bernhard also won the race in 2010 when driving for the dominant Audi team.

Kobayashi ground to a halt moments later and was forced to retire the vehicle at the Porsche Curves. It then ran into clutch problems and Kobayashi’s attempts to bring the vehicle back to the pits on electrical power failed. It briefly caught fire as he attempted to limp it back to the pits. Jordan Taylor was leading in the #63 Corvette C7.R followed closely by Jonathan Adam in the #97 Aston Martin.

Then came an Hour 21 which put the overall victory up for grabs.