By Jack Webster & Eddie LePine
Photos by Fabrice Huet
Can Ferrari pull off the hat trick at Le Mans this year, and win the race for the third time in a row? Doing so would give the legendary Italian marque its 12 overall victory at Le Mans.
We will know the answer to that question on Sunday afternoon, but on the face of it, Ferrari is looking pretty strong.
Unheard of in modern times, Ferrari returns to Le Mans with the exact same driver line ups that they had when winning the race in both 2023 and 2024. In 2023, piloting the #51 entry, James Caldo, Antonio Giovinazzi and Alessandro Pier Guidi covered 342 laps of the Le Sarthe circuit to take the win. The teammate #50 Ferrari 499P finished 5th, after starting the race from pole.
Alessandro Pier Guidi, 2023 Le Mans winner in #51: “It takes time to grasp what we did. Probably now, we are part of the history of Ferrari, the biggest brand in the world. As an Italian, I have dreamed of driving for this brand since childhood. Now it’s real. We won Le Mans with a red car. It isn’t easy to describe what you feel. It’s a mix of emotions.”
In 2024, piloting the #50 entry, Antonio Fuoco, Miguel Molina and Nicklas Nielsen shared the driving duties in the Ferrari 499P, covering 311 laps on their way to victory (lots of rain and yellow flags last year). The previous year’s winning #51 Ferrari finished on the podium in 3rd place.
2024 winning driver Antonio Fuoco: “We were perfect all weekend, so I think we deserve this victory. It’s been a long wait since last year, so we can enjoy it thoroughly. The result is even better because we finished on the podium with the #51…. Even during the race, at night, with the rain, it was lovely to see a big turnout from the public along the track, in the stands. It’s incredible how much passion you can experience. No words can capture this moment.”
The band is back together, as they say, and Ferrari is ready for the challenge of winning Le Mans three times in a row.
They did not qualify as well as they would have liked this year (#50 is starting 7th and #51 is starting 11th), but that has not dampened the enthusiasm of the team as the race approaches. With the frenetic pace of modern endurance racing, qualifying positions are still more for bragging rights than a predictor of the race outcome.
Antonio Giovinazzi, pilot of the #51 499P: “The Hyperpole certainly didn’t go as we’d hoped, considering we didn’t make it into the top ten. That said, the 24 Hours is a long race where anything can happen, and grid position isn’t such a determining factor. At the start, we’ll need to be careful and avoid any contact. From there, we’ll do everything we can to achieve the best possible result in the most eagerly awaited race of the season.”
When consistently successful, you don’t want to mess with that success. The development of the 499P into a winner has been an evolutionary process, and the core six drivers who took the car to victory the past two years have been a very important part of that successful evolution. As such, Ferrari has announced their intention to one again re-sign the same 6 drivers who won the Le Mans the past two years, to Ferrari in 2026 for the FIA-WEC series and Le Mans.
Antonello Coletta, Ferrari’s sportscar racing boss, has backed his current line-up of drivers pretty solidly. “For us, stability of drivers is something that is truly fundamental – it’s one of the pillars on which we carry out our sporting activity.”
Tifosi from around the world will be cheering Ferrari and its drivers on to that ‘hat trick’ victory this weekend in France. The red cars from Maranello look like the ones to beat this year.
