Toyota Takes 5th Consecutive Win In 24 Hours Of Le Mans

Toyota secured its fifth consecutive win at the Le Mans 24 Hours as the crew of Sebastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa emerged on top in the No. 8 car. With extensive experience to its credit, Toyota always had an edge over rivals - Glickenhaus and Alpine - in the hypercar space, as it drove home both the GR010 Hybrid cars to the finish line. The second Toyota car driven by Jose Maria Lopez, Mike Conway and Kamui Kobayashi finished second with both cars exchanging positions for the first two-thirds of the race. The only time the No. 8 car's win seemed threatened was due to a slight changeover from Buemi to Hartley in the penultimate hour. 

Nevertheless, Hartley covered up the lost time securing the victory by a margin of 2m01.222s over the No. 7 Toyota. This also marked the fourth Le Mans win for Buemi and a third for Hartley. This was also Ryo Hirakawa's first win. 

Finishing third in the five-car Hypercar class was the No. 709 Glickenhaus 007 Lmh with drivers Ryan Briscoe, Richard Westbrook and Franck Mailleux. The trip finished five laps down over Toyota and had a largely trouble-free through the race. The team's second car, te No. 708 with Olivier Pla, Pipo Derani and Romain Dumas, dropped off the lead lap after a spin damaged the rear suspension in the eighth hour. The car went on to finish fourth overall, 10 laps off the No. 7 Toyota. Coming in fifth was Alpine's A480 LMP1 car, which had a disappointing run with technical glitches in abundance and saw the trio of Nicolas Lapierre, Matthieu Vaxiviere and Andre Negrao finishing 18 laps down and outside of the top 20. 

In the LMP2 Class, JOTA took a trouble-free win with the No. 38 Oreca 07-Gibson driven by Antonio Felix da Costa, Roberto Gonzalez and Will Stevens secured the lead after the first round of stops. The team remained dominant throughout having built an advantage of a lap at one point. JOTA went on to take its first class win since 2017 by a gap of 2m21s ahead of the No. 9 Oreca driven by Robert Kubica, Louis Deletraz and Lorenzo Colombo.