Today marks the start of practice for the 2014 24 Hours of Le Mans from Circuit de la Sarthe. The first practice session begins at 4:00 p.m. Le Mans time (10:00 a.m. ET) and is four hours in length. The first qualifying session begins at 10:00 p.m. Le Mans time (4:00 p.m. ET) and is two hours in length. Fifty-five cars, across four classes aim for immortality in the lengthy history book for the twice-around the clock French classic.
LMP1
LMP1 overflows with talent. Audi drivers Loïc Duval and Tom Kristensen defend their Le Mans victory with Lucas di Grassi as the new third driver. Kristensen is Mr. Le Mans with nine overall victories and thirteen overall podiums in seventeen Le Mans starts. This is Duval's sixth Le Mans start and his victory last year was his career best after back-to-back fifth place finishes. Lucas di Grassi was promoted to the top Audi team this year after the retirement of Allan McNish. Di Grassi finished third last year on Le Mans debut with Marc Gené and Oliver Jarvis as co-drivers.
The #2 Audi has won two of the last three years overall with drivers Marcel Fässler, André Lotterer and Benoît Tréluyer. A third win for this trio would make them the 18th, 19th and 20th driver with three Le Mans victories. The third Audi features Portugal's Felipe Alubquerque making his Le Mans debut. Italian Marco Bonanomi returns after a one-year sabbatical. He finished third on debut in 2012 with Oliver Jarvis and Mike Rockenfeller as his co-drivers. Oliver Jarvis rounds out the #3 Audi and has finished third overall the passed two years.
The #8 Toyota of Anthony Davidson, Sébastien Buemi and Nicolas Lapierre have won the opening two rounds of the 2014 FIA World Endurance Championship and was fastest on the test day on June 1st. Alexander Wurz looks for his third Le Mans victory with his third different manufacture having won with Porsche in 1996 and Peugeot in 2009. The Austrian leads the #7 Toyota with three-time Le Mans runner-up Stéphane Sarrazin and Kazuki Nakajima as his co-drivers.
Then there is the return of Porsche. With 16 overall Le Mans victories, the Stuttgart-based manufacture aims for their first Le Mans triumph since 1998 with two previous Le Mans winners in their stables. Romain Dumas and Timo Bernhard are split between the #14 and #20 Porsche respectively. Dumas is joined by three-time Le Mans class winner Marc Lieb and Neel Jani. Bernhard is joined by Brendon Hartley and Mark Webber. Webber returns to Le Mans for the first time since 1999 where he had a massive accident in the warm-up, keeping him and one of the famed Mercedes CLRs from taking the tricolour.
Rounding out LMP1 are the two petrol-powered Rebellion R-One-Toyotas with Nicolas Prost, Nick Heidfeld and Mathias Beche in the #12 and Dominik Kraihamer, Andrea Belicchi and Fabio Leimer in the #13.
LMP2
None of the three drivers (Bertrand Baguette, Martin Plowman, Ricardo González) who won in LMP2 last year return to defend their titles. OAK Racing is the defending winning team and has two cars, one featuring Alex Brundle, Jann Mardenborough and Le Mans rookie Mark Shulzhitskiy, the other an all-Chinese line-up with David Cheng, Ho-Pin Tung and Adderly Fong. Brundle and Mardenborough finished second and third respectively in class last year.
One of the full-time FIA World Endurance Championship teams is G-Drive Racing, which finished third last year before being excluded for a fuel cell violation. Romain Rusinov returns with Frenchmen Olivier Pla and Julien Canal. G-Drive leads the LMP2 standings in WEC and were fastest on the test day. The Hong Kong KCMG Oreca-Nissan of Matthew Howson, Richard Bradley and Alexandre Imperatori are second in the standings after second place finishes in the first two races of the 2014 FIA WEC season. The Russian SMP Racing has two cars entered. Two-time Le Mans class winner Mika Salo is joined by Sergey Zlobin and Anton Ladygin while Anton's brother Kirill is joined by Nicolas Minassian, who will be making his fifteenth Le Mans appearance and Maurizio Mediani.
Defending European Le Mans Series champions Signatech Alpine and driver Nelson Panciatici returns for his third Le Mans start. He is joined by Oliver Webb and Jean-Loup Chatin, both making their Le Mans debuts. Winners from this year's European Le Mans Series season, Thiriet by TDS Racing and Jota Sport are on the entry list. Thiriet drivers Pierre Thiriet, Ludovic Badey and Tristan Gommendy lead the ELMS points. Second are Jota's Simon Dolan and Harry Tincknell. Marc Gené joins the Brits for Le Mans.
Three time Le Mans LMP2 class winner Tom Kimber-Smith returns with Caterham Racing and Americans Chris Dyson and 16-year old Matthew McMurray. This is Dyson's first Le Mans appearance since 2009. The other American in LMP2 is Ricky Taylor driving for Labre Compétition with Pierre Ragues and Keiko Ihara. Labre has five Le Mans class victories, all coming in GT classes.
Winners in LMP2 in 2011, Greaves Motorsport has an all-British line-up with Michael Munemann, Alessandro Latif and James Winslowm all making their Le Mans debuts. Sébastien Loeb Racing has triple Porsche Supercup champion René Rast joined by Czech driver Jan Charouz and Frenchman Vincent Capillaire. Two teams in LMP2 run under the Swiss flag. One is the Race Performance Oreca-Judd of Michel Frey, Franck Mailleux and Jon Lancaster. The other is Newblood by Morand Racing Morgan-Judd of former Formula One driver Christian Klein, Gary Hirsch and Romain Brandela.
The final two teams in LMP2 are the Irish Murphy Prototypes of Nathanaël Berthon, Rodolfo Gonzalez and Karun Chandhok and German Pegasus Racing with French drivers Julien Schnell and Léo Roussel and Swiss driver Nicolas Leutwiler. Murphy Prototypes was second fastest in class on the test day.
GTE-Pro
Another edition of the Ferrari vs. Porsche vs. Corvette vs. Aston Martin will unfold this weekend. Porsche returns as defending winners. Richard Lietz's two winning co-drivers from 2013 have moved to LMP1 (Lieb and Dumas). The Austrian will be join by German Marco Holzer and Frenchman Frédéric Makowiecki. The #92 started off on the right foot, leading the GT field on the test day. Jörg Bergmeister and Patrick Pilet made it a Porsche 1-2 last year and return in the #91 with Nick Tandy as their third driver.
Ferrari has the most entries in GTE-Pro with three. Defending GT world champions AF Corse has two cars entered. Gianmaria Bruni, Toni Vilander and Giancarlo Fisichella make up the #61 458 Italia. The trio won GTE-Pro at Le Mans in 2012. Bruni and Vilander currently lead the WEC GT Drivers championship. The #71 AF Corse features Le Mans rookies James Calado and Davide Rigon and six-time Le Mans class winner, Monegasque Olivier Beretta. The third Ferrari is entered by defending ELMS GTE champions Ram Racing. Matt Griffin, Álvaro Parente and Federico Leo are the three drivers.
The Corvette CR7.R makes it Le Mans debut. It's predecessor, the C6.R won on Le Mans debut in 2005 and on it's Le Mans GT2 class debut in 2009. The C5-R finished third on it's debut in 2000. Jan Magnussen, Antonio García and Jordan Taylor are in the #73 with Oliver Gavin, Tommy Milner and Richard Westbrook. Gavin has four class wins at Le Mans but has not won since 2006.
Aston Martin's last Le Mans win came in 2008. Darren Turner was apart of that winning team. He is joined by Stefan Mücke and Bruno Senna in the #97. The #99 Aston Martin has Hong Kong's Darryl O'Young as it's senior statesman in his third Le Mans appearance with Alex MacDowell and Fernando Rees making their Le Mans debuts.
GTE-Am
GTE-Am is the largest class in the 2014 running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Nineteen entries made up of 11 Ferrari 458 Italias, 6 Porsche 911s and 2 Aston Martins.
Defending winners IMSA Performance Matmut returns with Raymond Narac as the lone victor from 2013 defending the title (Jeal-Karl Vernay and Christophe Bourret are not at Le Mans). Narac is joined by Nicolas Armindo and David Hallyday to make an all-French line-up. IMSA Performance has a second all-French line-up with 1993 overall winner Éric Hélary, Erik Maris and Jean-Marc Merlin.
Belgian Prospeed Competition also has two Porsches entered. The WEC-entered #75 will be driven by two-time Le Mans class winner Emmanuel Collard, François Perrodo and Markus Palttalla. Their second entry features two Americans, Cooper MacNeil and Bret Curtis alongside the Dutchman Jeroen Bleekemolen. MacNeil and Curtis are both in their sophomore appearance while Bleekemolen won the LMP2 class in 2008.
The final two Porsche are Proton Competition-related. The German squad has their own WEC entry of Klaus Bachler, Christian Ried and Khaled Al Qubaisi and another entry in partnership with American Dempsey Racing. Patrick Dempsey returns with co-drivers Joe Foster and Patrick Long for the second consecutive year. They finished fourth in class last year.
Aston Martin returns with heavy hearts as they look to honor Allan Simonsen, one year after the Dane fatal's accident in the first hour of the race. The all-Danish team, the #95 Vantage GTE features 2009 LMP2 winner at Le Mans Kristian Poulsen, David Heinemeier Hansson who finished second in LMP2 last year and defending Porsche Supercup champion Nicki Thiim. Poulsen and Heinemeier Hansson lead the WEC GTE-Am points. The #98 Vantage GTE has a fourth Dane, Christoffer Nygaard alongside Canadian Paul Dalla Lana and Portugal's Pedro Lamy.
AF Corse has four Ferrari's entered in GTE-Am. The #61 WEC entry of Luíz Pérez Companc, Marco Cicoci and Mirko Venturi won the most recent round of the championship at Spa-Francorchamps and is second in WEC GTE-Am points. AF Corse's second WEC entry, the #81 of Sam Bird, Michele Rugolo and Stephen Wyatt finished third in class at the Silverstone season opener. The other two AF Corse Ferraris feature Peter Ashley Mann, Lorenzo Casè and Raffaele Gianmaria in the #60 and the ELMS GTE trio of Yannick Mallélgol, Jean-Marc Bachelier and Howard Blank in the #62.
The other WEC GTE-Am Ferraris in the field are Ram Racing with Johnny Mowlem making his eighth start with Mark Patterson and Archie Hamilton. 8Star Motorsports has Frankie Montecalvo, Gianluca Roda and Paolo Ruberti entered as it's drivers. 8Star was the fastest GTE-Am team on the test day and second fastest GT team on the test day.
Along with their two LMP2 entries, SMP Racing has one car entered in GTE-Am. Andrea Bertolini and Viktor Shaitar lead the ELMS GTE points with a second and first in the first two rounds. They are joined by Russian Aleksey Basov for Le Mans as their usual third driver Sergey Zlobin will be in LMP2. JMW Motorsports have American drivers Seth Neiman and Spencer Pumpelly on loan from Flying Lizard Motorsports with Saudi Abdulaziz Al-Faisal. The final ELMS-entered Ferrari in the field is of Team Sofrev ASP. Their driver Soheil Ayari makes his 12th Le Mans appearance with fellow Frenchman Anthony Pons and 1998 FIFA World Cup winning goalkeeper Fabien Barthez making his Le Mans debut.
Krohn Racing is the third American team in GTE-Am. Tracy Krohn and longtime co-driver Nic Jönsson is joined by Ben Collins. This is Collins' first Le Mans appearance in a GT class after three in LMP classes. The final Ferrari in GTE-Am is of Team Taisan from the Asian Le Mans Series. Former Formula One driver Shinji Nakano is joined by German Pierre Ehret and Brit Martin Rich in that car.
Garage 56
Nissan returns for the second time in three years as the Garage 56 entry. Unlike their 2012 entry as the engine supplier for the DeltaWing, Nissan is the builder of this year's entry, the ZEOD RC, an electric-hybrid. Nissan GT Academy drivers Lucas Ordóñez and Wolfgang Reip and joined by four-time Formula Nippon champion and driver of the DeltaWing in 2012, Satoshi Motoyama. The ZEOD RC was 29.560 seconds off the top time set by the #8 Toyota on the test day but was 4.686 seconds ahead of the #92 Porsche, the top GT car.
Prediction
I made it back in December: Porsche wins Le Mans with Mark Webber and I am sticking with it. The #20 Porsche wins. The #8 Toyota finishes second with the #2 Audi rounding out the podium.
The #35 OAK Racing Ligier of Alex Brundle, Jann Mardenborough and Mark Shulzhitskiy win LMP2 with G-Drive finishing second and Thiriet by TDS Racing rounding out the LMP2 podium.
The Nissan ZEOD RC runs at least two-thirds of the race.
Give me the #92 Porsche for back-to-back victories in GTE-Pro. The #73 Corvette finishes second with the #71 Ferrari holding off the #97 Aston Martin for third.
Finally, the #96 Aston Martin takes an emotional victory in GTE-Am with the #81 AF Corse Ferrari and SMP Racing Ferrari making it a tough battle. The Dempsey Racing Porsche and Ram Racing Ferrari having decent pushes for a class podium.
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