►We speak to Nick Tandy, 2015 Le Mans winner
► What to look out for this year
► Why GT3 cars present a new challenge for Hypercar drivers
62 cars start this year’s Le Mans 24 hour race, but only 23 of them make up the fastest Hypercar class. That leaves sixteen slower LMP2 cars and 23 GT3 cars, the latter of which present a new challenge this year thanks to new rules. To win Le Mans, all 69 Hypercar drivers (that’s three per car) will need to successfully negotiate the slower LMP2 and even slower GT3 cars – and like all things at Le Mans it’ll need to be done with the correct balance of risk and reward.
The new GT3 cars
‘I think the GT3 cars are ten seconds slower than the old GT class, which obviously makes a difference, and their straight-line speed is lower,’ Porsche’s Nick Tandy and 2015 Le Mans winner tells us. ‘So the class interaction at Le Mans is different what it used to be.’
This year, the GT3 rules will make the cars slower in a straight line, but also give them ABS, which will make getting past them a little trickier: ‘GT3 has got ABS also, so they are better in the slower speed braking stuff,’ Tandy explains.
‘They have more grip because the ABS enables all four wheels to be at maximum braking potential at all times. The point where you can dive inside a car has actually become a little bit less.’
With GT3 cars better on the brakes in the slower speed stuff, Hypercar drivers will now need to decide whether to risk it on the entry to a corner, or just wait for a safer overtake on the straight. The latter seems safe and sensible, but that’s not the way to pull ahead from one of the closest Le Mans fields in years.
The new challenge
‘At high speed we have more downforce so we can brake later, but you have to clear them by the time you’ve done that first 20% of the braking, as the track becomes quite dirty offline. Anything around the outside on the braking is… you don’t want to be doing it.’
The new overtaking situation will be challenging for all the Hypercar drivers, but Tandy has some experience thanks to his experience in the IMSA championship, where he usually races his Porsche 963: ‘In IMSA, we’ve been running Hypercar and GT3, which is the GTD class for two years already. So yeah, we’re used to it.’