The Glickenhaus 007 LMH dominated the first part of the race from pole position, with Pipo Derani enjoying a lead of nearly 50 seconds over the #7 Toyota then driven by Jose Maria Lopez.
A drive-through penalty was handed to Glickenhaus after Derani was found to be speeding under a full-course yellow period, but such was the team’s advantage that he could have gone through the pitlane and still come out ahead in the lead of the race.
However, before Derani got the chance to serve the penalty, the race was turned on its head when Portuguese driver Henrique Chaves ran wide over the kerbs on the entry to the second chicane, sending his TF Sport Aston Martin Vantage into the air.
The car landed upside down with a door missing and slid to the other side of the track, before coming to a rest after a full roll over.
Chaves was able to extract himself out of the car without external assistance but the safety car had to be called immediately, eradicating Glickenhaus’ advantage at the front of the field.
Glickenhaus couldn’t serve the penalty until after the SC period ended nearly half an hour later, dropping it firmly to the bottom of the Hypercar pack.
However, there was more drama for the American manufacturer soon after as smoke was seen coming out of the Pipo-engined car shortly after Olivier Pla took over driving duties, forcing him to head back to the pits.
The car was wheeled into the garage to assess the cause of smoke, ending any chances of a strong result for what could be the team’s last outing of the season.
Team owner Jim Glickenhaus revealed that it was a turbo failure that hit the #708 and the outfit may decide to retire the car as a precaution
"We were monitoring the temperatures, the pressures - everything was good and we just had a very quick catastrophic failure of the turbo," he said. "Brand new part, no reason [for it to fail].
"Normally, you'd have a warning it is going to happen. You will see you have maybe an oil leak or you will have an intercooler that has failed or something, and you could have brought it in and fixed it and hopefully gone back out.
"But the part failed catastrophically, it probably dumped a lot of metal shavings into the system and there will really be no reason to try to fix it and go out because once the metal parts get into the oil, you could just destroy the car for nothing."
With Glickenhaus likely out of the race, Toyota leads the race with the #7 car of Mike Conway, followed by the sister machine of Brendon Hartley and Alpine’s Nicolas Lapierre.
Peugeot runs fourth with the #94 9X8, which has had a trouble-free run so far but lacked the pace to challenge for a podium spot.
The #93 car returned to the garage after yet more technical issues in the early part of the race, which caused a full-course yellow period.
