Ferrari made it three out of three at the Le Mans 24 Hours since its comeback to the top of the sportscar tree. Yet its victory in the World Endurance Championship blue riband event this time around was quite different from those that preceded it. For a start, the honours went to the yellow Ferrari, the so-called customer car run like the factory cars by AF Corse. But more to the point Ferrari was dominant in a way that it wasn’t in 2023 or ’24.
The irony was that the margin of victory was closer than in each of the past two years. The winning 499P Le Mans Hypercar shared by Robert Kubica, Yifei Ye and Phil Hanson claimed honours by a fraction less than last year, 14.084s compared with 14.221s - in 2023 its margin was up at over a minute. But a Ferrari victory never really looked in doubt from two or three hours into the race as its satellite entry and the two red factory cars that ended up third and fourth monopolised the top of the leaderboard. The 499Ps between them led 277 of event’s 387 laps.
