Le Mans: After two hours of racing, Porsche teams lead

The rain, which collected before the start of the race, did not stop, so a rather sharp battle began almost immediately on the track.

Shortly after the restart, Mike Conway passed Niklas Nielsen and two Toyota hypercars led the race, pushing both Ferraris to 3rd and 4th. positions.

Felipe Nasr made his way to fifth position, ahead of Laurence Vantour, his partner in the Porsche Penske team. Behind them was another Porsche 963 hypercar driven by Michael Christensen, outpacing Earl Bamber’s Cadillac. And that was already catching up with Paul di Resta on Peugeot.

At the end of the first hour, Niklas Nielsen went to his first pit stop, but James Calado got ahead of Conway and moved into second position. And at the beginning of the second hour, Nasr attacked the British and successfully overtook him! The top three now featured three hypercars from different teams: Toyota, Ferrari and Porsche.

And when both Toyotas pitted, James Calado’s Ferrari took the lead. But after all the leading group cars were in the pits, Nielsen came back to the front, Sebastien Bourdais’s Cadillac followed and his namesake Buemi with Toyota took third.

Behind the top three there was a rather heated battle between James Calado, a Ferrari driver, and Earl Bamber, a Cadillac driver. He tried to attack James, but he fought back quite a bit.

What would have ended their battle remains not entirely clear, as yellow flags appeared on the track after another accident – Rodrigo Sales, a Nielsen Racing team driver, crashed the car badly at Dunlop corner.

Ferrari decided to take advantage of the situation and called on Nielsen for an unscheduled pit stop, putting Sebastien Buemi back in the lead. Seven seconds behind him was Kalado, the driver of the Italian team’s second hypercar.

But here two more accidents happened on different parts of the track: one of the Ferrari GT class of the AF Corse team, driven by the Le Mans debutant, the Belgian Ulisse de Pou, crashed and after a hard contact with the fence, the Canadian Tower Motorsports team’s LMP2 sports prototype fell out of contention.

It was clear that the repair of barriers and the evacuation of broken equipment would be delayed and yellow flags would be long, so the pit stops continued in the leading group, leading to another reshuffling. By the end of the second hour of the race, Bamber’s Cadillac was in the lead, the Porsche hypercar driven by Christensen was second, his partner Felipe Nasr followed, the best Toyota crew to date was fourth and the car of António Felix da Costa, another Porsche driver, rounded out the top five.

However, at the very beginning of the third hour, the yellow flags were removed, Bamber went to a scheduled pit stop, so the race was led by two Porsche hypercars. Although, of course, it was clear that this would not last for long …