The eighth hour of the race drew to a close, at Le Mans the #51 Ferrari hypercar confidently led the way, driven by Alessandro Pierre Guidi, who had previously driven a long distance in difficult conditions, in rain and darkness.
But then he went to a scheduled pit stop and when he returned to the track, the car spun at the first Mulsanne chicane and got stuck in the gravel in the relegation zone. It appears that Alessandro was trying to avoid a collision with another car that had left the track in front of him.
After this incident Nico Muller’s Peugeot hypercar took the lead – crew #94 had a great race overall and Nico continued the work started by his partners, Gustavo Menezes and Loic Duval.
About 30 seconds behind Muller was Kamui Kobayashi’s No. 7 Toyota, but he also became a participant in the incident in which two more cars collided. It seems that one of the drivers did not have time to react to the delayed hypercar of the Japanese team, which slowed down due to the departure of the Ferrari in the yellow flag zone, and something like a domino effect occurred.
And if Guidi was able to continue, although he lost more than five minutes, then Kobayashi retired from the race at Le Mans and was rightly considered one of the favorites.
To evacuate the cars that had stopped at the side of the road, the safety car had to be released again, which remained on the track for quite some time. By the way, on this leg of the race there were already 12 retirements.
The restart was not given until the tenth hour of the race and on this stage the first four looked like this: Muller’s Peugeout hypercar was in the lead, followed by the remaining Toyota sports prototype, driven by Rio Hirakawa. chased by the Ferrari hypercar Antonio Fuoko, and behind him alone was Alessandro Pierre Guidi. By the way, on the restart both Ferrari teams were ahead of Alex Lynn’s Cadillac.
It is worth adding that the Prema team was able to take full advantage of this situation, and Daniil Kvyat was already running 5th in the LMP2 class and 17th overall. And in 36th place was the Chevrolet Camaro ZL1, a NASCAR car driven by Mike Rockenfeller at 2 a.m. Paris time.
Source: F1 News
I am Christopher Clyde, an experienced journalist and content writer with a passion for sports. I have been writing about Formula 1 news for the past five years and am currently employed as an author at athletistic.com, one of the top sports websites in the US.
