Privateer Ferrari wins Le Mans 24 Hours for historic three-peat
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Ferrari took victory at this weekend's 2025 24 Hours of Le Mans, securing an historic three-peat that will be remembered for decades to come.
The #51 Ferrari 499P won the French endurance race's centenary event in 2023 – the first Le Mans of the Hypercar era – and its #50 sister car took victory last year: in 2025 it was the turn of the AF Corse team's identical #83, making it the first outright privateer win at Le Mans since 2005.
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Along with the third different Ferrari to win in as many years, it was the third different driver line-up: Robert Kubica took the chequered flag to become the first Polish winner, and teammate Yifei Ye is the first Chinese winner. For Phil Hanson, he is the 35th British winner and it's his second taste of victory at La Sarthe following an LMP2 class win in 2020.
He's also the third-ever Brit to win for Ferrari, after James Calado (2023) and Lord Selsdon, who co-drove a 166M to Ferrari's first Le Mans win in 1949. You might like
For Kubica and Ye, the victory was all the sweeter due to past hardships. The Pole had signed to race for the Ferrari Formula 1 team in 2012, but his devastating rally crash in 2011 ended those hopes. Racing together at Le Mans in 2021, the pair suffered heartbreak when a last-lap electrical failure robbed them of an LMP2 class victory. Ye, too, also crashed heavily at Le Mans in 2023 when leading in a privateer Porsche 963 .
'The emotions haven't really hit yet,' Hanson told Top Gear after the race. 'It's just relief – it'll take a little bit of time to process what happened. The last hour was the longest of my life, and the last minutes were horrible. My teammates, when I raced against them in LMP2, they DNF'd on the final lap so I know what Le Mans can do. I wasn't taking anything for granted.'
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The top-tier category at the world's most famous endurance race is arguably at an all-time high, surpassing even the Group C era, with Alpine, Aston Martin, BMW, Cadillac, Peugeot, Porsche and Toyota all competing. Yet this was arguably Ferrari's most comfortable win of the three, a victory seemingly never in doubt after the first hour.
This first half of 2025's World Endurance Championship had already provided an ominous sign: Ferrari had won all three races prior to this one, despite struggling away from WEC's headline race in 2023 and 2024.
And while the FIA's Balance of Performance (BOP) rules that attempt to keep the racing close are unique to Le Mans, this year's WEC dominance and two previous Le Mans wins meant the smart money was on a Ferrari victory.
READ MORE Robert Kubica in rally crash
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Still, there were hopes after qualifying that the race would be wide open, with Cadillac securing the front row, and Porsche and BMW each having two cars ahead of the fastest #50 Ferrari in seventh. The second factory Ferrari started 11th and the AF Corse car in 13th.
However, rumours swirled in the paddock that Ferrari might have been sandbagging, and the Caddy drivers openly talked down both their speed on the straights and a chance of victory.
That proved to be true as the two leading Porsche Penske 963s quickly picked off the American V-Series.R machines, while the #6 Porsche (starting from the back of the Hypercar class after being disqualified from qualifying for being underweight) stormed up to fifth in the first hour in the hands of Kevin Estre. The Ferraris then hauled in the Cadillacs, and gradually the Porsches, to the point that five hours in the #50 was leading a 1-2-3 – but the #6 Porsche stayed in touch.
There was hope around of closer racing through the night, after the #50 and #51 picked up a string of penalties, leaving the #83 as the only Ferrari in the top five. The sole safety car also mixed up the order somewhat, but with no further interruptions and no rain throughout the race, all three Ferraris were back in front with 18 hours to go.
A race is never over until it's over though. When Top Gear popped into the Ferrari pit garage on Sunday morning to witness the leading #51 stop for fuel, tyres and a driver change, all was quiet and calm. But on the way to its next stop a dozen or so laps later, Alessandro Pier Guidi spun on his entry into the pit lane. He managed to crawl out of the gravel, but the time lost saw his car drop to third.
Yifei Ye, at the wheel of the privateer #83 Ferrari 499P took the lead, before handing over to Kubica for a marathon three-and-a-half-hour stint, all with his driver-cooling system malfunctioning. The chasing #6 Porsche got close but never cut the lead into single-digit seconds.
It was a heroic comeback for the #6, which held off the other Ferraris to finish second. With 65 minutes to go, the factory Ferraris divulged over team radio that victory was out of reach, and while they swapped positions multiple times to try and overhaul the Porsche ahead, first the #51 and then the #50 succumbed to problems that slowed their pace and left Estre in the Porsche to nail out a succession of qualifying laps to close down the privateer Ferrari. Ultimately the #51 Ferrari rounded out the podium.
The win was Ferrari's 12th outright at Le Mans, and the three-peat will doubtless be remembered in Ferrari folklore on a level with its first victory in 1949, and its six straight between 1960 and 1965.
Before the race, Alessandro Pier Guidi from the #51 was asked if three wins on the bounce in WEC, and two previous Le Mans victories, meant there was extra pressure on Ferrari going into this year's 24 Hours. 'To be honest, no,' he laughed. 'The pressure is on the guys that have never won anything.' Three Le Mans races into the Hypercar era, that remains poignantly true for the other manufacturers.
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