24 Hours of Le Mans: Timo Bernhard leads Porsche to third straight title at the Circuit de la Sarthe

Sport360 staff 11:19 20/06/2017
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  • Yet more celebrations for Porsche.

    Porsche floored Hong Kong actor and stuntman Jackie Chan’s audacious bid for Le Mans glory as Toyota suffered fresh torment in a gripping 85th edition of the 24-hour endurance race.

    Timo Bernhard overtook Ho-Pin Tung in Chan’s LMP2 class Oreca-Gibson with less than an hour to go to claim a 19th Le Mans title for the German constructor.

    While Bernhard, who won with Audi in 2010, and his New Zealand co-drivers and childhood friends Earl Bamber and Brendon Hartley were celebrating, Toyota’s wait for a maiden title continued.

    As night fell on Saturday, Toyota, who made their Le Mans debut in 1986, were sitting pretty with the car of Kamui Kobayashi, Mike Conway and Stephane Sarrazin holding a comfortable lead.

    But with Kobayashi – who had set a record lap for pole – behind the wheel his hybrid car limped out of contention with clutch problems.

    A little later, the Toyota of Japanese rookie Yuji Kunimoto, Nicolas Lapierre and Jose Maria Lopez was also kyboshed after a shunt in the Dunlop Chicane.

    “Le Mans is a truly ruthless race,” said Pierre Fillon, president of race organiser Automobile Club de l’Ouest.

    That twin disaster left Toyota with one car still out on the track, driven by Sebastien Buemi, Anthony Davidson and Kazuki Nakajima.

    Last year Nakajima’s Toyota had the race at his mercy only for his car to give up the ghost on the final lap, handing victory on a plate to Porsche. He and his co-drivers had to settle for ninth this time around.

    The impish Le Mans gods that wreaked havoc on Toyota also poked fun at Porsche, the constructor’s No1 car with Andre Lotterer driving breaking down while leading by a massive 13 laps and only three hours to run. Lotterer said: “We were driving really conservatively but suddenly the oil pressure dropped,” said Lotterer. “To retire this way is hard, but this is Le Mans.

    “It’s a pity, very sad. You almost wanted to not believe it.”

    As Lotterer – teamed up with last year’s winner Neel Jani and Nick Tandy – climbed out of his stricken machine and broke down in tears, Chan was dreaming of a historic first ever Le Mans success for a privately entered team.

    But the remaining Porsche 919 Hybrid, dead last on Saturday evening, reeled in the film star’s surprise leader, pouncing to seize control on the fastest section of the fabled Sarthe circuit on lap 348.

    As a bleary-eyed and sun-baked 250,000 crowd watched on, Bernhard crossed the line with a lap to spare over Dutch-born Tung with Nelson Piquet Junior in another Oreca in third.

    Quite a reversal of fortune for Porsche’s No2 car after a one-hour pit stop on Saturday.

    “I was driving at the time when I heard it go ‘bang’ and I thought it was our race done,” Bamber, the 2015 winner, said. “I brought it back to the pits and the guys looked into it, and we were back out in under an hour. It was a matter of fighting back into the top five at first, then that became a podium and then a podium became a win.”

    This was Porsche’s third successive win in endurance racing’s Holy Grail, first staged in 1923.

    The team admitted later their calculations had predicted the race would go down to the final lap, so close were the leading teams in terms of speed.

    Hartley said: “It was really tight. From the calculations we made it was going to come down to the last lap. The pace that they predicted, we were looking at not passing all of the LMP2s, so the plan was just to push as hard as we could for the remaining 18 or 19 hours.

    “Before I hopped back into the car they were not even expecting us to be fighting for the podium.

    “Maybe the P2s ran into some problems – my three stints are potentially some of the best I’ve done, I really attacked as hard as I could.”

    “You don’t choose to win Le Mans, Le Mans chooses you. We hope one day it will choose us. We’ll be back,” said Toyota.

    Chan, who was absent from the race, is the latest silver screen star to be seduced by Le Mans after Steve McQueen, Paul Newman and Patrick Dempsey.

    Chopard are the Official Timekeeper of Porsche Motorsport

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