2023-06-10 16:20:00
The rain, which was gathering before the start of the race, did not go, so a rather sharp struggle began almost immediately on the track.
Shortly following 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, piloted by Michael Christensen, leaving behind 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 went into second position. And at the beginning of the second hour, Nasr attacked the British and successfully overtook him! Now in the top three were three hypercars from different teams – Toyota, Ferrari and Porsche.
And when both Toyotas went to pit, James Calado’s Ferrari took the lead. But following all the cars of the leading group were in the pits, Nielsen came forward once more, Sebastien Bourdais’s Cadillac followed him, and his namesake Buemi on Toyota was still third.
Behind the top three there was a rather heated fight between James Calado, a Ferrari driver, and Earl Bamber, a Cadillac driver. He tried to attack James, but he fought back quite hard.
What would have ended their struggle, it remains not entirely clear, because following another accident, yellow flags appeared on the track – Rodrigo Sales, a rider of the Nielsen Racing team, seriously crashed the car in the Dunlop corner.
Ferrari decided to take advantage of the situation and called Nielsen to an unscheduled pit stop, so Sebastien Buemi returned to the lead. Seven seconds behind him was Kalado, the driver of the Italian team’s second hypercar.
But here, two more accidents occurred on different sections of the track: one of the Ferrari GT class of the AF Corse team was crashed, which was piloted by the debutant of Le Mans, the Belgian Ulisse de Pou, and following a hard contact with the fence, the LMP2 sports prototype of the Canadian Tower Motorsports team dropped out of the fight .
It was clear that the repair of barriers and the evacuation of broken equipment would be delayed, and yellow flags would be a long time, so pit stops continued in the group of leaders, which led to another reshuffle. Toward 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 was following, the best Toyota crew was so far the fourth, and the car of António Felix da Costa, another Porsche driver, closed the top five.
However, at the very beginning of the third hour, the yellow flags were removed, Bamber went to a planned pit stop, so the race was led by two Porsche hypercars. Although, of course, it was clear that this was not for long …
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