2023-06-10 23:25:00
The eighth hour of the race was coming to an end, at Le Mans the Ferrari #51 hypercar was in the lead quite confidently, driven by Alessandro Pierre Guidi, who had previously driven a long distance in difficult conditions, in rain and in darkness.
But then he went to a planned pit stop, and when he returned to the track, the car turned around at the first Mulsanne chicane, and it 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 generally had a great race, and Nico continued the work started by his partners, Gustavo Menezes and Loic Duval.
Approximately 30 seconds behind Muller was Kamui Kobayashi’s Toyota No. 7, 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 slowed down hypercar of the Japanese team, which slowed down in the zone of yellow flags due to the departure of the Ferrari, and something like a domino effect occurred.
And if Guidi was able to continue moving, although he lost more than five minutes, then Kobayashi retired from the race at Le Mans, and he was rightfully considered one of the favorites.
In order to evacuate the cars that had stopped on the side of the road, the safety car had to be re-released, which remained on the track for quite some time. By the way, on this stage of the race was already 12 retirements.
The restart was given only at the tenth hour of the race, and at this stage, the first four looked like this: Muller’s Peugeout hypercar was in the lead, followed by the surviving Toyota sports prototype, which was piloted by Rio Hirakawa, he was pursued by the Ferrari hypercar Antonio Fuoko, and only behind him was Alessandro Pierre Guidi. By the way, at the restart, both Ferrari crews 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 riding 5th in the LMP2 class and 17th overall. And in 36th position was the Chevrolet Camaro ZL1, a NASCAR car driven by Mike Rockenfeller at 2:00 a.m. Paris time.
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#Peugeot #leads #Ferraris #departure
