1. Ferrari goes for the hat-trick

Ferrari will complete a Le Mans 24 Hours hat-trick if it lifts the trophy this year. And the 499P Le Mans Hypercar will remain unbeaten at the French enduro since the Italian manufacturer ended its 50-year factory hiatus from the front of the grid in 2023. Ferrari’s avowed aim this season might be the winning of the a World Endurance Championship title after missing out in each of the past two years. But that’s not to say it isn’t serious about winning Le Mans again. Double points are on offer, so it remains the most important race of the season not just in terms of prestige.

Ferrari has undertaken a no-stone-unturned approach to development of the 499P since its second Le Mans victory. That is, of course, within the confines of the rules that place strict limits on performance upgrades. One so-called evo joker modification was brought online for the Brazilian WEC round at Interlagos last July and there have been none since.

The focus has been on getting the most out of its package – that includes improving reliability. Ferrari wasn’t happy with the failures that blunted its WEC challenge in 2024 and that will clearly be of benefit in its bid to win the season’s longest race.

2. Toyota looking for legacy victory

A shade over a minute and a half. That’s the cumulative time by which Toyota has lost victory to Ferrari at Le Mans over the past two years. The Japanese manufacturer’s GR010 Hybrid might have triumphed both times with a bit of luck — or rather less misfortune — and taken a remarkable seven wins on the trot.
It didn’t work out that way, which means that Toyota is still missing a victory here against serious opposition.

Its five wins on the trot between 2018 and ’22 came against what can only be described as limited opposition: the first three were at the end of the LMP1 era after Audi and Porsche had departed and the next two at the start of the Hypercar era before the big influx of major makers. A win this time around against seven rival OEMs would cement the legacy of a marque that has been a constant at the Circuit de la Sarthe since 2012.

That experience of Le Mans means Toyota will be in the mix. But getting the job done is becoming harder year on year rivals multiply and up their game. In terms of pace Toyota only had to beat Ferrari in ’23 and ’24, and failed to do so.

3. Porsche aims for the big one

Porsche’s big target for this year is victory at Le Mans. It has to be after a season in 2024 in which its 963 LMDh won titles in both the WEC and the IMSA SportsCar Championship in North America.

A quick glance at the results from Le Mans last year would suggest that Porsche wasn’t a million miles away from a 20th outright win. The best of the Porsche Penske Motorsport factory entries in fourth position finished just over half a minute down on the winning Ferrari. The reality, however, was that the Porsche shared by the title-winning trio of Laurens Vanthoor, Kévin Estre and André Lotterer wasn’t a genuine contender. The 963 was tenths, not seconds, off the pace and, perhaps more pertinently, lacked straight-line speed compared with the Ferraris and the Toyota ahead of it. It was, put simply, a less raceable machine.

A new element of the Balance of Performance was introduced at Le Mans last year: called ‘power gain’, the intent is to equate the top speeds by tweaking the mandated maximum power above and below 155mph for each marque. With a year’s experience, there’s a fighting chance of getting all the cars in the same ballpark.

Don’t bet against a Porsche win. It’s again doing everything to maximise its chances by fielding three factory cars.

4. Cadillac’s time to shine

The big underachiever in the WEC since the Hypercar era began has a big chance to deliver on the promise of the past two years. Not only has Cadillac’s full-season factory campaign been taken over by the British Jota squad, a team with no fewer than 10 Le Mans class podiums in LMP2 and an outright WEC victory to its name, but there’s an expanded presence from the General Motors brand on the grid for the 24 Hours.

The big plus for Caddy is that Jota is running two of its V-Series.R LMDhs in the full world championship season, unlike its predecessor Chip Ganassi Racing. There’s no doubt that Cadillac’s WEC campaigns were held back by the single-car entry, even if Ganassi expanded its entry in France in June by bringing over its IMSA car.

Cadillac will have the biggest factory Hypercar presence on the grid with four cars – Porsche is represented with three works cars and one privateer. Action Express Racing, IMSA champion with the V-Series.R in 2023, is back for its third consecutive Le Mans, while Wayne Taylor Racing makes its debut at the big race. WTR is, as the Americans like to say, one of the ‘winningest’ teams in North American sports car racing and has big ambitions to add a Le Mans victory to its triumphs at the Daytona, Sebring and Petit Le Mans enduros in its homeland.

The V-Series.R has proven pace at Le Mans. It took third on its debut in 2023 and the best of the Ganassi cars was a genuine contender until the final hours last year. A broken underfloor resulted in it fading to seventh.

5. BMW on the up

BMW maintained the momentum that propelled it towards the front of the field in the final races of the 2024 WEC and IMSA series into the new season. The German manufacturer had the pace to win the Daytona 24 Hours IMSA curtain-raiser back in January but lacked the luck, and was then the second-fastest car behind the Ferraris in the opening two rounds of the WEC in Qatar and Imola in February and March.

That suggests BMW can build on the promise it showed at Le Mans last year. Dries Vanthoor, pole winner at the Daytona and Sebring IMSA races this year, was quickest in opening qualifying at Le Mans in 2024 and the M Hybrid V8 LMDh showed promise in the race on its Le Mans debut, even if its two cars were out of contention early on.

It would be wrong to call BMW a dark horse given its early season form. It has to be regarded as a genuine contender as it bids to follow up its 1999 Le Mans victory with the V12 LMR.

6. Racing for French pride

This is a big Le Mans for the two French manufacturers competing in Hypercar. Peugeot returns for a third crack at the race with its 9X8 LMH having so far never looked like repeating its La Sarthe victories of previous years with the 905 3.5-litre Group C contender (1992 and ’93) and the first-generation 908 HDi LMP1 turbodiesel (2009).

Alpine, meanwhile, is looking to make up for 2024’s disastrous attempt when both its A424 LMDhs were out of the race before quarter distance.

The heavily revised 2024 version of the 9X8, complete with a conventional rear wing, was probably too new to shine at Le Mans last year. Twelve months on there can be no excuses.

An issue with the valve train resulted in the early bath for Alpine last year. It managed the problem through the second half of the maiden campaign for the A424 and made progress towards the front of the field. If le tricolore is waved on the podium after the race, the smart money will be on Alpine drivers doing the waving.

7. A new qualifying format

Le Mans broke with its long traditions when it introduced Hyperpole qualifying in 2020: the grid had been set over multiple sessions for time immemorial. The short, sharp shock format has now been tweaked in the name of increased spectacle.

Instead of eight cars progressing from a one-hour session for the entire grid on Wednesday evening to the Hyperpole session a day later, the field will be split up and another round of qualifying added. Fifteen Hypercars will go through from one opening 30-minute session and the top 12 in each of LMP2 and LMGT3 from a second period of the same duration.

Five Hypercars will be knocked out over 20 minutes in a session to be known as Hyperpole 1 or H1 with 10 going through to the 15-minute H2, which will set the first five rows of the grid. In P2 and LMGT3 eight cars will move forward into H2.

The idea is to build the drama through the two days of track running and it will certainly make for a better TV spectacle. Perhaps the real significance, though, is that the Hypercars have been split out from the other classes for qualifying. The old excuse about traffic in the Porsche Curves should become a thing of the past.

8. Mercedes is back

Mercedes is ending an absence from the 24 Hours that dates back to 1999 and its disastrous campaign with the CLR LMGTP coupé when it withdrew from the race on Saturday evening after a third aerial accident of the event. More than a quarter of a century on there will be a trio of Mercedes-AMG GT3 Evos on the grid fielded by the Italian Iron Lynx squad. The German manufacturer missed out on entries into the WEC in the new LMGT3, but it has made a belated entry a year on.

When Iron Lynx’s relationship with Lamborghini – it ran its SC63 LMDh prototype as well the Huracán GT3 last year – broke down it jumped into bed with Mercedes for its campaign in the WEC’s secondary class. It fields two cars in the full series and has gained an additional entry for the 24 Hours.

Priority was given to GT3 manufacturers also competing in Hypercar when entries were allocated in the new-for-2024 class. There’s no indication that Merc has an LMDh or a Le Mans Hypercar on the stocks, but the return of a manufacturer that has won Le Mans twice, most recently with a Sauber-badged ‘Silver Arrow’ in 1989, is significant.

9. And LMP2…

The LMP2 prototype class, now a de facto one-make division for the ORECA 07 chassis, is bursting with quality on its annual return to Le Mans. There are 17 entries, one more than last year and two up on the 15-car minimum that race organiser the Automobile Club de l’Ouest has promised to maintain, and the majority of the top P2 contenders from around the world are present.

The British-based United Autosports squad, winner last year and in 2020, fields a pair of ORECA-Gibsons, ditto Inter Europol Competition, the Polish team that triumphed in 2023. The champion teams from the European and Asian Le Mans Series, AO by TF and Algarve Pro Racing, are present too.

Picking a winner in either the main P2 division or the Pro/Am sub-class that mandates a bronze-rated driver rather than a silver, is an invidious task. There can be no favourites in P2.