Global Courant
James Calado celebrates Ferrari’s comeback win at Le Mans
Engine overrun – a sound created when fuel drops escape on red hot exhaust pipes.
Sometimes it sounds like thunder. Sometimes a robot explodes. Sometimes like a huge tree breaking in two. Occasionally, if you’re close enough, it rattles your ribcage.
Oddly, it doesn’t register on television, but it is loud. Very hard.
It is part of the majesty of motorsport. Whether it’s part of his future, though, is another matter.
The sound of burning fuel on metal seems to many to be increasingly out of step with a warming world, where climate awareness is rising with the mercury.
At Le Mans, an engine overrun drowns out a backing track of thumping house music, fireworks, and drunken roars.
Around 300,000 people flock to north-west France for this annual Glastonbury for petrolheads, with the hardest core gathering around the Dunlop Curve to watch the action.
The main event, as always, is the race of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Over the course of a day and night, three-man driver teams battle fatigue and the field to steer their aggressive prototype racing machine to one of motorsport’s biggest trophies.
This year marks 100 years since the race was first held. For a while, however, it looked like it would limp past the landmark.
With the prohibitive cost of competition and the old-fashioned image of the race apparently out of date, Toyota was the only top-tier manufacturer to compete and effectively race itself in recent years.
Hollywood actor Steve McQueen shoots his film Le Mans on location
The glory days, epitomized by the 1971 movie Le Mans — in which actor Steve McQueen broods and Porsches and Ferraris battle under oil and cigarette billboards — seemed gone forever.
The organizers faced a dilemma: how to tap into a rich past while making the race relevant again.
The answer was in the rulebook.
“These new rules give car manufacturers freedom of design and now we have fantastic cars,” said Frederic Lequien, CEO of the World Endurance Championship.
“It’s a return to the history of Ferrari competing against Peugeot, Porsche and Cadillac. We have the best car manufacturers in the world. Endurance racing has never been so brilliant in history.”
Looser restrictions have led to hypercars – wonderful evolutions of sports cars of the past, where each company is free to follow a philosophy and make field statement models, something that is much more difficult to do in Formula 1 and Formula E , where largely identical cars fill the roster.
Lined up for this year’s season are a sleek Porsche, General Motors’ Cadillac, which sounds like a muscle car on steroids, and Peugeot’s masterpiece, the 9X8 – a rear-wingless childhood dream of a design.
But this resurgence – which saw the race sold out two weeks after the sale – is led by Ferrari, who have returned to Le Mans after a 50-year absence, adding to their already exhausting F1 schedule.
“We are very, very busy, but very happy,” said Antonello Coletta, Ferrari’s head of GT sport. “We are coming back to the pinnacle of endurance in the main category – hypercar – with less time compared to the other competitors, but we are super happy.
“Le Mans is the most important race in the world.”
Coletta is part of a new mold of Ferrari leaders. Gone are Gucci socks and blazers. He exudes a more business-like approach and you can hear that in his words.
He says many parts of the 499P – which, like all good Ferraris, is beautiful but difficult to drive – are being tested for use on road cars.
However, the most important part is not part of the impressive body of the 499P. It’s tucked away deep inside the engine. And it is innovation, perhaps more than any other, that is crucial to the future of Le Mans.
NBA superstar LeBron James at the start of the 2023 Le Mans 24-hour race, which took place 100 years ago
At this year’s race, all 62 cars, including the many privateer entries, will run on a sustainable fuel made from waste from vineyard grape skins.
The residue from the wine industry is converted into ethanol and then converted into usable fuel. Its makers say it reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 65%.
It is a very French solution to a global problem.
F1’s innovations tend to take longer to hit the road, but their direction of travel is the same.
Like Le Mans, F1 is keen to show that there is an alternative to electric cars, and has promised to do so runs on its own 100% sustainable fuel for 2026.
Right now, however, Le Mans is the strongest example yet for manufacturers as they advocate for a variety of ways to fuel the future.
Combined with Ferrari’s super-efficient engine, which uses far less fuel for the same amount of power, there’s a modern, more economical face for a legendary race.
Could the present for Le Mans also be the future for the man in the street?
Some of the arguments put forward by the race’s supporters certainly seem to have an effect.
Reportedly, the European Union (EU) is about to amend a proposed plan to ban the sale of all new internal combustion engine cars by 2035. run on carbon neutral fuel.
The possible move has been criticized by environmental groups, claiming that carbon neutral fuels are unproven, expensive to produce and a costly distraction from the most effective route to decarbonise road transport.
“I don’t want anyone to think we’re anti-electric. Far from it,” said F1 technical chief Pat Symonds, who is visiting Le Mans for the first time on his 70th birthday.
“In an urban environment, an electric vehicle is a very good solution to many problems.
“But likewise, in other arenas and other areas, an electric vehicle is not the perfect answer.
“In the race to cut carbon emissions and tackle global warming – something very close to my heart, believe me – too many governments around the world are saying, ‘here’s a solution we want that you’re using’ and engineers say, ‘Okay, it’s a good solution, but not the only solution’.
“We’ve seen this change in the EU since February leading to them recognizing the value of sustainable fuels, and I think we’ll see that globally.”
Peugeot’s 9X8 was one of the standout cars on the grid for the 2023 edition of Le Mans
In the dense forest next to the famous Mulsanne right at Le Mans, you can hear the distant drone of the engines held in the tall trees. It’s a dreamlike experience at night, a constant roar of bright headlights and raw noise.
In the oppressive heat of a summer day in Le Mans, the soft moss extracts energy from the air.
Mulsanne has been sanitized since Ferrari last raced here as a factory team – two chicanes slow the pace to reduce the chance of a car losing its downforce and, as in the past, taking off like a plane and landing in the trees.
It’s been 10 years since the race was last deadly when Dane Allan Simonsen crashed his Aston Martin on the corner before Mulsanne, Tertre Rouge. His car hit a tree behind the barrier just minutes into the race.
“It says on every driver’s license that motorsport is dangerous,” muses Ferrari’s James Calado in the team’s huge hospitality suite.
“We realize the danger, but in all honesty the risk isn’t great when you compare it to cycling in the Isle of Man. It’s not even 0.1% of the danger of what those guys are doing.
“Occasionally serious accidents can happen – normally a fluke. I don’t want to screw it up, but cars are super safe – you can have a big impact and the car will be completely intact.”
Motorsport has cleaned up its safety record since the grubby glory days of Le Mans. Given that renewable fuels still emit particulate matter such as toxic nitrogen dioxide, and electric cars suck power from the grid, there’s a long way to go before the same can be said about the sustainability credentials.
“As a driver, my job is to drive the car and give my best,” said Calado.
“I’m all for sustainability. It’s hard to know what’s going to happen in the future. The whole world needs to make a difference and we’ll do everything we can to help.”
Calado, Britain’s most high-profile Ferrari factory driver since Nigel Mansell in the late 1980s, recognizes the power that Le Mans has as a stage, both for a race and potentially for bigger issues that affect us all.
“It’s magical,” he adds with a smile when talking about driving in the middle of the night. “The fans never go off… it’s three or four in the morning and you can still see and smell the grills when you’re in the car.
“You smell everything — the sparks as a car scrapes the ground, and we get dust in our eyes where the visor is open.”
It’s an elementary experience. Tired drivers feel the pain, taste the dirt and smell the fumes.
For Calado and Ferrari, the weekend also ended with the black and white checkered flag and a milestone victory to complete the brand’s comeback to Le Mans.
And the signature sound, for better or for worse, remained the same as always: the creak of an engine running too fast.
