Who has the upper hand in the Hypercar battle at Le Mans?

By Stephen Kilbey June 6, 2023 2:04 PM

By Stephen Kilbey | June 6, 2023 2:04 PM ET

Even after six hours of track time at the Le Mans Test Day, the only thing for certain in the Hypercar class is that it's too early to predict how the battle for the overall victory at Le Mans will pan out this weekend.

Heading into June, Toyota looked to be the firm favorite, on pace, reliability and operations after three convincing wins to start the season at Sebring, Portimao and Spa. But there has been a slight shift in the paddock's mood since the teams arrived at the Circuit de la Sarthe for the centenary event.

The main reason to suspect that the battle for the overall victory won't be as clear cut is the surprise Balance of Performance change for the 24 Hours that was revealed last week. After stating that the Balance of Performance for individual cars was locked in between Portimao and Monza, the ACO and FIA felt that unplanned changes were necessary for Le Mans to,"ensure a level playing field."

"The first few races of the 2023 FIA World Endurance Championship season have shown differences between different LMH-spec cars competing in the Hypercar class to be greater than initially anticipated," said the ACO and FIA in a statement.

"Considering these factors, and following an in-depth analysis of available data, the WEC Committee has decided that the goal of ensuring a level playing field within the Hypercar class will be best achieved by implementing correction between, but also within, the LMH and the LMDh platforms."

Thus, Toyota's GR010 HYBRIDs will run with 37 additional kilos, Ferrari's 499Ps have had 24 kilograms added and the Cadillacs have seen their minimum weight increase by 11 kilograms.

The question on everyone's lips is, how much of a difference will this make?

Ask Toyota, and it will tell you that it's a problem. Pascal Vasselon, the TGR technical director, was not best pleased with the team's performance on Test Day, having seen its 2023-spec challenger on track at Le Mans for the first time.

During the day, the best time from the team came from the No. 7 in the afternoon, a 3m29.827s. While it wasn't in the same ballpark as the best times achieved last year, it was still the third-fastest time of the day and just 0.3s off the pace-setting Ferrari. The usual rules of course apply; reading into times from testing is almost never advisable.

Nevertheless, Vasselon sees cause for concern at this stage.

"It was not our best test day," he said. Just look at the lap times for an idea. It's not a surprise. We just have to get on with it. We have a full truck of engineers looking for pace."

A paddock source suggested to RACER that the impact the change will have on the race lap times for the GR010s is expected to be just over a second per lap, according to simulations. (Ferrari's weight increase is supposedly worth around 0.5s to 0.7s a lap.)

So it should close the gap a little to the chasing LMDh challengers from Porsche and Cadillac and Peugeot's pair of new-look 9X8s. But it's impossible to know at this stage how much pace everyone has in the pocket, especially as the GR010 HYBRIDs and Glickenhaus 007s are the only cars in the class that had run on the circuit prior to last Sunday.

Peugeot has a new paint job, but its the updates beneath the surface that could help shape this weekend's race. Rainier Ehrhardt/Motorsport Images

There's even been a suggestion that qualifying won't give us many answers either. One team source told RACER that there's a real chance that teams hold back in qualifying out of fear of a last-minute BoP change, even though the ACO and FIA insist that no further changes will be made.

In general, we can expect Ferrari and Toyota to have the outright pace. But what will we see from Porsche, Cadillac and Peugeot now the weight penalties have been applied?

Laurens Vanthoor told RACER that while the Penske-run 963s ‘are unlikely to be favorites’, he now expects them to be in the mix for the victory.

Cadillac, on the other hand, appears quietly confident, its senior figures keeping their cards close to their chest to this point, while Peugeot seems to be more optimistic heading into race week.

With a fresh livery has come a fresh outlook for Peugeot Sport. With an improved gearbox, and additional pre-Le Mans testing at Magny Cours, there is a sense that it may turn a corner at Le Mans, on the circuit that the 9X8 was originally designed to work best on.

"We have to be very focused on the race, stay professional," Jean-Marc Finot, the VP of Stellantis Motorsport, told RACER. "We saw that in the first races, we were not performing as a frontrunner. Le Mans is a different track. We had weaknesses in low-speed corners at other tracks because of the architecture of our car. But Le Mans has fewer low-speed corners per mile than Portimao and Spa. It should be better.

"We made some improvements too, the new gearbox actuator was good over six hours at Portimao and Spa. But for us, it will be our first time at Le Mans. The car isn't as bulletproof as we’d hoped. But we were more reliable than at the beginning of the season."

Few expect a total turnaround here, but with 70 laps completed on the Test Day by the No. 94 – the most of anyone in Hypercar – there are green shoots of progress emerging. It would be a real feel-good story for the locals trackside to see Peugeot achieve a result here after such a tough start to life in the WEC.

Tomorrow the track action resumes, with Free Practice 1 at 14:00 local time in France.

Le Mans/WEC