How the Americans Fared at the 24 Hours of Le Mans: Corvette Racing Earns Class Win

Led by Corvette Racing’s extraordinary comeback victory in the GTE Am class, American teams for the most part lived up to expectations in a centenary running of 24 Hours of Le Mans that was wet and wild and wrapped up on Sunday.

The Cadillac V-Series.R entries of Chip Ganassi Racing upheld the LMDh reputation by finishing third and fourth. But the Porsche Penske Motorsport team was left scratching its collective head about a subpar performance.

Once again, the Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus showed that a smaller American manufacturer could hang with the bigger factories by completing the race with two entries that ran trouble free.

Here's how the American's fared:

Hypercar

No. 2 Cadillac Racing: Finished 3rd

No. 3 Cadillac Racing: Finished 4th

No. 708 Glickenhaus Racing: Finished 6th

No. 709 Glickenhaus Racing: Finished 7th

No. 311: Action Express Racing: Finished 10th in class, 17th overall

Cadillac scored its first podium and led its first laps at Le Mans thanks to the No. 2 Cadillac driven by Earl Bamber, Alex Lynn and Richard Westbrook. Bamber went to the point during the catawampus opening hours resulting from a wet start and two safety car periods.

Starting with a brief fire in qualifying, the fastest of the Cadillacs spent much of the Le Mans effort trying to recover from various incidents. That the No. 3 Cadillac of drivers Sebastien Bourdais, Ranger Van Der Zander and Scott Dixon—the entry from the IMSA WeatherTech Championship—finished fourth behind the steady podium run of the No. 2 car, the WEC regular entry, was a tribute to persistence and pace.

Twice Bourdais was rear-ended on board the yellow No. 3. Once he managed to get back on the lead lap before the second incident dropped it one lap down.

“We’ve been the quickest car, or one of the quickest cars out there,” said Bourdais. “It’s been an awesome day driving. Just not the right circumstances for us. We had one opportunity to get back on the lead lap, which I took. I overtook the leader and started to pull away. I had about a 30-second gap and then that (LMP2 car) just turned on me. I wasn’t taking any prisoners at that stage.”

When the rain cleared and the safety car periods ended, the Caddies got outpaced by the leading Ferrari and Toyota LMH entries, custom-designed for Le Mans.

Hypercar entry Glickenhaus Racing, which made the podium in 2022, finished a solid sixth and seventh overall in Glickenhaus 007 cars. The No. 708 of drivers Romain Dumas, Ryan Briscoe and Olivier Pla finished sixth, seven laps back. The No. 709 driven by Franck Malleux, Nate Berthton and Esteban Gutierrez was next, nine laps behind the winners.

Unfortunately, the damp track at the start led to the No. 311 Action Express Racing Cadillac of drivers Jack Aitken, Alex Sims and Pipo Dirani being driven by Aitken into the barrier at the exit of the second chicane on the opening lap. Returning after extensive repairs, it finished 18 laps down.

LMGTE

No. 33 Corvette Racing: Finished 1st in class, 26th overall

In its last Le Mans start as the GM factory team and in the last appearance of the C8.R, Corvette Racing experienced the highs and lows of the French 24-hour—in just the first two and a half hours.

The No. 33 Corvette Racing team of drivers Nicky Catsburg, Ben Keating and Nico Varrone notched the team's ninth win at Le Mans, but not without a little drama.

After starting on the class pole won by Keating, Catsburg was doing fine until the front suspension became wonky. A shock replacement resulted in the Corvette dropping to 21st and the bottom of the GTE Am class leaderboard.

To add insult, the team believed it regained one lap under a Safety Car period, only to be thwarted by the ACO officials allowing the class leader to leave the pits without waiting for a subsequent Safety Car. Undeterred, the Corvette went from the bottom to the top on pace and well executed pit stops. The constant crashing and pitting for repairs of other class participants in tricky conditions aided the stunning comeback.

Texan Keating, the gentlemen driver who can outpace the non-pros in the other entries, helped start the comeback with a triple stint in the night. When rival teams started putting their gentlemen drivers behind the wheel during the daylight hours, the Corvette team was ready to pounce with gold-rated Catsburg and silver-rated Varonne.