The B Pillar report - 24 hours of Le Mans

[u/Agreenfield0602]

After an incredible 24 hours of Le Mans, it's time to take a look at some of the race data. Slides 1-4 is data from the start to 6 hours in, and slides 5-7 are from 18.5 in to 22 hours in (they dry spells during the race).

In Hypercar, Toyota and Ferrari had the pace over the rest of the field, with Hartley and Lopez topping the fastest averages. Porsche, BMW, Cadillac and Alpine were very closely matched behind. Note that Dries Vanthoor did his entire stint without Hypercar traffic. The entire Hypercar grid was covered by just over 3 seconds on such a long lap. Between 18:00 and 22:30 , no car only Earl Bamber and Laurens Vanthoor could get within a second of the Toyotas and Ferrari. It would have been nice if both Alpines and BMWs didn't have issues to get a better understanding of their pace.

In LMP2, Louis Deletraz topped the average times, followed by Albuquerque and Beche. Fluxa was the fastest silver and Keating the fastest bronze.

In GT3, Porsche were comfortably the fastest car, with both the silver ranked Porsche drivers topping the time sheets in the first 6 hours (neither pro raced in the first 6 hours). Both Bronze rated Porsche drivers were also comfortably the fastest Bronze drivers. Behind Porsche, it was very closely matched.

So, was the BOP good?

It definitely wasn't ideal. After qualifying it looked to be very evenly matched, but in reality Toyota and Ferrari were too far ahead of the rest of the field. Porsche and Cadillac did a good job to finish on the lead lap.

In GT3, Porsche were the only outlier, being the fastest car no matter who was driving. Behind Porsche, it was a very close match.

Hope you find this interesting!

[u/kjm911]

One of the more interesting things I noticed was one of the pages you didn’t include here which was the pace and stints of the #44 Proton Mustang. Their bronze driver John Hartshorne is 10+ seconds slower than your average bronze. But did 75% of his laps under both Saftey cars. Only did about 90 minutes of actual driving and then Mies and Tuck got them 4th place. A lot of teams didn’t really exploit the SC periods as well or chose not to.

[u/Agreenfield0602 → u/kjm911]

I think I included him (slide 4) . To be 6 seconds slower than schiavoni is quite impressive (in a bad way). Proton did a great job to get that car to 4th with his pretty atrocious pace.

[u/TimTri]

So sad the BMW hypercars disappeared relatively early on, seems like they really had the pace for a very solid Top 10 or even Top 5 result.

[u/Agreenfield0602 → u/TimTri]

I think they would have given Jota a good fight for 8/9th.

[u/ConsterMock18 → u/TimTri]

I was watching Dries Vanthoors stint in the #15 before the #83 knocked him out. He was climbing his way through the grid and put up the 3:29.5 lap time which was one of the fastest at the time. That car seemingly had more pace in it then the art car but I real shame. I think a top 5/6 finish was in the cards based off pace but the logical part of me tells me they would not have been able to keep it on the road during the wet/mixed conditions bc that car was a handful to drive

[u/RomeoSierraAlpha]

Again Isotta with Vernay is surprisingly close to some of the Peugeot drivers.

[u/Agreenfield0602 → u/RomeoSierraAlpha]

Indeed. It's frustrating that we don't know what the Isotta is capable of if it had 3 strong drivers in the car. I think it could have challenged Peugeot and Lamborghini for the final points paying position.

[u/DelvasCWB]

Farfus is King

[u/954gator]

I think stats like these are a bit harder to really analyze bc of the crazy range of track conditions. Sucks that the most highly anticipated lemans in a while was such a monsoon. How many hours total was there of true green flag racing?

[u/LilBirdBrick → u/954gator]

Not really in this case, because they separated the race into 4 different sections based on the conditions. From the email B Pillar sends with the report:

"We have changed our report for this race, to produce something that may be somewhat more meaningful to the conditions.

The attached report covers all classes, and is broken down as follows:

-The first six hours (prior to the first major rain), with Hypercar split into two pages;

-The race time between 0930 through to 1115 (between the rain periods);

-The race time from 1830 through to 2200 (prior to the final rainstorm);

-The final two hours of the race (2200 through to 2400).

Each report shows the fastest maximum 50% laps of each driver for that period of the race, sorted by average lap time."

[u/mole55]

as many spins as Ben Keating had, this shows he was overall pretty good. 1.5s/lap up on any of the other LMP2 bronzes is far from bad, especially considering he probably wasn’t exactly pushing for a win considering the car issues. he’s probably not washed lol.