Le Mans was rigged, and most people want it that way
Jack Baruth
Just a few days before the 100th running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, with the world anxiously awaiting an all-out battle between sleek and futuristic “hypercar” prototypes from Ferrari, Toyota, and others, the folks who run the show decided to put a thumb on the scales. More than a thumb, actually. The Automobile Club de l’Ouest, or ACO, announced that Toyota’s GR10 Hybrid, widely considered the favorite to win at that point, would be burdened, Harrison Bergeron-style, with 81.5 pounds of additional ballast during the race.
Toyota wasn’t the only manufacturer to take a hit. Ferrari was given a 59-pound penalty for their 499P hypercar. Porsche was assigned an extra 24 pounds, while Cadillac received a mild 6.6-pound ballast. Peugeot’s handsome but hapless 9X8, left in the dust by Toyota and everyone else in the first three races of the World Endurance Championship season, was permitted to continue as before.
The ACO had promised prior to Le Mans, in writing, that no such “balance of power,” or BoP, adjustment would take place. But they had a legitimate reason to break that promise. Toyota had been positively imperious in 2023, winning the most recent event by over a minute, and looked almost certain to extend their five-year streak of Le Mans victories. The ACO wanted a different outcome, or at least a more exciting one. Time to break out the ballast, along with a few additional restrictions in power and aerodynamics.
Like virtually all motor sports events throughout history, the 24h du Mans has always used a rulebook to govern what can and cannot participate in the race. These rules range from obvious (it wouldn’t be permissible to enter a motorcycle, or a diesel tractor-trailer) to somewhat recherche (all prototype sports cars must be capable of carrying a passenger seat, the size and weight of which is strictly specified, even though it has been more than seven decades since the disappearance of ride-along mechanics). BoP is different. It’s a system of active handicapping meant to ensure that most teams show up with a more or less equal chance of winning any given race.
The purists despise BoP, which arrived at the top classes of Le Mans after many years of successful experimentation in lesser sports cars, with one commentator on the official ACO channels snarling, “Congrats for a fixed, fake Le Mans.” Casual fans, however, are captivated by it. Gone are the days when endurance races were decided by margins of minutes or even hours. Today, the expectation is that the competition won’t be over until it’s over, or nearly so.
Just as importantly, the automakers adore BoP, which may occasionally rob them of a well-deserved win but far more often spares them the indignity of lagging the competition by embarrassing margins. It’s well understood in professional racing circles that the governing bodies will often give a new participant a minor BoP boost to ensure a strong debut. This helps reassure the C-suite and the bean counters while energizing the fans.
Prior to the 100th running of Le Mans, the ACO came up with the mother of all BoP schemes for its top class, Le Mans Hypercar. These spaceship-esque race cars, developed and built from scratch by Toyota, Ferrari, and Peugeot, would be joined by “GTP” cars from the American IMSA series. GTP is weak sauce compared to the Le Mans hypercars, being based on standardized chassis components from the middle-tier European LMP2 prototype series and a series-provided hybrid powertrain, but it’s also a lot cheaper to run. Putting LMH and GTP together would open the field to a total of 10 manufacturers and 16 total cars, a veritable traffic jam in a series which has sometimes seen as few as six vehicles on the track. But it would require some serious hypercar handicapping.
Some of that handicapping was positively ingenious. GTP cars have hybrid power on the rear wheels only, but the Toyota hypercar can engage electric drive on the front wheels, reducing tire wear and increasing traction when exiting corners. So the ACO forced Toyota to disable the system at speeds below about 120 mph. This compromise allowed Toyota to retain its innovative hybrid tech, which was important to its marketing efforts, without utterly humiliating the simpler GTP cars from Porsche and BMW.
In the end, however, cerebral tricks such as this couldn’t quite close the gap, so the ACO simply made the hypercars heavier. Quite a bit heavier, in fact. As a consequence, during Le Mans 2023, the Toyota was a full 15 seconds a lap slower than it had been in previous outings, enough of a handicap to let the competition draw near during the race.
Happily for spectators, Le Mans proved to be quite a spectacle, featuring everything from first-lap crashes to wild weather to the crowd-pleasing appearance of a highly-modified NASCAR stock car in the exhibition category, which received no BoP adjustments and therefore made light work of various Porsches, Ferraris, and Aston Martin sports cars. The eventual winner was a true hypercar, the #51 Ferrari of AF Corse, breaking a 58-year drought for the Prancing Horse. But the top 10 included Toyota, Cadillac, Peugeot, and the privateer effort of Wall Street inheritor Jim Glickenhaus.
Much like the titular hero of Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron, however, it appeared for much of the race that no amount of handicapping weight would stop the Toyota juggernaut. It took a drastic mistake to remove the TS10 Hybrid from contention; perhaps thinking of national glory, Toyota’s team put Japanese driver Ryo Hirakawa in for a final stint and told him to “take full risk” in pursuit of the win, only to have him lose control of the car and strike a barrier.
Hirakawa’s blunder allowed Ferrari to take the victory with over a minute to spare. In hindsight, more than a few pundits are praising the ACO’s heavy-handed efforts to balance the competition, purity be dammed. But there is some satisfaction for the old-timers in the fact that the best car nearly won the whole thing anyway, only to fade out of the winner’s circle through old-fashioned human error. “In the end,” one wag wrote, “the most critical ballast adjustment of the entire week was … the 68 kilograms contributed to the Toyota by Ryo Hirakawa.”
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Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn, New York, and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver and a former columnist for Road and Track and Hagerty magazines who writes the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.