Winner: Ferrari
A fourth win in as many races in the 2025 World Endurance Championship, a third straight victory at Le Mans. What more can Ferrari ask for? A 1-2-3, one might pedantically answer – which was a real possibility, such was the dominance of the 499Ps in terms of race pace, but Porsche denied Ferrari a lock-out by snatching second place.
Admittedly, Ferrari can be thankful for that mid-race safety car that put it back on track, having overcome a number of errors for further Le Mans glory.
The prancing horse is now in an ideal position to win the drivers’ and manufacturers’ titles in the WEC. The #51, #83 and #50 crews already have 105, 89 and 81 points respectively in the championship; the #6 Porsche has just 42. And as a constructor, Ferrari is on 202, so it’s hard to see how anyone could catch up in just four races when closest rival Toyota’s tally is 91.
Loser: Toyota
Having won the Le Mans 24 Hours five years in a row from 2018 to 2022, Toyota was aggravated by its lack of competitiveness at La Sarthe this year, which it attributed – without naming it – to the Balance of Performance, feeling that in a two-class system it was in the ‘no top speed’ class.
Yet, the #8 car still led the race shortly after the halfway point, but it ended up losing any chances of a good result – the best it could realistically hope for was fifth – when “a broken component caused its front left wheel to detach”, which cost it seven laps. The sister #7 car, meanwhile, suffered from first-lap damage and several penalties.
With sixth and 16th, this was Toyota’s worst Le Mans since 2017, when it was significantly more competitive but two cars retired and one finished eighth, nine laps down.
Winners: Former team-mates Kubica, Ye and Deletraz
Four years ago, Robert Kubica, Ye Yifei and Louis Deletraz teamed up at Team WRT for Le Mans and were cruelly denied an LMP2 class win on the very last lap of the race by a broken throttle sensor.
Le Mans 2025 will feel like payback for all three of them, as Kubica and Ye were part of the #83 Ferrari crew that won overall, while Deletraz took LMP2 Pro-Am honours with the AO by TF entry he shared with Dane Cameron and P. J. Hyett – a pretty comprehensive win with a near-one-lap margin.
The Pole and the Swiss had competed together again at Prema and WRT in 2022 and 2023, taking second place in LMP2 each time, and Deletraz was also runner-up last year in the Pro-Am subclass with that same AO by TF outfit.
Loser: Peugeot
Peugeot arguably was the main loser from the Balance of Performance this week.
The French lion was given the worst power-to-weight ratio of all Hypercar competitors, and it showed on track, as the 9X8 was significantly slower than all rivals but newcomer Aston Martin.
Peugeot qualified down in 17th and 18th, then Paul di Resta crashed the #93 entry in the first hour of the race when attempting to overtake an LMGT3 car. The #94 car followed a different strategy to other Hypercar runners, with longer stints, which meant it ever so briefly led the race, but it still finished outside the top 10.
One might wonder why Peugeot would want to stay in WEC any longer in those conditions.
Winners: Porsche
Porsche did not get a record-extending 20th overall Le Mans win this time around but, alongside partner Penske, still proved to be the only manufacturer capable of consistently challenging Ferrari over those 24 Hours.
It only took a minute for Julien Andlauer’s #5 car to take the lead of the race from the Cadillacs at the start, and Kevin Estre had a monster opening stint in the #6 machine to vault himself from 21st to fifth, as that car had been disqualified from qualifying after being found overweight.
Estre and team-mates Matt Campbell and Laurens Vanthoor ran an impeccable race, but lost out when the mid-race safety car wiped out their two-minute gap on the #50 and #51 Ferraris – the winning #83 admittedly was just 15s away.
It’s a case of what might have been, but there still are reasons to be positive.
Loser: BMW
BMW was expected to be a serious contender at Le Mans, having been Ferrari’s main rival in Qatar and at Imola, though it struggled more at a Spa-Francorchamps track whose characteristics are much closer to Le Mans.
The M Hybrid V8s were competitive on single-lap pace as they qualified fourth and sixth, and halfway through the race, both were still on the lead lap – which is crucial with current safety car rules.
Unfortunately, they were both struck by late-race mechanical issues, on top of a couple of trips through the Mulsanne gravel trap for the #15 car.
Eighteenth and 32nd is an overall Le Mans result that BMW will attempt to promptly forget about.
Winner: Aston Martin
Calling Aston Martin a winner might be a stretch given the lack of pace of the newcoming Valkyries, but the British constructor pretty much maximised what it could hope for alongside its operating squad, The Heart Of Racing.
The #009 Aston made a surprise appearance in Hyperpole thanks to Marco Sorensen, outqualifying one Toyota, one Porsche and both Peugeots on merit – discounting the Porsche that was excluded for being overweight.
Then its race was solid. The #007 car did have a slow puncture and was hindered by its gearbox overheating, while the sister #009 entry had an unwanted tour of the Mulsanne roundabout – like a number of other competitors – and got a drive-through penalty for a full-course-yellow breach, but that’s all very minor for a 24-hour race.
This was decent from the green machines, which are the only non-hybrid entries in Hypercar.
Loser: WEC
Over the 24-hour race, it didn’t take long for a sense of inevitability to submerge Le Mans.
Most competitors’ fears were proven justified as Ferrari clearly had the edge in terms of not only top speed but simply overall race pace.
The Hypercar field was the most exciting we’ve had in a long time, yet last night in the paddock it was difficult to find people that had actually found that spectacle enthralling – despite the top four cars finishing within 30 seconds!
Defining the Balance of Performance is an extremely tricky task, and we journalists can in no way whatsoever claim that we would do it better than the FIA’s engineers.
However, it is regardless fair to state that if the goal is competition, close racing and suspense, then Ferrari was – not necessarily voluntarily – given too much of an advantage. It has been dominating WEC, it dominated Le Mans, and other brands may soon get tired of it.
Just check what happened when so many OEMs went to Formula E – where most of them still got race wins.
