General Motors walks away from this year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans with an overall podium finish for one of the top-class Cadillac V-Series.R prototype, a class victory in GTE-AM with the factory Chevrolet Corvette, and an overwhelming win for the NASCAR-derived Garage 56 Chevrolet Camaro in the completely made-up Index of Awesomeness competition.
The weekend started ominously for the Cadillac crew. Two of the three Cadillac prototypes were among the eight quickest runners, earning them a spot in the new Hyperpole session that would decide the pole sitter for the 24-hour event. But after local son Sebastien Bourdais set the third quickest time of the session to that point, he pulled to the side of the track with fire erupting from the rear end of his Cadillac. The damage was relatively minor, but Bourdais lost his fast lap because he was the cause of the ensuing red flag that halted the session with about five minutes to go.
In the race, the Action Express Cadillac made it less than a lap before starting driver Jack Aitkin slid into the wall at the first chicane. Significant front-end damage meant that the car would go down many laps before rejoining. But it soldiered around making back positions and gathering data for the other two cars. It finished seventeenth, 18 laps down. But Cadillac’s return after 21 years away from Le Sarthe was starting to look cursed.
A bit later in the race the highest placed Cadillac–the yellow-nosed car run by Chip Ganassi Racing and driven by Bourdais–was hit from behind by a GT car, requiring an unscheduled pit stop to swap out damaged rear bodywork. Bourdais handed the car over to teammate Scott Dixon and stalked through a tension-filled pit box, understandably angry over the incident.
Could it be that the Cadillac prototype effort with its load of factory support, star drivers, and top-shelf teams fail, despite showing more than ample speed? Briggs Cunningham first brought Cadillac to Le Mans in 1950. The near-stock Series 61 and the wild Le Monstre finished 10th and 11th, respectively. The brand didn't return to Le Mans until 2000 with the Northstar LMP effort. The Northstar never finished better than 9th in three attempts before Cadillac pulled the plug.
Chip Ganassi's two Cadillacs continued pounding away through the night, staying in the hunt for a top finish in the incident-strewn event. They would finish third and fourth overall, an excellent result for a new program (and a whole lot better than other big factory efforts from Porsche and Peugeot). Given how the weekend started, you’d think those finishes would be especially satisfying. That the team members we spoke to were dissatisfied that they hadn’t made the top step of the podium bodes well for the future.
The Corvette in GTE Am had an even more dramatic win. That class will be replaced by privateer GT3 cars. While a GT3 version of the C8 will compete, the long-standing and hyper successful factory Corvette Racing team won't be back. After taking a convincing pole position in the hands of 51-year-old Ben Keating, the lone Corvette was the odds-on favorite against the five Aston Martins, seven Ferraris, and eight Porsches until a broken front damper put the Corvette three laps down in the early going. But the familiar yellow Corvette worked through the night, picking its way back to the front for a convincing one-lap victory over its next closest competitors. So, the program which first race Le Mans in 2000 with the C5-R closes out its 23-year run with a ninth class victory.
Its star drivers didn’t stand on the podium and it finished only 39th in the race, but the Garage 56 NASCAR Chevy Camaro, fielded by Hendrick Motorsports, was without question the race’s winner (apologies to the Ferrari 499 P that actually crossed the line first). The hulking Camaro could be dismissed as a lovable oaf, except that it was fast. Really fast. Its race was for demonstration purposes only, but what it demonstrated was that it kicked ass. It outqualified every GTE car. I can tell you nothing beats the sight of a blaring Camaro stock car (albeit a heavily modified one) blasting by an LMP2 car. Even as campers went to sleep on Le Sarthe's huge infield, they could keep track of laps by noting when the thundering Camaro passed. The team had to replace a broken transmission (a half-an-hour stop) with about three hours to go. But it didn’t really matter. The car finished. It proved wildly popular and impressively fast. And like all the other GM entries, it sounded phenomenal.
Daniel Pund took the Executive Editor role at Road & Track in 2020 to help re-invent the venerable magazine brand. For nearly 30 years, Pund has toiled away as a feature writer, car reviewer, editor, and columnist for every car magazine that matters (including Car and Driver and Autoweek) and a few that didn’t. He’s also contributed to Esquire and GQ and other general-interest publications.
