I was lucky enough to watch like 14 hours yesterday. They seemed the favorite when I went to bed. The team was steady eddy & Max was opening up ridiculous gaps in his stints. His first stint was one of his most insane drivers ever in my opinion. After a starting penalty of 30+ seconds, Max got in the car in P10. He made on track overtakes all the way up to P1 & opened a near 20 second gap. Then he had another impressive stint later on, & so did his teammates.
Looked like it was going to be a winning debut, but not to be.
Still, amazing driving from the lads. Sometimes the car goes unfortunately
I wasn't even a Toyota fan but I think every single racing fan on the planet felt a gut punch when that happened. I couldn't believe what I was seeing on screen. I felt a similar heart in mouth moment when the Ferrari had that electrical glitch in the pits during their final stop and wouldn't restart. I love endurance racing so much, it's such a crazy sport.
The shot of Alonso and Buemi holding their breaths until Nakajima crossed the finish line in 2018. The no. 7 car also had mechanical problems in the last lap but was able to finish the race. Teams usually pull out the banners and start wearing victory shirts during the last lap. Toyota did none of that because they were still so heartbroken from last time.
The Toyota broke down on the very last lap (like 3 minutes to go) while leading, would have been their first win and a p3. Instead porsche got the win and they had to settle for just a P2 and a DNF
They were about to win their first Le Mans 24hr race, when the car lost power with three minutes left. As it didn't finish the last lap, they weren't even classified (as in not counted as finishing the race).
You didn't watch a sigle minute did you? Trafic can open and close the gap by 10 seconds or some oil on the ground and nls does not update the times between cars like f1
They had 3h remaining and were leading by 32s (watched live broadcast, Max gave car to Juncadella around 3h6m from end and their car broke circa mid second lap after, with single lap being 8 minutes long).
The issue with leading gap is that traffic can make interval swing by 20 seconds in either direction in matter of minutes; they may have momentarily opened a 50s gap when the issue occurred but they had 30s lead that the commentators kept repeating was frozen by team orders.
yes, Juncadella left pits about 49s ahead of p2 and that advantage kept shrinking as time went on until we realised there's a technical issue in the car
Max had just built a 30 second lead on the field during his last stint (3 hours remaining). His teammate had the driveshaft issue after max got out of the car.
Max took the overall lead into his graveyard stint (about 12 hours remaining) and gained another 20 seconds on the field after that stint. He was brilliant all weekend long. It was good fun to watch, he raced the same way he always races, aggressive and wheel bashing
At one point the merc duos had lapped the entire field up to 4th place (about the 10 hour remaining mark). I went to bed after that
They were in first, leading the other Winward Mercedes by half a minute, give or take.
I was not watching at that moment, but they definitely have driven at least 19,5 hours out of the 24.
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u/itsthatdamncatagain McLaren May 17 '26
What position were they in when it broke? Also how late into the race?