2 days ago
The 24 Hours of Le Mans Is Long. So Are the Preparations.
Ferrari is the team to beat in the F.I.A. World Endurance Championship.
It has won all three rounds in 2025 and is heading to the 24 Hours of Le Mans seeking to add to the team's victories in 2023 and 2024.
The race itself takes a day, but the preparation for it takes a year.
'We started to work for Le Mans the day after the last one,' Antonello Coletta, global head of endurance and Corse Clienti at Ferrari, said in an interview in May.
Understanding failures, and applying remedies, is a priority.
'Even though the results of the last two [Le Mans] were brilliant for us, the best learning case we can have is to understand where we can improve, where we can do better, not just on the car side but also on the operations side,' said Ferdinando Cannizzo, head of endurance racecars. 'We list all this stuff and for each of the points we have a countermeasure and actions. Sometimes it's a meeting, sometimes it's months of work.'
Three Ferrari 499Ps are in the race: the No. 50, the No. 51 and the No. 83.
In 2024, the No. 50 overcame a door problem and rain late in the race to win Le Mans, but its margin of victory over Toyota Gazoo Racing was just 14.2 seconds.
'Normally when you win you are not the best, but you are the best between all the other competitors that made more errors than you,' Coletta said. 'The best is who made less errors than others. On each occasion [in 2023 and 2024] we had problems, and we needed to understand why we had a mistake, a failure, or an error or [an error in] strategy. We won the first three races [of 2025] but after each race we analyzed some errors that we made in each of them.'
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