Beating Factory Crews a “Huge Achievement” for Glickenhaus

Jim Glickenhaus labeled his team’s double top-ten finish at the 24 Hours of Le Mans as an “amazing” outcome, as his team beat factory efforts from Porsche and Peugeot and extended its flawless finishing record in the French endurance classic.

The pair of Glickenhaus 007 Pipos finished sixth and seventh overall, led by the No. 708 entry driven by Ryan Briscoe, Romain Dumas and Olivier Pla.

The American squad finished behind Ferrari, Toyota and Cadillac but were classified ahead of all Porsche Penske Motorsport entries as well as the pair of Peugeot 9X8s.

With both cars making it to the end of the race on Sunday, Glickenhaus’ eponymous outfit continued its spotless finishing record at the event.

The team hasn’t recorded a single retirement at Le Mans since it made its debut in 2021.

“It’s amazing,” Glickenhaus told Sportscar365. “We’re six for six, finishing six entries over three years, and we finished it all. We had incidents, but we turned one crash around in four and a half minutes, which is pretty good.

“The bottom line, our little company beat four Porsches at Le Mans in the top class. I mean, how crazy is that? 

“It wasn’t impossible if we didn’t have some incidents and stuff, and that’s stupid to say because everybody has it.

“I’m not saying we could have won, but we could have maybe got third, which I mean is just unbelievable for a little company like us.”

Team principal Luca Ciancetti said that the increase of entries in the Hypercar category compared to last year’s edition meant Glickenhaus experienced a vastly different race compared to 12 months ago.

“Last year was enough to finish because honestly Toyota was way quicker and Alpine way behind so we just had to finish,” he said.

“This race, we raced against competitors. We had some issues but we were racing against big manufacturers and this for us is already a huge achievement.”

Ciancetti explained that the team’s lack of testing prior to the start of the season meant that early-season FIA World Endurance Championship rounds were sacrificed to ensure the team was “ready to fight” at Le Mans.

“We basically used the races up to here to be ready in a certain way,” he said.

“I think we made it honestly, so we came here and really cars were perfectly assembled. The team was really ready to fight.

“We had everything we needed so that was the plan honestly. We really wanted to do a good Le Mans and I think we are satisfied.”

Glickenhaus endured a difficult opening to the race when its No. 708 went a lap down at the start as it was forced to start from the pit lane after the team discovered mechanical problems on Saturday morning.

“We had an leakage from the gearbox, gearbox oil,” Ciancetti explained.  “Our fault because the day before the race usually we don’t do anything to the most important mechanical parts of the car.

“But we had to set the differential because there is a rule about the maximum torque speed of the differential.

“We were not sure to be compliant for the race, so we had to to retune the differential and by doing that we swapped parts.

“During the warm up, we noticed a leak and then we had to sort it out.”

Cianchetti said both cars “ran smoothly” for the remainder of the race from a reliability point of view, although it wasn’t a trouble free race for the squad.

Both Olivier Pla and Franck Mailleux had separate incidents at Indianapolis roughly an hour apart on Sunday morning.

Pla’s brush with the barrier inflicted suspension damage on the No. 708 car, leading to a pitstop of more than six minutes as the team carried out repairs.

“We’re getting used to it,” Ciancetti joked when asked about the repairs.

The Italian explained that the race put a strain on the team’s supply on spare parts, as it was seen taping up previously damaged parts of bodywork to be pressed into action again.

“We had like one and a half kit [of] spares per car,” Ciancetti said. “So we we ran out of them and so we really had to reshuffle everything to try to have a set of spares to get to the end of the race.”

Daniel Lloyd contributed to this report