No. 6 Porsche Out Front in Le Mans at Halfway Point

Laurens Vanthoor led the 24 Hours of Le Mans at the halfway point for Porsche Penske Motorsport, with the field compressed again after a safety car triggered by a crash for Nielsen Racing driver Cem Bolukbasi.

After 12 hours of racing at Circuit de la Sarthe, the No 6 Porsche 963 held an advantage of 4.203 seconds over the No. 8 Toyota GR010 Hybrid of Ryo Hirakawa.

Hirakawa jumped up into second during a round of pitstops that took place under the race’s first safety car intervention after Bolukbasi crashed the No. 24 Nielsen Oreca 07 Gibson at Tertre Rouge.

Bolukbasi was unharmed in the crash, although the Pro-Am-entered LMP2 machine has been retired.

At the time of the crash, the No. 6 Porsche had broken through at the front thanks to a combination of longer fuel stints as well as penalties for two out of three Ferrari 499Ps.

First, the No. 50 car received a drive-through penalty for a yellow flag infringement, followed by a 20-second stop-and-hold penalty for the No. 51 sister machine for speeding in the pit lane.

As a result, only the No. 83 Ferrari remained in the top three with Yifei Ye at the wheel in third, followed by the No. 4 Porsche of Pascal Wehrlein and the No. 15 BMW M Hybrid V8 piloted by Raffaele Marciello.

Both factory-entered Ferraris made rapid progress on the fringes of the top-five immediately following the restart, as both the No. 50 machine of Miguel Molina and the No. 51 car in the hands of Alessandro Pier Guidi quickly fought past Alex Lynn’s No. 12 Cadillac V-Series.R.

The two 499Ps then battled over sixth as Pier Guidi overtook Molina into Mulsanne Corner, dropping the Spaniard back to seventh.

Behind Lynn in eighth, the top ten was completed by the No. 5 Porsche and No. 38 Cadillac driven by Mathieu Jaminet and Sebastien Bourdais, respectively.

Meanwhile, the No. 101 Wayne Taylor Racing Cadillac appeared to become the first retirement of the Hypercar class when Filipe Albuquerque stopped the car on the Mulsanne Straight with a reported engine failure.

In LMP2, VDS Panis Racing continued its commanding run at the head of the class, although the safety car saw Ollie Gray’s lead over the No. 9 Proton-Iron Lynx Oreca 07 Gibson slashed to 6.391 seconds.

Jakub Smiechowski held third for Inter Europol Competition, with the two IDEC Sport Orecas of Mathys Jaubert and Sebastian Alvarez fourth and fifth.

In LMGT3, Team WRT’s stint at the head of the field came to a dramatic end when the No. 46 BMW M4 GT3 EVO retired just before halfway due to electrical issues.

Kelvin van der Linde was aboard the car when a failure in the Porsche Curves caused a sudden loss of power steering, sending the South African into the gravel.

After the No. 46 car was recovered, Van der Linde brought the car into the pits, where it spent five minutes in the garage before rejoining the race.

However, the car returned to the pits not much later, with a BMW spokesperson since confirming that the car had been retired.

Almost immediately after the safety car restart, the Belgian squad suffered a second setback when the sister No. 31 BMW was damaged after a collision with a rabbit. The car has yet to rejoin.

After the No. 46 BMW fell away, the No. 92 Manthey Porsche 911 GT3 R has emerged at the front of the field with Riccardo Pera at the wheel.

The No. 81 TF Sport Chevrolet Corvette Z06 GT3.R, driven by Rui Andrade, sat in second, followed by the No. 78 Lexus RC F GT3 of Finn Gehrsitz.