Yelloly: Inter Europol Practiced Vital Fuel-Saving “A Lot”

Nick Yelloly says Inter Europol Competition “practiced quite a lot” its strategy of long 12-lap stints that he believes was key to securing back-to-back LMP2 triumphs in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

The Briton repeated his success from last year at the wheel of the No. 43 Inter Europol entry having again shared with Tom Dillmann and Kuba Smiechowski, son of team founder Wojciech, as the squad secured its third LMP2 victory in the past four years.

Yelloly felt the strategy of regularly extending its stints by one lap to save fuel was key to propelling both his entry and the sister No. 343 Oreca 07 Gibson of Nico Mueller, Reshad De Gerus and Bijoy Garg into victory contention.

“Most were doing 11 [laps] and we went for 12 straight away, just to try to get that fuel advantage towards the end of the race,” Yelloly told Sportscar365.

“Some people switched over [to 12 laps] but it’s quite hard to do without practice, so we definitely had the step ahead there.

“I’m sure people will now know the tricks for next year! I think we did a great job there and all the boys and girls in the team, that was down to them.”

While both cars initially adopted a very similar strategy, Yelloly said this evolved a little as the race wore on when the duo were running together to avoid them both pitting at the same time in adjacent boxes.

“When you’re parked next to each other in the pit lane, it’s very, very easy to trip over each other when you’re doing the same strategy,” he said.

“We went slightly split near the end just to make sure that didn’t happen because we had done such a great job until that point we didn’t want to screw both cars.”

While Dillmann breezed past Mueller at the second Mulsanne chicane for the lead with just an hour to go, Yelloly believed it was “just how it fell on strategy at the end” that determined which of the cars triumphed.

“I think the No. 343 tried to do a quadruple stint and, when asked, I said, ‘No, I don’t want to do that because the tires were struggling a little bit when it got hot,'” he added.

“And that was definitely the right call because Tom was flying on the double stints at the end there, so it made the difference.

“To win again, and in a really clean way, just on pace and to have the sister car battling for the win as well in the last six to eight hours, we knew it was, I wouldn’t say awkward, but we knew we were going to go back and forward between the cars for the whole last eight hours.

“To get a 1-2 for Inter Europol as well, which hasn’t been done for them before, is pretty special.”

For the first 20 hours of the race, the No. 30 Duqueine Team Oreca regularly enjoyed a narrow advantage over the Inter Europol duo but this retired late on with a suspected brake disc failure on the Mulsanne Straight when Richard Verschoor was at the wheel.

Yelloly reckoned it could have been very close between the three crews without that problem.

“They had zero mistakes from the drivers, they were executing well in the pits, it was just unfortunate they had the failure so very sorry for them but that’s 24-hour racing,” he said of the Duqueine squad.

Yelloly will not have the opportunity to try to make it a hat-trick next year, after it was announced last week that he will be one of the drivers for the new Ford Hypercar program in the FIA World Endurance Championship for 2027.