1993 24 Hours of Le Mans

Start

From flagfall, Alliot and Irvine dueled at the front, with the latter's Toyota taking the lead on the eighth lap when the Peugeot spun at Mulsanne corner. Irvine continued to hold the lead through two driving shifts until a slow pitstop (Sekiya lost 2 laps waiting for his drinks bottle to be secured^[5]) handed the lead back to the Peugeot, now driven by Mauro Baldi. At 6.30pm Raphanel brought in the second Toyota, while running third, with an engine misfire. Half an hour later the lead Peugeot lost 35 minutes and 8 laps with a broken oil pipe. The to and fro battle between the works teams was then picked up by Geoff Lees' Toyota and the Peugeot of Boutsen/Dalmas/Fabi. In GT, one of the TWR-Jaguars was out with a blown head-gasket after only half an hour. After the works Porsche was held up for 20 minutes with a sticking throttle,^[6] the other two Jaguars dominated the class, around 15th place, mixing it with the Group C (Category 2) cars, ahead of a raft of works and private Porsches. In the works Porsche, Walter Röhrl had driven hard to make back 2 of the 5 laps by 10pm when he rammed the back of the Debora in the Mulsanne chicanes. Losing oil, the engine seized before it could reach the pits.^[7]

Night

Juan Manuel Fangio II had been closing in on the leader into the night until 11pm when he was hit from behind by Yojiro Terada's Lotus GT missing its braking point at the 2nd Mulsanne chicane. Repairs cost it 35 minutes, dropping it to 10th. Through the night Boutsen and his co-drivers held the lead over the third team car of steady teammates Brabham/Bouchut/Hélary, with a recovering Irvine a lap behind. At 2.30am, Fabi bought his Peugeot into the pit with smoke in the cockpit from faulty wiring. Though fixed in five minutes they lost the lead to their sister-car. When Irvine's Toyota lost more time with electrical problems, the two Peugeots had a comfortable lead, swapping the lead depending on the pit strategy. In Category 2, brilliant night-time driving by Roland Ratzenberger in the Toyota 93C-V of Shin Kato's SARD team kept them the lead, ahead of the Porsche 962s, that he had got them soon after 5pm.

Morning

At 7am Hélary had his rear wing damaged by debris, losing the lead, then at 8.50am Boutsen lost a lap with a fractured exhaust handing the lead back. Irvine, meanwhile, was driving blisteringly fast, breaking the lap record and making back a lap. But battery and clutch issues affected the Toyotas: Wallace's car came to a stop out at the Dunlop curves at 7.45am with gearbox problems, then Irvine's challenge ended after midday with a 30-minute engine repair, and finally Lees' car, despite all three drivers doing triple stints to save pit-time, needed gearbox repairs dropping it from 4th to 9th. In GT, the private Porsche of Jean-Pierre Jarier's Monaco Média team had been leading for 6 hours, chased by the remaining Jaguar who finally passed it in the 21st hour.

Finish and post-race

So with Toyota's problems, Jean Todt's Peugeots finished a convincing 1-2-3, with Alliot's car making its way back up through the field to 3rd (still 8 laps behind). Toyota ended up finishing 4-5-6, with the older Category 2 (Group C) cars heading the rest of the field home with a big lead over the Porsche 962s, with Roland Ratzenberger and Mauro Martini holding on for the Japanese SARD team. In the battle of the 962s, the Obermaier team's reliability beat its bigger brothers: the Joest and Kremer teams.

Sir Jack Brabham had two of his sons on the podiums when David, along with fledgling test-driver David Coulthard and veteran John Nielsen bought the Jaguar XJ220C as the first GT home. However, it had raced under waiver due to scrutineering concerns on its lack of catalytic converters like its production-model had (although no other GT cars used them, nor the racing-spec version of the Jaguar). A month later, they were disqualified on a technicality- Jaguar's evidence and appeal had been filed correctly with the ACO, but not on time with the French motorsport authority (FFSA).^[8] The record thus shows the GT win went to the Porsche 911 of Jürgen Barth that had finished 2 laps behind.

In the small Category 3 field of 3 LMP cars, Gérard Welter's latest WR-Peugeot prototype had started well, staying in the top 20 well ahead of its rivals until delayed by wheel-bearing problems. Didier Bonnet's Debora SP93 took the category lead until the WR overtook it again just before dawn, until delayed again - this time replacing a driveshaft. The Debora took over again until halted the engine broke with just over an hour to go, handing the win to the long-suffering WR drivers.^[9]

With consecutive wins, this was the last Le Mans for the works Peugeot team for 14 years. After the race, Jean Todt immediately left Peugeot to manage the Scuderia Ferrari F1 team.^[10] Back in Japan, blame was laid at the engine engineering department. A month later, Toyota bought out Anderson Motor Sports, running its rally cars and set up Toyota Motorsport GmbH in Cologne for a European racing programme.^[11]

Included in the GT field were seven new Venturi 500LM supercars, coming out of the French one-make race series. Although not on the pace with the Porsche 911s or Jaguars, five of them finished. It was a success for the brand though: Jürgen Barth's German Porsche series joined Patrick Peter and Stéphane Ratel's Venturi series in 1994 to create the BPR Global GT Series (named for their surname initials) - the only major international sports car series running that year, piquing FISA's interest.