#8 Toyota wins at Le Mans 24H after late race drama

Sebastien Buemi, Kazuki Nakajima and Fernando Alonso have won the 2019 24 Hours of Le Mans.

The #7 car of Mike Conway, Kamui Kobayashi and Jose-Maria Lopez were leading the class for most of the race, until a trio of unplanned stops for Lopez handed the lead to Nakajima, at which point the 2018 winner held on to take victory and capture the world championship.

SMP Racing won the battle for supremacy amongst the non-hybrid privateers as the #11 BR Engineering BR1-AER of Stoffel Vandoorne, Mikhail Aleshin and Vitaly Petrov finished ahead of the #1 and #3 Rebellions. Both the ByKolles and Dragonspeed entries retired from LMP1 competition.

In LMP2, the fight between G-Drive and Signatech Alpine was decided in favour of the French outfit when the #26 Aurus-01 Gibson needed a starter motor replacement from the lead early on Sunday morning. As a result, Andre Negrao, Nicolas Lapierre and Pierre Thiriet re-captured the double as the victory put them 15 points up over the #38 Jackie Chan DC Racing Oreca 07 Gibson of Ho-Pin Tung, Stephane Richelmi and Gabriel Aubry, who finished second. Pole sitters TDS Racing finished third.

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In GTE Pro, the #51 AF Corse Ferrari 488 GTE Evo of Daniel Serra, Alessandro Pier Guidi and James Calado survived a battle of attrition to take a class win ahead of the #91 Porsche of Gianmaria Bruni, Richard Lietz and Fred Makowiecki. The #93 Porsche of Earl Bamber, Patrick Pilet and Nick Tandy completed the podium in the Brumos liveried Porsche. The driver's championship was decided in favour of Kevin Estre and Michael Christensen, who finished in twelfth place. But because the #91 failed to win its class, Estre and Christensen held on to the points lead.

GTE Am came down to a thrilling fight between the #85 Ford GT of Ben Keating, Jeroen Bleekemolen and Felipe Fraga and the #56 Project 1 Porsche of Jörg Bergmeister, Egidio Perfetti and Patrick Lindsey. The chasing Porsche came close after the Ford had to make a pair of unplanned stops (one for a bumper repair and one for a stop-and-go penalty), but Dutchman Jeroen Bleekemolen managed to hold off Bergmeister to take the win. Bergmeister and company's second position, however, proved enough to capture the championship in GTE Am.