Kamui Kobayashi, Mike Conway and Nyck de Vries have won the 2026 24 Hours of Le Mans, with the #20 BMW of Robin Frijns, Rene Rast and Sheldon van der Linde second.
In third was the #8 Toyota of Sebastien Buemi, Ryo Hirakawa and Brendon Hartley.
Magnussen started the sister #15 BMW on pole, while the #20 BMW was 4th. Magnussen temporarily lost the lead to Will Stevens in the #12 Cadillac right at Dunlop Curve at the very start, he had it back again by the end of the Mulsanne Straight.
The Toyotas, though, had a plan to they put it into action very soon after the start. Just as they’d done at Spa, both Toyotas, with Buemi and Conway at the wheel of either, pitted early, Conway first on lap 7 of a 12 or 13 lap stint, and Buemi the following lap.
This had the effect of getting them out of the initial LMP2 and LMGT3 traffic, and instead put them in some clean air to set fast lap times.
When their rivals came in later, Buemi undercut everyone and emerged in the lead, with Rast second and Ferdinand Habsburg in the #35 Alpine third.
For the next few hours, the race ran surprisingly clean, with the order shuffling when the off-strategy Toyotas stopped roughly 5 laps earlier than their rivals, which mainly included the #20 BMW and, increasingly, both JOTA-run Cadillacs, #12 and #38.
However, over time, the strategies and the gap the #8 Toyota held began to slowly diminish. At the end of the fifth hour, Hartley in the #8 held a 30s gap over the #20 BMW, now with Rast’s teammate Sheldon van der Linde at the wheel, with the two JOTA Cadillacs of Jack Aitken and Louis Deletraz third and fourth.
However, with the cycle continuing to converge, both Frijns, now in the #20, and Buemi, back in the #8, both came in on the same lap, with less than a second between them, by the eighth hour, with BMW seemingly have progressively cut stints short or short-fueled in order to bring themselves back onto parity with Toyota, presumably in order to avoid a potentially costly splash and dash at the end.
The race had run very clean until this point, with just a single full course yellow and no slow zones or safety cars.
But that changed here, as Gianmarco Livorato in the #88 Proton Ford Mustang and Francesco Castellacci in the #54 AF Corse Ferrari collided at Forest Esses, just after the Goodyear (no longer Dunlop) Bridge.
The safety car period bunched everyone back together but Buemi held the lead at the start and retained it. He handed the car over to Hsrtley, and despite a brief excursion onto the Mulsanne roundabout for the Kiwi, he kept the car in the lead.
The JOTA Cadillacs, though, were clearly faster in the night time. Aitken and Deletraz maneuvered themselves into the lead by the end of the 11th hour, giving JOTA and Cadillac a 1-2 as the race approached 4am in the morning and the all-important half way mark.
But then, disaster. Sebastien Bourdais, who had replaced Aitken at the wheel, came into the pits for a stop when the power steering failed on his #38 Cadillac V-Series.R.
The car was duly pushed back into the garage but lost 7 laps and emerged back out in 17th, well out of contention. For local boy Sebastien Bourdaism, who grew up watching this race from the spectator areas and was born near Mulsanne, he couldn’t hide his dejection.
“I just to try to take the emotion out of it, the best I could,” said the Frenchman in a media session a few hours before the end of the race, attended by Motorsport Week.
“I did my part, I think I had a solid stint in the car when I was there. So did everybody else. I think at that point, when the gods of racing decide that it’s not your day, it’s just not your day. We didn’t stuff the car in the fence or anything like that, it’s just a stupid failure that ruins everybody’s efforts. It is what it is.”
The power steering issue would plague the #38 for the rest of the race and eventually retired at 8am local time, 16 hours into the race.
From then on the win was between 3 cars and 4 manufacturers: both Toyotas, #7 and #8, the remaining #12 JOTA and the #20 BMW, were the cars in contention for the win.
The #12 continued to lead, sans its sister car, for next couple of hours, punctuated by points when it would lose the lead due to the pit cycle.
However, a costly mistake 14 hours or so into the race was made when Deletraz, somewhat unfamiliar with WEC-rules racing, committed a full course yellow infringement and duly received a drive through penalty.
The leaders were were pushing, though in a bid to make up as much time as possible. The #8 needed its front left brakes change at one point by the Toyota crew, while before its retirement the #338 was sent out for testing purposes for the other 2 Cadillacs still in the race.
Once the daylight returned, though, it was clear Toyota had the legs on BMW and Cadillac. Both Toyotas duly took a 1-2 over the course of a few hours, although the lead was cycling whenever the leaders stopped.
Frijns was able to split the Toyotas late into the race, by taking new tyres on his penultimate stop while neither Toyota did.
He subsequently caught, and overtook, Buemi in a magnificent move around the outside to take second.
Now he had an arguably harder task: catching, and passing, Kamui Kobayashi in the lead Toyota, the #7.
All 3 stopped simultaneously for their final stops, with Kobayashi and Frijns declining to take new tyres. Buemi, on the other hand, did, setting him around 15 seconds back from Frijns.
Frijns was around the same distance from Kobayashi. Try as he might, the Dutchman could not close the gap in the sub-40 minutes left to the Japanese driver, eventually reducing it to under 11 seconds for an exceptionally close finish after 24 hours of racing.
The #8 Toyota of Buemi was third, putting both Toyotas on the podium.
Fourth was the #12 Cadillac of Will Stevens, alongside his teammates Louis Deletraz and Norman Nato. While they had pace in the night time, leading for a substantial amount of time, the pace in the day light wasn’t quite enough to challenge BMW and Toyota.
Fifth was the #51 Ferrari of Antonio Giovinazzi, Alessandro Pier Guidi and James Calado, with Ferrari’s winning streak since 2023 coming to an end.
See the full results on the WEC website.
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