A drive must join the safety car. There is a regulation hole as now, Felipe Nasr takes over from Matthieu Jaminet in the #4 Porsche 963 on the air jacks and getting new wet tires. Sebastien Bourdais feels even though it is properly wet, that we should go back to racing. Sector one is far wetter than the Mulsanne straight is. Manthey with Pure Racing and EMA run 1-2 in GT3. #92 Porsche ahead of #91. Alex Malykhin ahead of Yasser Shahin. There will be a full service here, for drive time's sake. Malykhin getting out and handing over to Klaus Bachler. Yasser Shahin is leading the motor race in the GT3 class and the two of them are now all the way up ahead of The Heart of Racing.
We will see two Aston Martin Valkyrie's in the WEC next year in 2025 and one in IMSA. Felipe Nasr being told that the rain is stopping in the next three or four minutes. Penske will be putting more Rain X on the windscreen. After two hours of blabbering about rain and safety cars, we could go racing because the rain is depleting, and we have less than nine hours to go. The two Alpine's are out because of engine failures, smoke pouring out of the back of the 3.4-liter turbo V6. Robert Kubica and ithers cannot believe we are still running under the safety car with all this water. This rain will be gone soon and we'll have about three hours of no rain and then at noon French time, there will be more rain before the end.
The Toyota radar says it has stopped raining and there is no change though on track with all the standing water. Car #47 had a lot of trouble early doors, but things have settled down. Last in the LMP2 class, Naveen Rao at the wheel, invented an artificial intelligence company and sold it to a big company to get the cash to go racing. We have not seen the happy merge phase yet but could be approaching it. Now, Rao sharing the #47 with Matt Bell and Fredric Vesti. Robert Kubica says it is totally impossible to see anything beyond 20 meters away. Ferrari are fast in the dry and want to jump straight to slick tires.
Thanks to the camera operators for being out in the rain with their 45 cameras and 140 cameramen across three shifts. Thank you all! Heart of Racing in and out of the pit lane, the #27 Asto Martin Vantage GT3. We remain under the safety car here at Le Mans. Matteo Cairoli, we did not hear what he had to say about going racing or not. The #91 Manthey EMA Porsche 911 GT3R is into the pit lane. Keep the same tires on the car. Throw a driver in now or keep your driver in. The AF Corse LMP2 car has gone long into it's pit box, Francois Perrodo at the wheel of it, changing to Ben Barnicoat, I believe.
Francois Perrodo has done over seven hours of driving. They can use Ben Barnicoat and Nico Varrone. If you are on the lead lap in your category, you have a chance to win this. Iron Dames are in the pit lane for service and for a driver change. Alex Wurz, two-time Le Mans winner says that we saw a lot of proper racing before the safety car came out. Race Control made the right decision. This is just too much water. Eight and a half hours remaining with drizzle coming in and out and in and out and in and out.
It is like driving on the highway at night with concentration lapses and being totally blinded in the rain. The rain could be easing up and we could get back to full-fledged racing in the next 40 minutes to an hour. Wurz is an ambassador for Toyota Gazoo Racing. Hello, again, to Tom Kristensen. The conditions he thinks are OK. It is not raining. It is all the spray hanging in the air. We need to go racing soon and get some mileage on the board. Four-wheel drive Hypercars can be unstable. There are more opportunities for power deployment only.
Front braking can be too much and lock the wheels and too much deployment makes for the cars to overuse the tires. The drivers are able to control and work with this. Still no Race Control updates yet. The Hypercars are having water leak into the cars. The Toyota had it on the dashboard and into the side of the Cadillac's. We used to race open cockpit cars years ago. Take responsibility and have freedom to control the cars, although, we have seen a lot of accidents, and this puts pressure on race control. We really need to get this race restarted and get some mileage under our belts. In over a century, Le Mans has never been red flagged.
We are moving through the stages to get this race back underway. The merge and the pass around will take time. We will start merging. At Lamborghini, they are trying to heat the battery up and the regeneration for the hybrid system. Felipe Nasr aboard the #4 Porsche Penske Motorsports Porsche 963 leaves the pit lane. Eight and a quarter hours to go. The categories are still mixed up and not in category order like we had last year. Strategists will be going backwards from the end of the race over the next eight hours as we are closing in on the final third of this race. 2/3rds will be complete soon. Vadislav Lomko is now into the #34 Inter Europol Oreca 07 in LMP2.
The merging and pass around begin now. Felipe Drugovich in the #311 Whelen Action Express Cadillac is being told to catch up with the rest of the pack. Ditto for the #22 United Autosport LMP2 car. Safety Car and prepare for the pass around. Start the pass around, please. Thank you. It is now in progress. Circulating between the safety car and the class leader, overtakes the safety car to reduce gaps. Pit stops forbidden. Alex Malykhin, Kevin Estre, and Francois Perrodo are the cars the stewards are looking for. They picked up the #8 Toyota which is the leade of the motor race.
The pass around is complete as Matteo Cairoli is playing catch up. We are at the pass around stage after crawling around behind the safety car for four hours or more. Nicklas Nielsen will be ready to attack when we go green.
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