The collateral damage of the ongoing spat between the GTE manufacturers following the much criticised Qualifying session results that saw a dominant performance from the Ford and Ferrari runners threatened to spoil what had been a spectacular, near race-long, battle between Risi Competizione’s #82 Ferrari 488 GTE and the pair of US entered Chip Ganassi Ford GTs.
The timing screens flashed up with 20 minutes to go in the Le Mans 24 Hours that the #82 was being shown the black and orange flag for a non-operable leader position light cluster, Toni Vilander ordered by the team to ignore the instruction to pit,and to ignore too the later stop and go penalty that resulted from non-observance of the flag.
Post race the Risi crew though were on the podium in second position and were introduced in the post-race press conference as the second placed GTE Pro team.
DSC now understands that the protest was posted by Chip Ganassi Racing, with the stewards post-race deciding that a 50 second time penalty was to be applied, but that they also applied an identical time penalty to the winning #68 Ford for a yellow flag infringement. The overall positions are therefore unaffected.
