This time last week the 2023 ELMS season came to a close with the post-season Rookie Test. This year’s campaign really was one for the ages, featuring a raft of storylines in each class.
So, with the dust settled and the FIA WEC’s final 2023 meeting fast approaching, it’s time to look back at some of the key talking points heading into the off-season.
The class of 2023 in LMP2 was truly special
The 2023 combined ELMS LMP2 and LMP2 Pro/Am field, has been little short of stellar, both in the pro line-ups across both classes and in the racing it has produced.
The inclement weather at Portimao could have seen disaster and indeed some teams stumbled in very challenging conditions. But that will not be the lasting impression of the championship’s first-ever double-header Grand Finale.
Instead, DSC will long remember a pair of hard-fought wins overall for United Autosports, two well-measured drives from LMP2 title-winning team Algarve Pro Racing and the relatively luckless weekend for the standout team in Pro/Am, Racing Team Turkey.
Back-to-back standout stints from the mercurial Malthe Jakobsen will live long in the memory too. The Dane has spent the season honing his skills with Nicolas Lapierre and Alexandre Coigny and is almost certainly destined for great things in the future.
Jakobsen produced two drives over the weekend that lit up the timing screens and gave a grandstand finish to a remarkably hard-fought Pro/Am championship. His chase to the front against Matthieu Vaxiviere on Sunday saw COOL Racing fall short of the title by just half a second.
Vaxiviere had to use every ounce of talent to fight off the Dane, en route to his first ELMS title and a remarkable fifth major title for Francois Perrodo since 2016.
Farewell ELMS GTE, thanks for the memories
Proton Competition’s Christian Ried, in a podcast that you will hear in full next month, described the outgoing GTE class as the best GT ruleset ever, with the best GT racing ever.
Those that have witnessed the class at its very best, will almost certainly agree.
Portimao’s Sunday encounter marked the 69th and final race for the class in Europe, the final race in the ELMS and the penultimate race ever for the class that has graced ACO rules racing since 2011. It’s a mark of the quality of competition that we have seen in recent years, that a very large proportion of the factory driving talent from GTE Pro continues in competition in Hypercar.
The Am drivers too though, will mourn its passing with genuine sadness. In the ELMS the 911 RSR 19, 488 GTE EVO, and AMR Vantage GTE are now parked, with only next week’s WEC finale to come.
As one commenter on social media said after the final race: “Don’t be sad that it’s gone, be happy that it existed.”
The 2024 grid is set to be oversubscribed
As is traditional at the ELMS season finale, DSC worked the paddock all week to put together the best picture possible of the season to come.
First things first. Expect all four classes to be significantly oversubscribed, with a maximum grid size of 42 cars not enough to accommodate the demand.
The combined LMP2 and LMP2 Pro/Am grid will exceed 20 cars for the first time, leaving 10 cars apiece for LMP3 and the new LMGT3 division.
More extraordinary still, the ELMS organisers will almost certainly turn away a significant number of cars in all classes in what is a transitional year for LMP3, which sees the final year of the Nissan-powered formula and of course with an incoming GT3 class.
The ELMS is in rude health, and the challenge now is to actively manage what has been a very productive rung on the ACO as international sportscar racing continues to boom in this stunning new era.
Race control made the right calls
Portugal has traditionally produced stunning weather late in the year for the ELMS finale. 2023 however, was a real exception to that rule. The conditions were grim at best and simply horrible at worst.
At most races, the most popular viewing is the timing screen. This time however, the weather radars attracted the most attention. Race director Eduardo Freitas and his team did a simply fantastic job, particularly on Sunday for the ELMS and Le Mans Cup finales, when the weather was at its most dire.
Hundreds across the paddock were receiving weather warnings from the Portuguese government by text message, but it was clear that race control was ahead of the game, never doubting that there would be windows to race.
The Michelin Le Mans Cup contest in the morning was red-flagged with 20 minutes left as the weather closed in and the ELMS race eventually got underway two and a half hours after its original scheduled start time, following a brief safety car recon mission and 45-minute red flag.
The racing that followed though, was superb, a credit to the competitors, the marshals and intervention crews who dealt with multiple minor incidents very quickly and once again to Freitas and his staff. It was a worthy finale to what has been a season to savour.
