The #69 Team WRT BMW drivers, Dan Harper, Anthony McIntosh, and Parker Thompson, are all making their 24 Hours of Le Mans debuts this year. With a team with the pedigree and level of execution of WRT though, the Le Mans rookies are in an almost ideal situation to succeed on their maiden entry.
In their first months as teammates, Harper, McIntosh and Thompson have already developed a winning dynamic. Right from the beginning of the ALMS season at Sepang, this line-up of drivers, along with their current WEC #69 engineers, finished second in Race 2 and later took back-to-back victories in Races 4 and 5.
“We hit the ground running pretty well. I think we just gelled very well very early,” said BMW M factory driver Dan Harper. “We’re lucky that we all have the same character, we all have the same humour, which is very important, because if you don’t enjoy spending time together, then it also impacts the performance.”
“Getting to share Le Mans with two teammates that you’ve already had a lot of success with, and you just genuinely enjoy hanging out with, has been really special. And luckily, Dan Harper’s a superstar, and Tony is one of the best Bronze drivers you can get, and I’m pretty handy in the silver slot,” added Parker Thompson.
A victory on their WEC debut made a statement right out of the gate in Imola, but their strong pace there was no big surprise to the WRT concern. The team had previously won at the Italian circuit with the M4 in 2024 and tested there in the off-season, which gave them a lot of confidence.
“When we won the first race, I was kind of like, yeah, you know, not to sound cocky in any way, but it made sense, like that was a good track for BMW, WRT executed how they know how to do strategy, and the three drivers drove pretty flawlessly the whole week,” said Thompson.
“We had a test there, like a month or so before the first race, and we were all very strong, we were all quick, and we just liked how the car felt there,” said Harper.
However, Le Mans is particularly difficult to prepare for on debut, due to the limited testing time available to teams in the lead-up to the race. Especially given factors such as traffic, weather, cautions, and sharing time in the car with two other drivers, which can easily eat up the allocated testing time.
Adding that La Sarthe has not been kind to the BMW GT3s in recent years, with three DNFs in two races, the pressure to make the most of every practice lap compounds.
McIntosh emphasised the advantage that those with extensive “seat time” and overall racing experience here have in understanding and adapting and finding ways to extract everything out of the BMW M4 GT3 EVO around this 13-kilometre track.
“This is really a seat time track, and I can see it in myself as I’m driving, I’m making all these adjustments every single turn of every single lap.
“It’s weird, but you get like nine or 10 laps in a tank of fuel, so you get nine or 10 chances for every corner, but maybe 50 per cent of those corners have traffic. So you really get like five attempts an hour to dial something in, and then the track is changing, the fuel load is changing, the tyres are changing, so you’re trying to make all these tweaks.
“Some of these people, our competitors, have 11, 12 times at this track. That’s a lot of 24-hour races at one track to be proficient.”
On the other side of the garage is the #32 car, with a combined 14 Le Mans entries between its three drivers, Sean Gelael, Darren Leung, and Augusto Farfus – who, by the way, finished second in 2024 with WRT. While it is intimidating to be in direct competition with three Le Mans veterans as rookies here, the sister car has proven to be a crucial resource for the #69 crew.
“There is full cooperation, that’s the best bit about working with the guys that we do, and within the team that we do, we’re all one family, we’re all aiming for the same thing,” said Harper.
“Sometimes you look at it like your teammate—your sister car—sometimes as the number one rival, the one you need to beat first. But you’re not going to beat anyone else if you don’t work together.”
There are some limitations to what a driver can learn from studying an onboard or looking over analytics. This can be a particular issue when discussing data from a highly experienced driver who has the privilege of having first-hand, intuitive knowledge of La Sarthe that is sometimes unexplainable, as McIntosh explained.
“They’ve helped us out quite a bit; they’ll give us tips. But sometimes there are things where they just can’t explain it, they’re just doing what they’re doing, and we’re trying to watch the video and just can’t understand it.
“Everyone’s been fantastic, but we are realistic that we’re all rookies.”
When it comes to what the driver line-up realistically aims to achieve, all three drivers recognise the uphill battle ahead, but are ultimately confident in the team around them and the competitiveness of the car.
“What we’re aiming for is to do a clean race, make no mistakes. We know the team can always perform really well, so we just need to do our job, and we’ll be in the fight,” said Harper.
“Do we want to do well? Absolutely. If you were to take Dan, Parker, and I, any one of us three, and look at where we fall in our [driver’s] classification, we all have amazing results. And putting all three of us together, we’re all very calm, and we all work very intensely and focused, so there isn’t any reason on paper any reason why we couldn’t have a breakthrough moment. But we’re giving ourselves some room here,” added McIntosh.
Thompson commented that, as in all endurance racing, any positive result involves a good amount of luck with things that are out of a driver or team’s control, especially at Le Mans, where “lady luck” is often the deciding factor.
“Le Mans has to choose you. There’s that side of it that you need a little ‘lady luck,’ you know, WEC chose us to win on our debut. So I’ve kind of just got this general good feeling that we’re going to go out and have a really nice race.”
“Between Dan, Tony, and I, we just want to go out, have no penalties, have a clean race. Don’t touch anything other than the apex curves,” Thompson chuckled.
“If we do that, I think at the end of the race, we’ll be in it for the shot to win like the other four or five cars [in the fight]. And then we’ll see if Le Mans chooses us.”
Images © dailysportscar.com, BMW
