In tomorrow’s ELMS season finale at Portimao, four Le Mans invitations are up for grabs in the LMP2 and GTE classes, following COOL Racing’s LMP3 title win.
Adrien Chila, Marcos Siebert and Alejandro Garcia’s fourth-place finish in yesterday’s 4 Hours of Algarve clinched COOL’s second consecutive LMP3 title in a row and handed the team an automatic invitation to the 2024 Le Mans 24 Hours as a result.
That was the only class title settled ahead of the finale, meaning there are still Le Mans invites for the first and second-place finishers in LMP2, the LMP2 Pro/Am title winner and the final GTE championship-winning team to be handed out.
As it stands, Algarve Pro Racing is poised to take the LMP2 teams title. It holds a 20-point lead after its second-place finish yesterday. United Autosports’ #22 crew are now second in the points and therefore in pole position for the invite handed to the team that finishes in the runner-up spot.
LMP2 Pro/Am meanwhile, is set to be a three-way fight between AF Corse, COOL Racing and Racing Team Turkey, with three points separating them.
In GTE the top four cars in the standings are still in contention. Proton Competition, Iron Lynx and Kessel Racing are all in with a chance but Proton has two horses in the race. Its #16 leads the standings by three points and its #77 Porsche sits third, 12 points back.
The invitations handed out tomorrow night will add to the invitations that were awarded in the past month in IMSA’s WeatherTech SportsCar Championship and the SRO’s GT World Challenge Europe.
At Petit Le Mans, George Kurtz won the Jim Trueman Award that is handed to the top performing Bronze driver in LMP2 and Brendan Iribe sealed the Bob Akin Award for being the best-placed Bronze driver in the GTD standings.
Ben Keating won the IMSA LMP2 championship but missed out on the award because the Trueman Award doesn’t include points for qualifying and awards points for the results at Daytona. The overall LMP2 championship doesn’t award points for the results at Daytona (only the LMP2 Endurance Cup championship does) and awards points in qualifying.
Meanwhile, in GT World Challenge Europe, Lithuanian-flagged Porsche customer team Pure Rxing claimed the invite handed to the overall Bronze Cup championship winner, after sealing the title at Barcelona.
Following the conclusion of the ELMS season, a further three invites will be handed out before Le Mans. Two of them will go to championship winners in the 2023/24 Asian Le Mans Series season, which kicks off at Sepang in December.
Notably, only the winning teams in LMP2 and GT3 will receive invitations this season. The LMP3 class champion, for the first time, will not. Instead, the LMP3 title-winning team will be handed an automatic invite to the Road To Le Mans (Le Mans Cup) races in support of the Le Mans 24 Hours.
There is also a final invitation which will be awarded to a team in IMSA. It would be reasonable to assume that this at-large invitation will handed to GTP championship-winning team Action Express.
