Inside the Le Mans finish too barmy for Hollywood
Team WRT has been at the forefront of GT racing for years and made a successful move to prototypes for 2021, capped by an LMP2 win on its Le Mans debut. It could've been even better had the race been one lap shorter, when its cars ran 1-2, but the stranger-than-fiction reality has spurred the team to reach greater heights.
“You can think about doing a movie of it, but it would never be happening like this. If you go to Hollywood and you see this, you say, ‘It’s too much, that would never happen’. But actually it happened.”
As Yifei Ye’s #41 Team WRT Oreca LMP2 car rolled to a halt at the Dunlop Curve on the final lap of this year’s Le Mans 24 Hours - a race he had been on course to win with teammates Robert Kubica and Louis Deletraz - technical director Sebastien Viger had no time to despair.
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James Newbold is Autosport's Plus Editor, responsible for coordinating website feature content.
In a sign of things to come, having completed his Politics and International Relations degree at the University of East Anglia in 2015, he left his graduation ceremony early to catch the last train to Brussels for the following day's Spa 24 Hours.
After a period as a freelancer, he joined the Autosport staff in 2018 and won the Motorsport UK young journalist of the year award.
He initially edited Autosport magazine's Performance and Engineering supplements before joining the website team in his current role in 2020.
A keen enthusiast of anything that can be categorised unusual, niche or random, he enjoys unearthing little-known stories across all branches of motorsport, but has spent most of his career covering sportscars as Autosport's British GT correspondent and is a regular part of the Le Mans 24 Hours reporting team.
An expert in catching 40 winks on media centre floors, he lives with his wife and son in Plymouth, England.
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