Are Le Mans 24h safety car rules “better this way” or ‘taking merit away’?

Sebastien Buemi has claimed the current Le Mans 24 Hours safety car rules ‘take merit away’ from the best competitors, while fellow event veteran Sebastien Bourdais reckons they’re an improvement on the previous iteration.

Since 2023, all cars have been gathered behind a single safety car and the race leader, while there previously were three safety cars around the 13.6km track, separating the pack with no regard for overall and class leaders.

Buemi very much disapproves of the current rules, especially as he has deemed them detrimental to Toyota in 2023 and 2024. His car led until the 18th hour last year but ended up outside the podium positions, which the Swiss blames on the single safety car keeping the leading pack bunched up.

“Last year, if you look at the #8 car – people may struggle to remember – we’re the ones who had the best drive,” claimed Buemi, a four-time overall winner with Toyota.

“We led for a very long time, and when it mattered, when there were the safety cars at the end, we had a problem during the pitstop. We were hit by a Ferrari. And that’s how we finished fifth.

“So now you need to be a lucky bastard, basically. Because the safety car resets everything, even if you’ve had an exceptional race.

“What made the race special in my eyes was that it rewarded the guy who was really able to have a nice, consistent race.

“Two years ago, the Ferrari won. It was in the gravel trap. We never were in the gravel trap, but it was there. Lucky them, they were put back on track straight away.

“JEV [Jean-Eric Vergne], in the Peugeot, stayed there for three laps. If the Ferrari had stayed there for three laps like the Peugeot, it would have lost everything.”

Buemi reckons the current rules take away the incentive to push early on.

“Doing well at the start of the race brings almost nothing, and that annoys me,” he lamented. “If at some point you’re far off and it helps you, you’re happy, but it takes some merit away in some ways.

“You can’t afford to take it easy,” he added, “because if you get a little slow zone in your face, a hiccup here or there, you lose the lead lap. Then you’re really screwed. You’ve got to stay on the lead lap, that’s for sure.

“But you shouldn’t take all the risks at the start of the race when everything is likely to be reset 10 hours later. Otherwise, what have you taken all those risks for? What for?”

##38 Cadillac Hertz Team Jota Cadillac V-SeriesR: Sebastien Bourdais

Photo by: Alexander Trienitz

Meanwhile, Bourdais sees things quite differently. The Le Mans native, a three-time runner-up with Peugeot during the LMP1 era, does remember pre-2023 instances when the three safety cars split up victory fights – especially in an extremely competitive GTE Pro category at the time.

“I personally reckon it’s a good thing, because people are here to see a race,” insisted the Jota Cadillac racer, who won the GTE Pro class with Ford in 2016.

“The issue is, if you don’t do it that way, you do the opposite. Thirty seconds suddenly turn into two minutes.

“I’d rather it interfered by giving everyone a chance rather than kicking someone out [of the fight for victory] when they’ve done nothing wrong and were always up there – and now they’re not because some procedure screws them. I think it’s better this way.”