Six hours and 35 minutes before the start of the most prestigious race of the World Endurance Championship, Kubica’s #83 Ferrari 499P skidded into Vanthoor’s #15 BMW M Hybrid V8, which had just lapped the #92 Manthey Pure Rxcing Porsche GT3 on the stretch of straight leading to the Mulsanne corner, sending the Belgian driver into the wall and causing the BMW to withdraw from the race.
The #83 Ferrari was given a 30-second stop-and-go penalty, but managed to stay within the leader’s lap, allowing it to remain in contention for the win thanks to the current Safety rules Char.
Vanthoor was infuriated by the stewards’ decision and took to X (formerly Twitter) to express his discontent: “Thanks for all the messages, I’m fine! Just a little emotion! A bad day for our sport, push someone out at 300 km/h and get a 30 second penalty. Sorry @FIAWEC, I’m losing faith.”
Team boss Vincent Vosse told Motorsport.com that it was intolerable that the Ferrari that caused the accident had managed to get back to the front of the pack, and said he would have preferred a three- or five-minute penalty, which it would have dropped car number 83 by at least one lap.
“In the end, it’s something we won’t accept,” the Belgian said. “For me the penalty was very unfair. If you take someone out of the race, you deserve to be slowed down in some way much more than to be able to fight for the podium again three hours later.”
Vincent Vosse, WRT Team Principal
Photo by: Marc Fleury
However, Vosse holds no grudge against Kubica, a former Team WRT driver who won the ELMS and WEC championships in the LMP2 class with the Belgian outfit in 2021 and 2023 respectively, while last year he finished second in the 24 Hours of Le Mans with teammates Rui Andrade and Louis Deletraz.
“I am very close to Robert, he drove for us for a few years,” Vosse underlined. “With him we won the championship last year and he is someone I respect a lot.”
“I will say that I didn’t expect something like this from him, but I won’t judge him. I’ll calm down first and probably talk to him about the incident next week.”
“From a sportsman of his level – and he really is a sportsman, because I see him that way – I have to say that, unfortunately, I was disappointed by the situation.”
The 24 Hours of Le Mans was a disappointing one overall for BMW Hypercars, with Marco Wittmann spinning the #15 car on lap six, while Robin Frijns crashed the #20 car after bouncing off a curb at the Ford chicane at 6.23pm. The Dutchman managed to get her back to the pits, but she then returned to the track just 21 hours later to see the checkered flag, unclassified.
Andreas Roos, head of BMW M Motorsport, explained to Motorsport.com that the car could have returned to the track earlier, but the German manufacturer did not want to risk further damage ahead of the WEC round in Sao Paulo on 14 July.
“Le Mans can always be quite brutal,” added Roos. “The first thing to do is not to make mistakes, which we didn’t do. There were too many mistakes.”
“This is how you try to win races today,” Vosse analyzed. “Unfortunately we saw that in some phases we were fast, but perhaps a little too fast, or that we exaggerated in trying.”
“We didn’t learn as much as we hoped about our cars, because in the end we didn’t get to spend the night. Let’s just say we learned what not to do next year.”
Additional information by Heiko Stritzke and Rachit Thukral
#Mans #BMW #accept #light #penalty #Ferrari
