Neel Jani: That's the special thing about Le Mans.
There is no easy part.
I think you can talk about every corner
where many cars crash.
My name's Neel Jani, I'm a Porsche factory driver.
When you start, obviously it's all tight,
but you don't want to crash lap one,
because it's a 24 hour race, okay?
If you lose a position, you lose a position,
but yet still everyone attacks kind of.
You're 50/50,
how much should I attack?
How much do I go along with the game?
It's very physical to drive at Le Mans.
The maximum you're allowed to do is four hours.
And it happens quite often that we, as a driver,
are four hours in there, and that feels long and hard.
So we are heading onto the main straight Start/Finish line,
and then we have a long right-hander uphill
leading into the famous Dunlop Chicane.
On that long right-hander,
you can get a little loose on the rear.
You see many cars going off
on the right side barriers.
So many times. That's the special thing about Le Mans.
There is no easy part.
I think some parts are just more dangerous to crash,
and other parts are just time costly.
It's quite a tricky Chicane
because you have to take a lot of speed in.
And then you go down the hill into what's called
Foret De La "S",
which is kind of like the roller coaster,
because it's up, down, a little bit banked.
And then Tertre Rouge, getting on the curb wide.
And then you come onto the very famous
Les Hunaudieres Straights,
where you reach the top speeds of 350 kph.
Here you can see
I'm getting some drafts from an LMP2 car,
and now we'll just enter into the first chicane.
Those chicanes were added later on in the history of Le Mans
because this long straight was just too quick,
so they added those.
You arrive at the chicane with not-so-hot brakes.
The brakes cool down and you have to basically
come down into second gear.
It's very tricky to get your brake points right.
It's important again here to get a very good exit,
go wide, take the speed onto the next long straight.
And then we come to the next chicane.
You can see, I've used all the road on the exit,
I even go a bit wide.
Again, take the speed. It goes a bit up.
Here is the famous part where the Mercedes
took off in the '90s.
Announcer: Here we go.
Oh my God, oh my God,
the Mercedes has taken off.
Neel: So now we are at the furthest part
of the track, at Mulsanne.
This is a very slow, 90 degree right-hander,
and quite special here is sometimes
you have completely different weather down here
than on the Start/Finish line.
That is why this corner sometimes you also have spotters
out there who tell us
what weather we have down there.
That's the speciality about Le Mans,
the track is so big that you don't know if you have
everywhere the same weather.
The other thing that is tricky is during the day,
obviously it's warm most of the time
because it's summer in France,
but comes night it gets really cold.
And it's very tricky to keep the tires up to temperature.
So sometimes you're just outside of the tire temp window
and you slide around and it's super tricky
and you lose a lot of lap time.
One lap takes 3 minutes 20 on average.
You can lose two, three seconds very easy
when the tires are not there.
It's super important that you have brake markers at night.
So like, a 100-meter board or a curb,
because obviously you don't always see the corner
where you have turn in, but because you are arriving
at 360 kph, you need to brake before you see the corner.
You can see on the exit, take full curve.
And you really try to launch all this
for this long straight, you take as much speed as you can.
Then we come into a very quick right-hander
Indy 1, Indianapolis, and then into Indy 2.
Why are they called Indy 1 and Indy 2?
It's because they're banked.
Both of those corners are highly banked
and the most banked corners on this track.
So you really try to dig into that
and use it to go quicker through the corner.
We are now at Arnage
which is the slowest point of the track.
Also here, again, just a few little kinks,
but with traffic, it can get tricky.
And then we come into the famous Porsche corners
super quick. It's a section where it's all in fifth
or sixth gear,
so that means that's all way above 220-30 kph.
Entering the Porsche corners we pull up to 5G laterally
so you really need to train your neck for those corners.
And you have to be so precise because if you miss one
turning at that speed,
you travel so many meters within one second,
you're in trouble.
We go left into Karting.
It's called Karting actually, because on the right side,
if you would go off there, you would end up
on the go-kart track.
And it's quite a tricky corner
because that's actually one of the few corners
that is off-camber.
The Indy corners are banked so we can dig in,
but this one is off-camber means we just slide off.
And you really have to make sure
you get the line there nicely.
And we get through those left/right kinks
to the Ford Chicane.
On the right side, on the entry of Ford Chicane
is the pit entry.
That's basically your braking point because at night
that's a difficult part because it's very dark there
and you don't see the entrance where you have to turn in
for the Ford Chicane.
So you try to look for the curbs on the right side,
you wait, you wait, then you see them, you brake.
It should work out,
you just need to make sure you brake hard enough obviously.
We go into the last chicane,
huge curbs there and easy to brake the car there
so you just try to be smooth
and try to finish that lap nicely.
I started on pole. We lost the lead in the beginning.
We had an issue on the first pit stop with the screws
didn't come off, the tires didn't come off.
So we lost a lot of lap time,
but then we came back at night.
But then there was a lot of yellow phases during the race
because there was a lot of crashes at night,
and we lost a lot of lap time in those
compared to the Toyota, which was at that time
our main competitor.
We caught back up and then we were leading,
then they were leading again.
And then we turn into the last half an hour,
we are 20 seconds back, but closing in every lap.
I was driving then at the end.
And then 10 minutes before the end,
I have a puncture, front right.
I'm like, "Oh no, that's it.
The race is gone."
So I went in, changed tire, came back out,
we were a minute something behind
and I was like, okay that was bad luck.
Then I hear on the radio my engineer telling me
"Hey Neel, keep pushing, keep pushing.
The Toyota is getting slow."
Engineer: The car is slowing down, push, push, push.
Neel: The last lap he had an issue
with the engine or turbo,
they had stopped to stop on the main straight,
so I took the lead back, finished the lap
and won Le Mans.
Hollywood couldn't write it any more better
and we wouldn't believe the film,
if it was a film, you'd say "I know, how great is that."
It's the proof why Le Mans is so special.
Le Mans lets you win.
You cannot win Le Mans,
you cannot win that race.
That race chooses its winner and it has proven
over and over again.