For the first time in the 102 year history of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, American luxury automaker Cadillac has secured pole position on Thursday when Cadillac Hertz Team Jota driver Alex Lynn set an impressive final lap of the day to notch up a three-minute 23.166-second run. Following closely behind Lynn was his Jota teammate Earl Bamber, who himself fell just 167 thousandths of a second behind, with the number five Porsche Penske of Mathieu Jaminet rounding out the top three. This year marks the 75th anniversary of Cadillac’s first efforts at La Sarthe, and the achievement makes Cadillac only the second American automaker in history to secure pole at the famed endurance race—Ford started on pole three times in 1965, 1966, and 1967.
This year’s qualifying sessions at Le Mans were a bit difficult to follow, but made for an interesting effort. Each of a car’s three drivers were required to set a time in order to make pole, and each had an opportunity to fail. On Wednesday the top 18 cars of the 21-car class graduated to the following day’s Hyperpole efforts. In Hyperpole 1 a second driver put in a time, and only the top 10 cars continued on to Hyperpole 2. That ten-car shootout laid out the grid for the start of the race when it arrives on Saturday.
Cadillac went a different way from the typical Le Mans setup, which usually favors top speed as a way to find lap time. Because of this year’s unseasonably hot temperatures it seems that tire degradation is a major factor, and Cadillac went with a higher downforce setup, which cost them time on the main straights, but allowed the drivers to find time in the circuit’s many corners without relying as much on mechanical tire grip overheating the rubber. Both Lynn and Bamber set times with trap speeds some eight or nine kilometers per hour shy of the faster Porsche, Ferrari, and Alpine entrants.
A history lesson
All the way back in 1950 American racing icon Briggs Cunningham put together an effort to run factory-backed Cadillac entries at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. He entered two cars, the #3 “Petit Pataud” Cadillac Series 61, and the absolutely bizarre #2 “Le Monstre” which used the Series 61’s 329 cubic inch V8 and frame, but with an aerodynamic and lightweight body shaped out of sheet steel in the Grumman wind tunnel. The Cunnningham-entered cars finished 10th and 11th with Le Monstre one lap behind Petit Pataud when the checkered flag fell. A pair of privately-entered Talbot-Lagos finished 1-2 that year, though a Cadillac-powered Allard J2 finished third a mere four laps behind.
