1995 24 Hours of Le Mans

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The 1995 24 Hours of Le Mans was the 63rd Grand Prix of Endurance, and took place on 17 and 18 June 1995 in one of the wettest races in the event's history with about 17 hours of steady rain. The race was won by the #59 McLaren F1 GTR driven by JJ Lehto, Yannick Dalmas and Masanori Sekiya entered in the GT1 category. This was the first Le Mans win for a driver from Finland and for a driver from Japan.^[1] It was also McLaren's first win, at its first attempt - Ferrari had accomplished the same feat with its two cars in 1949, but other manufacturers like Jaguar, Porsche, Ford or Audi achieved their first Le Mans win only after 2, 3 or more attempts.^[2] As well as its outright win, the strength of the F1 GTR in the race was underlined by it ultimately filling four of the first five places.

The car was already well known for dominating the BPR Global GT Series with customer teams, but the car that won was actually the initial GTR prototype. This was on loan to Lanzante Motorsport, and prepared by McLaren's Unit 12 and overseen by McLaren's Chief Engineer James Robinson to run it on behalf of Kokusai Kaihatsu Racing. Mario Andretti's Courage finished second, having been the sentimental favourite of many in the run-up to the race. However the reliability of the production-based McLaren helped it defeat the much faster Le Mans prototypes, although in an interview 20 years ^[3] later Graham Humphrys (former Spice technical director^[4]), who engineered the race winning car, attributed the win to the rain which fell on the circuit overnight, which eased the stress on the car's relatively fragile transmission, and which also saw a remarkable performance by Lehto, who was as much as 30 seconds a lap faster than his rivals at times. Humphrys also managed to identify the source of the gear selection problems which the Kokusai car and the other McLarens in the race suffered from, working out that the exposed gear linkage mechanism was filling with water and dirt from the wet conditions, and solved the problem by filling the affected area with WD-40 at every pit stop.^[1]

The top three spots in GT2 were taken by Honda NSX and two Callaway Corvettes. The class was now showing manufacturer diversity unlike previous year dominated by the Porsche 911 derivatives since the mid-1970s.