LE MANS, France — The link between IMSA and the ACO extends to the headline race of the FIA World Endurance Championship — the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
A strong volume of IMSA competitors made the trip to the Circuit de la Sarthe to compete in the 24-hour endurance race classic.
It’s not the only IMSA componentry of the race week in Le Mans, France; several IMSA-sanctioned series drivers will compete in Le Mans support races, including the Michelin Le Mans Cup’s Road to Le Mans and Ford’s Mustang Invitational.
The headliners, though, are in the FIA WEC’s Hypercar class, which allows for both Le Mans Hypercar (LMH) and Le Mans Daytona h (LMDh) specification prototype cars to compete for overall honors across both IMSA and the FIA WEC.
Most of the full-season IMSA top-class prototype drivers will make the trip to Le Mans, including last year’s Grand Touring Prototype (GTP) championship winning team, while two other IMSA entrants garnered automatic invitations for their efforts in 2024.
Three IMSA entrants – Porsche Penske Motorsport, Nick Boulle and Orey Fidani – received automatic invitations to the 2025 24 Hours of Le Mans from their 2024 IMSA successes.
Porsche Penske Motorsport secured a slot for the No. 4 Porsche 963, driven by IMSA full-timers Nick Tandy and Felipe Nasr alongside Pascal Wehrlein, courtesy of the team’s 2024 GTP class championship achieved by Nasr and Dane Cameron.
IMSA recognizes the top-scoring Bronze-rated drivers in Le Mans Prototype 2 (LMP2) and Grand Touring Daytona (GTD) with the Jim Trueman Award and Bob Akin Award, respectively. Boulle secured the Trueman Award winning the LMP2 title in 2024, driving the No. 52 Inter Europol by PR1 Mathiasen Motorsports ORECA LMP2 07. Fidani was the Akin Award winner in GTD aboard his No. 13 AWA Corvette Z06 GT3.R.
Boulle, who races with United Autosports USA in 2025 IMSA Michelin Endurance Cup races, returns to Inter Europol for Le Mans. He’ll share the No. 34 ORECA LMP2 07 with Jean-Baptiste Simmenauer and Luca Ghiotto as a Pro/Am entry within the LMP2 class.
Fidani has an easier car to follow; his same No. 13 AWA Corvette entry alongside IMSA co-drivers Matt Bell and Lars Kern. It shifts liveries from its usual black and gold colors to a striking red and white honoring the team’s Canadian roots.
Tandy and Nasr (GTP) and Fidani, Bell and Kern (GTD) also won this year’s Rolex 24 At Daytona and are among several drivers across the three Le Mans classes who can double up with both 24-hour race wins this year (more on that in a bit).
Tandy and Nasr also sit on the precipice of history if they can win Le Mans to complete an unprecedented single season sweep of the traditional endurance sports car racing “Triple Crown” at Daytona, Sebring and Le Mans.
“You think it would be totally out of this world to be able to win the three ‘Triple Crown’ races in one season. But we look at it today and the stuff that’s happened already this year is just quite unbelievable. So why not?” Tandy said. “It would just be it would be an amazing thing that would be in the history of books forever, of course.”
Two additional IMSA GTP cars head to Le Mans after being awarded an invitation by the selection committee: the pair of Cadillac V-Series.R cars fielded by Cadillac Whelen (Action Express Racing) and Cadillac Wayne Taylor Racing.
This will be the Whelen entry’s third straight trip to Le Mans, and has a relatively young lineup of Jack Aitken, Frederik Vesti and Felipe Drugovich slated to drive the team’s No. 311 Cadillac. Drugovich is also the Aston Martin Formula 1 reserve driver.
For WTR, it’s a first trip for the family effort with Wayne Taylor and sons Ricky and Jordan Taylor, the latter two sharing the team’s No. 101 Cadillac with Filipe Albuquerque.
It’s been a long time coming for the organization, having had a winter of change with the shift back to the General Motors family after a four-year period and beginning the logistical prep for this race.
“When they asked me to apply for the Le Mans entry, I was really pleasantly and happily shocked that that they accepted us,” Wayne Taylor said. “(WTR Vice President, General Manager) Travis Hogue on our team has done a really good job of getting the logistics and everything together, and we’ve been working with people in Europe as well.
“As far as people are concerned, there’s a lot of people going, probably about 80 people. (Cadillac Hertz Team) JOTA has helped us in a big way as well as Cadillac, and I believe we’ve got everything under control right now. It will be a week of building, and I think we can handle it pretty well.”
While nearly 100 drivers who have started at least one 2025 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship race count in the 62-car, 186-driver 24 Hours of Le Mans entry list, the highest percentage of full-season IMSA drivers racing in France come from the GTP class. No less than 18 of the 22 full-season IMSA GTP drivers are racing at Le Mans.
Porsche Penske Motorsport’s quartet of Tandy, Nasr (No. 4 Porsche 963), Mathieu Jaminet (No. 5) and Matt Campbell (No. 6) appear, although are split among all three Porsche 963s.
All four Cadillac WTR drivers will race too, with the two Taylors and Albuquerque racing together.
Meanwhile, last year’s Le Mans LMP2 polesitter Louis Deletraz shifts to the No. 199 AO by TF ORECA LMP2 07, which he’ll share with last year’s IMSA GTP champion Dane Cameron and AO Racing co-founder PJ Hyett – who share “Spike,” AO’s popular, dragon-liveried LMP2 car in the WeatherTech Championship.
Cadillac Whelen’s other full-season driver, Earl Bamber, is in another Cadillac for Le Mans: the No. 38 Cadillac Hertz Team Jota entry he races during in the FIA World Endurance Championship.
BMW M Team RLL drivers Dries Vanthoor (No. 15) and Sheldon van der Linde (No. 20) resume with their FIA WEC team, BMW M Team WRT, aboard their BMW M Hybrid V8s.
Aston Martin THOR Team drivers Ross Gunn (No. 007) and Roman De Angelis (No. 009) join the respective WEC lineups there, Gunn as part of an all-British No. 007 Aston with De Angelis joining fellow Aston GT graduates Alex Riberas and Marco Sorenson in the No. 009.
And then there’s Acura Meyer Shank Racing w/Curb-Agajanian, which sees all four of its GTP drivers at Le Mans, split among four different LMP2 cars.
The No. 60 Acura ARX-06 pair of Colin Braun and Tom Blomqvist will be in the No. 24 Nielsen Racing ORECA (Braun) and No. 37 CLX Pure Racing ORECA (Blomqvist).
Meanwhile the No. 93 Acura ARX-06 duo of Renger van der Zande and Nick Yelloly will shift to the No. 22 United Autosports ORECA (van der Zande) and No. 43 Inter Europol ORECA (Yelloly).
The four full-season GTP drivers not racing at Le Mans are BMW’s Marco Wittmann and Philipp Eng, and JDC-Miller MotorSports’ Gianmaria Bruni and Tijmen van der Helm.
There are also a bevy of other IMSA drivers competing at Le Mans, most of whom are shifting from their WeatherTech Championship team to another one across the three classes at Le Mans.
