Ferrari is the team to beat in the F.I.A. World Endurance Championship.
It has won all three rounds in 2025 and is heading to the 24 Hours of Le Mans seeking to add to the team’s victories in 2023 and 2024.
The race itself takes a day, but the preparation for it takes a year.
“We started to work for Le Mans the day after the last one,” Antonello Coletta, global head of endurance and Corse Clienti at Ferrari, said in an interview in May.
Understanding failures, and applying remedies, is a priority.
“Even though the results of the last two [Le Mans] were brilliant for us, the best learning case we can have is to understand where we can improve, where we can do better, not just on the car side but also on the operations side,” said Ferdinando Cannizzo, head of endurance racecars. “We list all this stuff and for each of the points we have a countermeasure and actions. Sometimes it’s a meeting, sometimes it’s months of work.”
Three Ferrari 499Ps are in the race: the No. 50, the No. 51 and the No. 83.
In 2024, the No. 50 overcame a door problem and rain late in the race to win Le Mans, but its margin of victory over Toyota Gazoo Racing was just 14.2 seconds.
“Normally when you win you are not the best, but you are the best between all the other competitors that made more errors than you,” Coletta said. “The best is who made less errors than others. On each occasion [in 2023 and 2024] we had problems, and we needed to understand why we had a mistake, a failure, or an error or [an error in] strategy. We won the first three races [of 2025] but after each race we analyzed some errors that we made in each of them.”
Ferrari runs its Hypercar, the 499P, at a full daylong test during the winter, stress-testing components, which gives it ample time to apply any fixes. It cannot test at Le Mans, as some of the circuit uses public roads, so it heads to tracks in Europe that best replicate the characteristics of Le Mans. There are also simulator sessions in which drivers evaluate setups in the virtual world that will correlate to the real car.
“It’s a long race, everyone says it’s the 24 Hours of Le Mans — it’s not, for me it’s the 200 hours of Le Mans because you start a week before and it never ends,” James Calado, one of the drivers of the No. 51 car, said in an interview. “Preparation is key to a good race week.”
The week before includes practice and qualifying sessions, technical debriefings and meetings, partner commitments, and event requirements, such as a Drivers’ Parade in downtown Le Mans.
“Most of the time you’re pretty tired before you even start the race as there’s so many things,” Nicklas Nielsen, one of the No. 50’s drivers, said in an interview. “But we sleep at the track so we’re always five minutes away from the bed.”
Once the race begins the drivers must adopt a different mentality because of the race’s duration.
“At Le Mans, you need to be fast, this is for sure, but it’s not the only key,” Antonio Giovinazzi, one of the No. 51’s drivers, said in an interview. “You need to finish, and the important thing is to be always on the lead lap, then in the last two to three hours you start to think about what we can do to win.”
That includes multiple stints for drivers, effectively driving two hours each, cycling through four times. That means experiencing the circuit in different conditions, whether that’s surface temperature or the weather, with different race outcomes, including through the night. It also means managing a severely disrupted sleep pattern.
“My first Le Mans, I was too happy, and the adrenaline was there so I never slept as I wanted to follow [the team] and see where I was going, but the last five hours I was completely destroyed,” Giovinazzi said. “Now my routine is simple: I drive; jump out; eat; sleep if I can for one hour, one hour 30; cold shower; coffee. A lot of coffee.”
Teams have schedules of who drives when, but a caution period, or an unexpected pit stop, can change things.
“One year I was sleeping, with the fireproof underwear already on, and there was a puncture,” Nielsen said. “I had to rush back to the pits, put on the helmet and go back to the car. But then even when you’re fatigued the adrenaline takes over.”
Managing the arduous race extends to other team members.
“You need to consider that our mechanics stay ready for 24 hours during the race,” Coletta said. “But they wake up six or seven hours before [the start], so at the end they stay focused for 30 to 32 hours, and they need to make all the pit stops. Each pit stop is a part of the race; if you lose one or two seconds for each pit stop, at the end of the race it’s half a minute.”
Ferrari is aware of the challenges, pitfalls and importance of Le Mans.
“We are Ferrari, we have to arrive there with the mentality to win — but you cannot plan everything for Le Mans,” Giovinazzi said. “We can say we want to win, but there’s so many things that can happen. If you want to win Le Mans the reliability needs to be well, the strategy needs to be the right call in the right moment; there’s so many things you need to be perfect.”
Whatever the result, some drivers have their habits after the race is over.
“I just have a beer,” Calado said. “A cold beer with my friends, no matter what the result, and spend time with the team or family. No matter what position you finish, if you finish, it’s a big race to have finished. It can be disappointing, but at the end it’s nice to switch off. And I’m always in bed by 6.”
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