1993 24 Hours of Le Mans

1993 24 Hours of Le Mans
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The 1993 24 Hours of Le Mans was the 61st Grand Prix of Endurance, and took place on 19 and 20 June 1993.

The race was won by Peugeot Talbot Sport, with drivers Geoff Brabham, and Le Mans rookies Éric Hélary and Christophe Bouchut completing 375 laps in their Peugeot 905 Evo 1B. Brabham became just the third Australian to win the French classic after Bernard Rubin in 1928, and Vern Schuppan in 1983.

A class for Grand Touring (GT) style cars was included for the first time since the 1986 race. With the extra class, the entry list expanded from 30 cars in 1992 to 48 in 1993.

The 1992 race had seen the lowest number of entries since the iconic race's advent in the 1920s, and in October 1992 the FIA officially cancelled the Sportscar World Championship - a series that had been running, in various guises, continuously since 1953. The idea to run the premier class on F1-derived engines had proved a spectacular failure with negligible interest from the major car manufacturers that had been anticipated, and too high costs for small teams. Soon after the series cancellation, and with no alternative international series proposed, the Automobile Club de l'Ouest (ACO) took matters into its own hands, drafting up regulations for a new "Le Mans Prototype" category: open-cockpit, flat-bottomed cars powered by regular production or restricted race engines. Early in 1993 the American IMSA federation also announced a new "World Sports Car" category along very similar (but crucially, not identical) lines.

In March however the ACO only had 21 entrants, but with no formal championship to adhere to, the ACO was now free to set its own invitation list to the great race and so it revised its entry parameters to offer four distinct divisions:

This marked the return of GT cars to Le Mans, since the solitary Group B BMW M1 raced in 1986. The revision worked and soon a number of Group C and GT teams lined up. When entries closed in April, it had a full field of 58, including the first Ferrari (a GT) to appear since 1984. They also revived the May Test Day (last run in 1987), attracting 32 cars. A number of current and future F1 drivers were in the driver list. A new rule was also included that teams had to qualify the car to be used in the race, to stop abuses with specialised test-cars, and that reserve cars could be qualified in case of accident to the primary cars.

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