Has Ferrari ever won Le Mans before 2023?

The first run: 1949 to 1965

Ferrari's Le Mans story began at the second post-war running in 1949, when Luigi Chinetti drove almost the entire 24 hours single-handed in a Ferrari 166 MM. His co-driver, the British amateur Lord Selsdon, drove for less than an hour of the race. The win was Ferrari's first major international victory and helped launch the road-car business that funded the rest of the racing programme.

The marque returned to the top step in 1954 with the Ferrari 375 Plus (Froilan Gonzalez and Maurice Trintignant). The 1958 win came from Olivier Gendebien and Phil Hill in a Ferrari 250 TR. Hill and Gendebien then established themselves as Le Mans's defining 1960s pairing, winning together again in 1961 and 1962 with the Ferrari 250 TR/61 and TRI/61.

The four consecutive wins from 1960 to 1963 represent Ferrari's peak Le Mans dominance. The 1963 race was won by Lorenzo Bandini and Ludovico Scarfiotti in a 250P, a mid-engined prototype that established the layout's superiority at La Sarthe. The 1964 race went to Jean Guichet and Nino Vaccarella in a 275 P, and the 1965 race to Masten Gregory and Jochen Rindt in a 250 LM run by Luigi Chinetti's North American Racing Team. The 1965 race finished with Ferrari taking the top three places.

The Ford-versus-Ferrari era and the long absence

The 1966 Le Mans is remembered for the Ford GT40 1-2-3 that ended Ferrari's run. The Henry Ford II versus Enzo Ferrari rivalry produced four consecutive Ford wins from 1966 to 1969 and effectively ended Ferrari's outright Le Mans programme. Enzo Ferrari withdrew the works prototype effort at the end of 1973, citing the cost of running competitive sports-car and Formula 1 campaigns simultaneously. Ferrari customer entries continued to race in lower classes for the next five decades.

The marque returned to factory-supported competition at Le Mans in the GT category in the 1990s and 2000s, taking class wins with the F40 and 333 SP and the 360 Modena. Ferrari customer teams scored class wins again with the 458 Italia GTE in 2012, 2014 and 2019 (the latter under AF Corse's banner), and the 488 GTE Evo took class wins in 2019, 2021 and 2022. The works manufacturer effort, however, stayed in the lower classes.

The 2023 comeback

Ferrari announced a return to the top class for 2023 in late 2020, alongside the new Hypercar regulations. The 499P, a clean-sheet LMH design, debuted at Sebring in March 2023 and won the centenary Le Mans on its first attempt in June 2023. The winning trio of Alessandro Pier Guidi, James Calado and Antonio Giovinazzi made Ferrari's first overall Le Mans win in 58 years.

The 2024 race went to a sister Ferrari (Antonio Fuoco, Miguel Molina, Nicklas Nielsen in the No. 50), and the 2025 race to the customer No. 83 AF Corse 499P (Robert Kubica, Yifei Ye, Philip Hanson). Three consecutive Ferrari wins took the marque's total to 12, two behind Audi's all-time second-place tally of 13 and seven behind Porsche's all-time record of 19.

Why the 58-year gap

Three reasons explain the absence. The first is the cost trade-off Enzo Ferrari made in 1973: a serious Le Mans programme demanded engineering resources that the company chose to allocate to Formula 1 instead. The Maranello F1 programme was already the financial heart of Ferrari's racing operation.

The second reason is the regulation set. The Le Mans top class shifted through Group 5, Group C, LMP1 and LMP1-Hybrid between 1976 and 2020, with each era demanding bespoke chassis and hybrid technology that Ferrari did not have. The Group C era of the 1980s was particularly close to Ferrari's competence but the company chose to focus on F1's contemporary turbo era instead.

The third reason is that until 2021, the WEC's top class was a manufacturer arms race rather than a cost-controlled platform. The Hypercar regulations capped development cost at roughly a fifth of the LMP1-Hybrid figure, which made Ferrari's return financially viable for the first time since 1973.

What it tells us about Ferrari's place at Le Mans

Three consecutive Le Mans wins since 2023 have put Ferrari back in the live conversation for all-time Le Mans dominance. The marque's 12 total wins now sit closer to second-place Audi (13) than to a top-three position. If Ferrari maintains its current Le Mans win rate of one per year for three more seasons, the marque will pass Audi and stand alone in second place behind Porsche. The result would be the second-fastest return to top-tier Le Mans success in motorsport history, behind only Audi's 2000-2008 ascent.