Safety car

The safety car is endurance racing's heaviest neutralisation: the field slows, closes up behind the pace car and follows it until the track is clear. Gaps built over hours vanish, which is why long-race strategy treats a badly timed safety car as one of its biggest risks.

Le Mans adds a wrinkle: the lap is so long that multiple safety cars deploy simultaneously at spaced positions, each collecting the cars in its section. Which queue you land in is lottery, and it can split cars fighting for the same position by most of a lap. Procedures such as wave-bys around the safety car exist to reduce the resulting distortions before the restart.