AF Corse facing headwinds in hunt for fourth-straight Le Mans win

If Ferrari AF Corse wins the 24 Hours of Le Mans for a fourth consecutive year, its management believes it will have overcome its most difficult challenge to date.

It's been a tough event so far at La Sarthe for the fabled Italian marque's Hypercar crews. On the combined Test Day leaderboard, the three 499Ps finished eighth, 14th, and 15th. In FP1 earlier today, the fastest of the Ferraris – the No. 50 – ended up seventh, 2.7s off the fastest lap from Cadillac. And in Qualifying the factory cars ended up sneaking into Hyperpole in 14th and 15th, while the reigning winners in the No. 83 ended up 17th, failing to make the cut.

It's still early days, of course, but there is a growing sense that the Italian manufacturer believes claiming a fourth straight Le Mans win will be a tall order. Antonello Coletta, the head of Ferrari's endurance programs, certainly gave hints earlier today that the team is mentally preparing for the possibility that its win streak may come to an end.

"Let's wait and see," he said. "Some values, I think became visible throughout the Test Day. It was clear that some of our competitors have completely disclosed all their cards. We will have all the tools to understand who is pushing 100 percent and who is not, and so we are pretty sure about the potential for each one, and we know who is going to be in favor and who is going to have the best potential and those who are going to suffer more.

"We clinched three victories, and we are very proud of that, but we have to look ahead. We should not look backwards. Three wins are in our pockets. However, in life you cannot always win, although we are here to win and our dream is to continue to win. Should we lose a race because of our mistake or because of something that was not done properly, we will have to understand the reasons. If we don't win because of other reasons, it's not a failure."

The 499P - which wasn't updated with an Evo 'Joker' over the winter - hasn't won a race since Le Mans last year, meaning if it fails to win on Sunday afternoon, it will have gone more than a year without a victory in Hypercar. That begs the question: will Ferrari move to update its car for 2027 in a bid to improve its form?

"We are happy with the package we have," Coletta continued. "This doesn't mean that we're not working on new solutions for the future. We fully respect what the others, what the rivals, have done. Clearly, when you realize you can improve, you can try and do so. It's pretty normal that our rivals have done their best to fine-tune their packages.

"I am sure our car has been great from Day 1. We have developed it as much as possible. On many occasions, in various press conferences, I said that before thinking of further development, we should try to better understand the car we already have to exploit its full potential. 

"So this is what we've done; we've focused a lot on that prior to changing something, because maybe you can further improve. We said: 'Are we really capitalizing on what we have at 100%?' Well, we did. So we worked focusing on this strategy, and for this reason we thought for 2026 the car is a competitive one without needing further development.

"But again, we are also working and we will decide when to work on further developments."

Ferdinando Cannizzo, Ferrari’s technical director, was quizzed on 499P updates for next year too. He ruled out Ferrari bringing a brand new car, but reiterated that Ferrari will not be standing still, and is looking into updating its current Hypercar challenger.

Looking even further ahead, Coletta also made comments on Ferrari's stance on the next evolution of top-class prototype regulations, which is being put together for 2030, standing firm on the need to design and develop its own chassis to influence the development of future street and Corse Clienti vehicles.

"For us it is very important to build our car 100 percent," he said. "For future regulations we expect that we will be able to follow this path. We are negotiating with the FIA and ACO and I think they have realized what our stance is. We will see what they propose and suggest, but when we have the prancing horse on the car, the car has to be built 100 percent in Maranello."