Catsburg, Edgar and Keating help TF Sport add another chapter to Corvette’s Le Mans legend

In 2023, Ben Keating and Nicky Catsburg helped complete a memorable comeback to win the centenary Le Mans 24 Hours in GTE Am, not only recording the final Le Mans win in the category, but also the last Le Mans win for the singular factory Corvette Racing team.

Three years later, they’ve come back together with another incredible comeback story, both on the track and off it, to help customer team TF Sport continue the Chevrolet Corvette’s legacy of Le Mans excellence.

With Keating just nine weeks removed from an elbow injury which forced him out of action for the first two FIA World Endurance Championship races, and after starting 17th on the 25-car LMGT3 class grid – he, Catsburg and Jonny Edgar ended up not only winning in their No. 33 Corvette Z06 LMGT3.R, but dominating for most of the race.

“If you get to write the story, you would write it this way,” Catsburg said “We had to come all the way from the back. We had to wait for Ben to heal and be back in shape, nine weeks after he broke his elbow.”

“It’s an incredible result for us. A great, great day.”

It was Chevrolet/Corvette’s 10th Le Mans class win, coming 25 years after the Pratt Miller-run factory team won it for the very first time in 2001. And it was the first for Corvette in the still-young LMGT3 era, in which the factory now serves as the supporting arm to empower private teams such as British-based TF Sport.

Integral to the comeback was Keating himself, in his first race since breaking his elbow in a mountain biking accident just before the delayed start to the WEC season. He had to miss Imola and Spa, and even after being cleared to race, the now three-time Le Mans class winner wasn’t entirely sure if he could deliver to his same high standards as the man regarded as endurance racing’s best Bronze driver of the generation.

But come race time, Keating plugged away with five consecutive clean-driving stints aboard the No. 33 Corvette, and he only needed to be relieved momentarily by Catsburg just so he wouldn’t do more than the allowed four consecutive hours of driving at once.

Keating returned to the cockpit just after sunset and drove all the way until about half past midnight: In a little over eight hours, he’d already completed the mandatory six hours of driving required of each LMGT3 crew’s Bronze-graded driver. This put TF Sport at a massive strategic advantage when other front-running teams still had Bronze time to clear much later in the race.

“You always believe it can happen, absolutely – I don’t care how good your car or team is. You can’t come into a 24-hour race expecting to do well," Keating said. "You just have to do your job, and we had a perfect race – no penalties, no mistakes. The car is in pretty good shape, and that’s what you need to do to win this race.

“It’s so good to be with these guys. I enjoy Nicky. I’m super-proud of Jonny. To win with Corvette is really special again.

The warm conditions suited the Corvette to a T, and the TF Sport trio maximized that throughout the 24 hours. James Moy Photography/Getty Images

Keating was also appreciative of the warm, but fair weather conditions which enabled many consecutive hours of continuous green-flag racing. “When Nicky and I won in the Corvette in 2023, that was far and away the worst conditions I’d ever experienced," he recalled. "I think over half the field retired with damage – it was a really difficult race.

“This has to be the best weather I've ever seen in Le Mans in the 12 times I’ve done it. It was a clean race; I’d be shocked if we didn’t go further in this race than we ever had before, and it made for really competitive racing.

These factors also helped Keating, Catsburg and Edgar maximize the strengths of the Corvette Z06 GT3.R.

“I think the extreme heat out there was really beneficial for our car," Keating said. "If it were a green-flag race, all of the LMGT3 cars would have done somewhere around 34-35 stints, and we had 15 sets of tires – so you had to double-stint and triple-stint in our car.

“The Corvette is really good at taking care of its Goodyear tires, and so I think that it was an advantage for us to have the heat. Especially at the end of the day, after the safety car in the morning (for Ayhancan Güven’s crash in the No. 91 Manthey Porsche) we needed it to be light outside!”

Catsburg, now a two-time Le Mans class winner, added; “First of all, the Chevy has been great to us, both in 2023 and this year again. And then, I am a lucky guy to have these teammates. For him (Keating) to do all of his driving before Sunday was incredible – no mistakes.”

Catsburg cheers Edgar over the line. DPPI photo

But Catsburg had equally high praise for Edgar, who took his first Le Mans win in only his second start. The Englishman showed glimpses of the once highly touted single-seater prospect that he once was – a champion in Formula 4, a race winner in FIA Formula 3, briefly part of the famous Red Bull Junior Team – before he changed gears in 2024 towards the greater mobility offered in endurance sports cars. It’s a change that’s rewarded him well with the biggest achievement of his young career in sports car racing.

“I knew we had a fighting chance because the car was feeling really good and we seemed pretty fast,” Edgar said. “I always knew we had a chance to win, but in a 24-hour race, you need so much to go right.

“There are a hundred things that could have gone wrong, but we had a pretty perfect race, I would say. No mistakes, no contact, good pit stops the whole time. It was just a great race."

Edgar punctuated the race with a quintuple-stint to close out the race, just like the one Keating did to lead it off. And his pace stacked up not only against the best Silver-rated drivers in the class, but the best Gold and Platinum professionals with years of high-level sports car racing experience too.

“The plan wasn’t to do five stints at the end,” he admitted. “But I think I had to do at least three due to the drive-time rules and how much Nicky had done. I was going to do three but because of the way we did tires, it made sense to do four. Once I was already in for four, I may as well have stayed in again! So it went from two stints to five pretty quickly.

“I’m very proud of it. I felt left out – Ben and Nicky already had a win, so it’s nice that I’ve got one now.”