The 16 Ex-F1 Drivers Chasing Glory at This Weekend Le Mans 24 Hours

• Sixteen former Formula 1 drivers line up at this weekend’s Le Mans 24 Hours, spread across the Hypercar, LMP2 and LMGT3 classes.
• Robert Kubica, Kevin Magnussen, Nyck de Vries and Stoffel Vandoorne headline a Hypercar field stacked with grand prix experience.
• Recent F1 departees Jack Doohan, Pietro Fittipaldi and Logan Sargeant are all chasing a different kind of glory in the French classic.

While Formula 1 spends the weekend in the Barcelona heat, a parallel reunion is taking place eight hundred kilometres north. The Le Mans 24 Hours, the race that has tempted grand prix drivers since the 1920s, this year features sixteen men who once raced in Formula 1, each of them chasing the kind of redemption, reinvention or simple joy that the F1 paddock could not give them.

Some were champions in waiting whose careers were cut short. Some were squeezed out by politics or money. Some simply fell in love with sportscars and never looked back. Together they form one of the strongest ex-F1 contingents in the modern history of the French classic.

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Kubica, the Man Who Refuses an Ending

No story in the field carries more weight than Robert Kubica’s. Fifteen years after the rally crash that partially severed his right arm and ended one of the most promising F1 careers of his generation, the Pole arrives at La Sarthe as a Le Mans winner, having taken overall victory in 2025 with the customer AF Corse Ferrari. This year he lines up in Toyota’s factory Hypercar alongside Nyck de Vries and Mike Conway, hired by the most successful Le Mans operation of the modern era to win it again.

Kubica has never framed his sportscar career as consolation. He drove a Ferrari to overall victory at the world’s most famous endurance race with an arm that doctors once doubted he would keep. Whatever happens this weekend, his presence at the front of the field remains one of motorsport’s great acts of defiance.

The Hypercar Class Is an F1 Reunion

The top class reads like a grid from the late 2010s. Kamui Kobayashi and Sebastien Buemi carry Toyota’s hopes alongside fellow F1 alumnus Brendon Hartley. Paul di Resta and Stoffel Vandoorne share the No. 93 Peugeot 9X8 with Nick Cassidy. Antonio Giovinazzi anchors Ferrari’s factory effort. Kevin Magnussen, who left F1 after a decade of midfield combat, races for BMW M Team WRT. Andre Lotterer, a three-time Le Mans winner whose F1 career lasted exactly one race, lines up in the No. 17 Genesis Magma Racing entry. Sebastien Bourdais and Will Stevens fly Cadillac’s flag, with Bourdais sharing the No. 38 car with Earl Bamber and ex-Williams junior Jack Aitken.

For several of these drivers, endurance racing has delivered what Formula 1 withheld. Vandoorne, dismissed by McLaren after two seasons in uncompetitive machinery, became a Formula E world champion and a factory endurance ace. Buemi, dropped by Toro Rosso at 23, has since won Le Mans four times. The French classic has a long memory and a generous definition of second chances.

The New Generation Arrives

Lower down the order, the most recent F1 exiles begin their next chapters. Jack Doohan, who lost his Alpine seat during the 2025 season, races in LMP2 alongside fellow F1 refugee Pietro Fittipaldi. Logan Sargeant, the last American to race in F1 before Cadillac’s arrival changed the calculus, makes his Le Mans debut in the LMGT3 class aboard a Ford Mustang.

Their presence is a reminder of how brutal the F1 ladder has become. Doohan got eleven grands prix. Sargeant got two seasons in a struggling Williams. Both were dismissed as failures before their 25th birthdays, and both now get to rebuild their reputations in a discipline where careers regularly stretch into the 40s. Nobody at Le Mans considers them failures. The race has been rehabilitating Formula 1 careers since before their fathers were born.

The numbers behind the modern Hypercar era explain the pull. Nine manufacturers contest the top class this year, more than Formula 1 has engine suppliers, and the budget for a full works programme is a fraction of an F1 entry. For a carmaker, Le Mans offers victory photographs that sell road cars for a decade. For a driver, it offers something F1 cannot: the possibility of standing on the very top step without driving for the one team that happens to have built the fastest car that year, because over 24 hours, reliability, teamwork and weather luck redistribute the odds.

That unpredictability is the great equaliser for the sixteen former grand prix drivers in this field. A perfect lap means little at 3am in the rain with a slow-zone gamble looming. Experience, patience and mechanical sympathy decide Le Mans, qualities that age in a driver’s favour. It is why men dismissed by Formula 1 in their early 20s can be factory superstars here at 40.

The Quiet Stars Who Found a Home

Between the headliners sit careers that endurance racing quietly rescued. Kamui Kobayashi, beloved in F1 for his banzai overtaking at Suzuka, has become one of the most respected team leaders in sportscars, combining driving duties with managing Toyota’s WEC programme. Brendon Hartley was dropped by Toro Rosso after one full season and responded by winning Le Mans and world championships with Porsche and Toyota. Nyck de Vries, whose ten-race Formula 1 stint at AlphaTauri ended brutally in mid-2023, has rebuilt himself so completely that Toyota trusts him with its lead car.

Paul di Resta’s journey may be the most understated. The Scot left F1 in 2013 carrying the reputation of a solid midfielder, spent years in touring cars and commentary booths, and is now a works Peugeot driver at 40, sharing a Hypercar with Vandoorne in front of a French crowd that treats the 9X8 like a national monument.

And then there is the man who proves the crossover can work in a single weekend. Nico Hulkenberg, still racing in F1 with Audi today, won Le Mans outright with Porsche in 2015 as a one-off, the only active grand prix driver of the modern era to do it. Every driver on this year’s entry list knows that story by heart.

A Different Kind of Glory

The relationship between F1 and Le Mans runs deeper than driver traffic. Only one man, Graham Hill, has won the Triple Crown of Monaco, Indianapolis and Le Mans, and the modern stars know it. Fernando Alonso took two Le Mans wins during his F1 sabbatical. Max Verstappen has spoken openly this year about racing in the World Endurance Championship, and his enthusiasm for endurance racing is one of the sport’s worst-kept secrets.

What draws them is partly the racing and partly the culture. Le Mans drivers share cars, share data and share credit. The midnight stints, the fog at dawn, the 300,000 fans camped in the forests, all of it stands apart from the corporate precision of a modern grand prix weekend. Drivers who spent years guarding tenths from their teammates describe the experience as liberating.

Sixteen of them get that experience this weekend. Some, like Kubica and Buemi, are chasing history. Others, like Doohan and Sargeant, are chasing a future. By Sunday afternoon, at least one former Formula 1 driver will be standing on the most famous podium in endurance racing, and not one of them will be thinking about the careers they left behind.

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Written by

Jack Renn

Jack Renn is an editor at F1 Chronicle and a veteran motorsport journalist with 25 years of experience covering Formula 1 and international motorsport. A member of the Association Internationale de la Presse Sportive (AIPS), the global body representing accredited sports journalists, Jack has spent his career reporting from paddocks and press rooms across the F1 calendar. His work spans race analysis, technical insight, and in-depth features, giving readers authoritative coverage grounded in decades of firsthand experience at the highest level of the sport.

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