Three Years After F1 Cut Him Loose Mid-Season, Nyck de Vries Has Won the Le Mans 24 Hours

• Nyck de Vries, dropped by AlphaTauri barely half a season into his only full Formula 1 campaign in 2023, has won the Le Mans 24 Hours for the first time.
• The victory came after a tense Sunday-morning team orders standoff between his No.7 Toyota and the sister No.8 car of Brendon Hartley, eventually resolved through the pit-stop cycle rather than wheel to wheel.
• Toyota ended a four-year wait at La Sarthe, with Kamui Kobayashi and Mike Conway each adding a second Le Mans crown alongside de Vries.

At three o’clock on Sunday afternoon, the timing screens at the Circuit de la Sarthe settled on a name that Formula 1 had quietly written off less than three years ago. Nyck de Vries had just won the Le Mans 24 Hours.

The Dutchman shared the winning No.7 Toyota GR010 Hybrid with Kamui Kobayashi and Mike Conway, holding off the No.20 BMW M Hybrid V8 of Robin Frijns, Rene Rast and Sheldon van der Linde by just 11 seconds after a full day and night of racing. For Toyota it was a first win in the French endurance classic for four years. For de Vries it was something more personal: proof that a driver F1 decided it no longer wanted can still stand on top of one of the sport’s grandest stages.

That context is what gave the result its weight. The man celebrating on the Toyota pit wall was the same man who, in the summer of 2023, was told his grand prix career was effectively over before it had really begun.

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The career Formula 1 tried to close

De Vries arrived in motorsport’s top tier with a CV that should have guaranteed him years at the front. He won the Formula 2 title in 2021 and the Formula E World Championship the same year, a double that few drivers in history can claim. When Alex Albon fell ill at Monza in 2022, de Vries stepped into a Williams at a circuit he barely knew and scored points on his unscheduled grand prix debut, finishing ninth.

That cameo earned him a full seat at AlphaTauri for 2023. It did not last. After a difficult run of races against the highly rated Yuki Tsunoda, Red Bull’s junior team lost patience and removed him roughly ten rounds into the season, handing the car back to Daniel Ricciardo. A public dispute over his contract followed into 2024. For a 28-year-old who had spent his whole life climbing toward Formula 1, the speed of the fall was brutal.

Rather than disappear, de Vries rebuilt. He returned to the World Endurance Championship with Toyota, the manufacturer that had given him a sportscar foothold years earlier, and kept his Formula E programme alive. Le Mans, the race he had circled as unfinished business, became the goal.

Twenty-four hours that went his way

The 94th running of the event was, as ever, a test of patience as much as speed. The No.7 crew managed traffic, weather and the relentless rhythm of the night before edging clear in the closing hours. Kobayashi, a Formula 1 podium finisher with Sauber at his home Japanese Grand Prix in 2012, helped steer the car through its trickier moments. Conway, a sportscar specialist who never landed the F1 break his talent deserved, was the steady hand many expected.

De Vries was the new name on the trophy. Having missed out on being part of Toyota’s previous Le Mans wins, this was his maiden triumph in the race, and the emotion on the slowing-down lap told its own story.

The team orders row that decided it

The victory was not without controversy, and the drama came from inside the Toyota garage rather than from a rival manufacturer. On Sunday morning the sister No.8 car, with Brendon Hartley at the wheel, was leading overall when the call came for the New Zealander to let de Vries through on the Mulsanne Straight.

De Vries, running on tyres around 27 laps fresher, was the faster proposition at that moment, and Toyota wanted its quicker car at the front. The exchange grew tense when the pass did not happen cleanly on track, with de Vries making his frustration plain over the radio. In the end the team settled it the calmer way, allowing the No.7 to move ahead through an upcoming pit-stop cycle rather than forcing a risky move at more than 200mph.

Hartley, alongside Sebastien Buemi and Haas reserve driver Ryo Hirakawa, completed the podium in the No.8, keeping a Toyota one-two intact. Inside a works team that prizes its drivers equally, the morning’s standoff was a reminder of how thin the line is between cooperation and conflict when a Le Mans win is on the table.

Le Mans, the second life for F1’s leftovers

De Vries was one of 16 former Formula 1 drivers on the entry list, a number that underlines how the great endurance race has become a proving ground for talent the grand prix paddock could not, or would not, keep. Not everyone reached the flag. Sebastien Bourdais, Jack Aitken, Andre Lotterer and Kevin Magnussen were among those who failed to finish on Sunday afternoon.

Kobayashi, who now combines driving with running Toyota’s WEC operation as team principal, embodies the same idea from a different angle: an F1 career that ended too soon, redirected into something lasting. De Vries appears to be writing a similar chapter. He has a Formula E title, a sportscar programme with one of the most successful teams in endurance racing, and now a Le Mans victory that no contract dispute can take away.

There was a time, not long ago, when the story attached to his name was about being dropped. After this weekend, it is about being a winner of the Le Mans 24 Hours. That is a far better headline to carry, and one he earned the hard way.

Toyota’s long road back

Toyota had not won the Le Mans 24 Hours since 2022, an unusually long wait for a team that had previously turned the race into its private property. The arrival of new manufacturers under the Hypercar rules, with Ferrari, Porsche, BMW, Cadillac and others all committing factory efforts, transformed the grid from a near-walkover into one of the most competitive fields the event has seen in decades. Winning in that environment carried more weight than the team’s earlier, more dominant victories.

The margin told the story. Eleven seconds after twenty-four hours of flat-out racing is a sliver, and the chasing BMW pushed the Toyota crew to the very end. There was no room for the kind of mistake that quietly ends races at the Circuit de la Sarthe, and across its three drivers the No.7 made none of any consequence.

A fuller life beyond Formula 1

For de Vries, the win caps a reinvention that few drivers manage after being discarded by F1. He has built a career across two disciplines, combining his endurance commitments with Toyota and a continued presence in Formula E, the all-electric world championship he had already won. Where some drivers fade after losing their grand prix seat, he has kept stacking up silverware at the top level of whatever he turns his hand to.

That breadth is becoming the template for the modern racing driver. Formula 1 has only twenty seats, and the talent it cannot accommodate has to go somewhere. Increasingly that somewhere is sportscar racing, where the prestige of Le Mans offers a stage every bit as grand as a grand prix Sunday. De Vries has now conquered it, and done so against the strongest entry the race has assembled in years.

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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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