Four Chevrolet Corvette Z06 GT3.Rs will line up for the 24 Hours of Le Mans on June 13-14, the largest contingent of Corvettes at the French classic in a decade. The number alone tells a story about where this program thinks it stands and where it needs to go.
Corvette Racing owns nine class victories at Le Mans, the most recent in 2023. But since the Z06 GT3.R replaced the old GTE-spec machine, results have been harder to come by. A debut year in 2024 produced nothing memorable. Last year brought a third-place podium — progress, sure, but not the standard this program set for itself across two decades of factory dominance.
So now Chevrolet is playing the numbers game.
Three of the four entries come from TF Sport. The No. 33 car pairs Nicky Catsburg and Jonny Edgar with Ben Keating, who is returning from an elbow injury that kept him out of the first two FIA WEC rounds this season. Catsburg hasn’t raced a Corvette at Le Mans since winning there in 2023. I haven’t been there yet in a GT3-spec car, so that’s going to be new,” he said, with the kind of understatement that only a former winner can pull off.
Keating, characteristically blunt, acknowledged the variables stacking against him. New chassis. Healing elbow. A car that was “missing a little something” in 2025. Every car in this race is a long shot,” he said. “And I still feel that way.”
The No. 34 Racing Team Turkey by TF entry carries Charlie Eastwood, Salih Yoluc, and Peter Dempsey. Eastwood has a Le Mans win and a podium in his last four starts there. The car scraped its first championship points of the WEC season with a ninth at Spa.
Le Mans is a double-points round, and Eastwood isn’t hiding the math. “No better place for it than Le Mans,” he said. “The Corvette’s always so good there.”
Every LMGT3 champion since the class was created in 2021 has won at Le Mans. That fact hangs over both WEC entries like a neon sign.
The No. 2 TF Sport entry is a reward car — the team earned its Le Mans slot by winning the 2025 European Le Mans Series title. HH Prince Jefri Ibrahim and Ben Green are Le Mans rookies. Only their teammate Lorcan Hanafin has raced the 8.48-mile circuit before, though Green and the Prince ran the Corvette to a Pro-Am runner-up finish at the Bathurst 12 Hours in February. “It took us seven years to get here,” the Prince said.
The fourth car is 13 Autosport’s No. 13, the Canadian red Corvette that became a fan favorite during its Le Mans debut last year. Matt Bell, Orey Fidani, and Lars Kern are all back after finishing 10th. Fidani was candid about the learning curve — slow zones at 300 kph, penalties that cost positions they never recovered. “Now I have a better understanding,” he said. The team won back-to-back Bob Akin Awards in IMSA, given to the top rookie or most improved entry. They are past the rookie stage now.
Four Corvettes. Nine previous wins. One podium in two years of GT3 competition. The gap between legacy and current results is the tension driving this entire effort.
Corvette Racing built its Le Mans legend with a purpose-built race car running in a class it often dominated. The GT3 world is different — more entries, tighter performance windows, less room for a manufacturer to engineer its way to the front.
Flooding the grid with four cars improves the odds. It also raises the stakes. If none of them can crack the podium with this much firepower, the conversation shifts from “building toward something” to something far less comfortable.
The green flag drops Saturday, June 13 at 4 p.m. local time.
Share this Story