Filipe Albuquerque put the No. 101 Cadillac Wayne Taylor Racing V-Series.R at the top of the morning session timesheet at Le Mans test day with a 3:27.011, and every single person in the paddock — including Cadillac’s own people — shrugged.
That’s the nature of the pre-race test at the Circuit de la Sarthe. It’s a dress rehearsal where nobody shows their hand. The 94th running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans is days away, and Cadillac brought three cars to the 8.467-mile circuit knowing full well that a fast lap on Sunday means almost nothing when the lights go green on Saturday.
The No. 12 Cadillac Hertz Team JOTA entry driven by Norman Nato actually posted the quicker absolute time in the afternoon — a 3:26.853 — good for third overall. Sebastien Bourdais, the Le Mans local who knows every bump and curb on public roads that become a racetrack once a year, put the No. 38 car 12th with a 3:27.261.
Three Cadillacs. All ran clean. No mechanical drama. In endurance racing, that’s the headline that actually matters.
Cadillac chief engineer Jeromy Moore was careful not to oversell it. “We’re looking reasonably competitive, but we know our competitors are strong and really we won’t know for sure what they have in their pocket until next week,” he said. That’s the kind of sentence you only hear from someone who has been burned before by reading too much into test-day results.
The V-Series.R is running a new evo package this year, and the drivers are still calibrating. Bourdais said he noticed “a positive change in the new car since last year,” which is the most telling comment of the day. Last year’s Le Mans was not kind to the Cadillac program. Improvement was not optional — it was survival.
Earl Bamber, sharing the No. 38, offered perhaps the most honest assessment of the competitive landscape: “It looks like the field’s super close at the moment. It’s really, really tight.” Hypercar has become a knife fight. Toyota, Porsche, Ferrari, Peugeot, BMW, Lamborghini, Alpine — the entry list reads like a manufacturer war that hasn’t been this crowded since the Group C era.
Wayne Taylor, the veteran team co-owner who has been chasing Le Mans glory for decades, couldn’t hide his enthusiasm. “All the Cadillacs look strong, and all I hear from our drivers is how good the car is,” he said. But then he added the qualifier: “I’m not sure if anybody was going to try and set any times out there today.”
That’s the game. Everybody sandbagging. Everybody running programs. Everybody gathering tire data on a track surface that had been freshly resurfaced in spots, creating what Jack Aitken described as “a pretty wide variety of tarmac conditions.”
The morning session was disrupted by red flags and slow zones, making meaningful comparisons even harder. The afternoon ran cleaner, giving teams actual data to chew on during the two-day gap before Free Practice 1 on Wednesday.
Ricky Taylor captured the Cadillac camp’s mood best: “We clearly have some decent outright pace.” The emphasis belongs on “outright.” Quick over one lap at Le Mans is a party trick. Quick over 24 hours, through rain, darkness, traffic, and mechanical attrition, is something else entirely.
Cadillac is fielding a serious three-car assault with serious drivers — Albuquerque, Bamber, Bourdais, the Taylor brothers — and a car that appears genuinely improved. But topping a test-day timesheet at La Sarthe is like leading after the first mile of a marathon. The race hasn’t even started yet.
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