'A historic GT forced me to recalibrate everything I knew about the circuit'

Going from modern-era LMP2 cars to a Ford GT40 gave Alex Brundle an eyeopening – and at times hairy – new perspective on Le Mans, as he reports from this year's Classic

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An opportunity to return to Le Mans? That's not something you ever turn down - especially when it is centred around racing a stunning 1965-spec Ford GT40 in which I had a personal and heavy involvement in building from scratch.

Between 2012 and '22, I made nine starts at the Le Mans 24 Hours, racing primarily in the LMP2 class. Now here I was, pitching up for the 2025 Le Mans Classic in one of the greatest sports car models of them all, but one that might as well have been from a different world from the high-downforce modern prototypes I'm so familiar with.

Our GT40 is a toolroom car, newly built from constituent parts. Effectively, they are replicas but it's slightly unfair to call them that. The concept is such that you should be able to take the door off an original and, with the minimum of fettling, fit it on the car you've built. This was a project created for a sequence of films documenting the build, to understand such models and how they worked and were driven in period, so it was a joy to get the chance to race it here.

We entered Le Mans Classic in Plateau Four for cars from 1962-65, a grid that is normally led by GT40s but also features AC Cobras, Jaguar E-types and other pre-66 GT staples. However, it was made clear to me a few weeks before the race that we'd be 'shifted' to Grid Five for cars from 1966-71. On the fifth grid, you're up against Ferrari 512s, Porsche 917s and Lola T70s - so although the scenery is a little better, the competition is stiffer. Our GT40 was giving up 150hp with an extra 200kg, on narrower tyres than a Ferrari 512, for example. The ultimate Le Mans weapon of the early 1960s looked a bit chubby by 1971, a testament to the pace of motor sport development.