SERT finish sixth despite six crashes in six hours at Le Mans

 

The Yoshimura Suzuki Endurance Racing Team - SERT - displayed a huge amount of resilience and teamwork at the weekend's Le Mans 24-hour, to recover from six crashes in six hours to finish sixth at the chequered flag.

 

In hugely challenging conditions at the historic 24-hour race and the opening round of the 2025 EWC season, SERT qualified second quickest and grabbed the holeshot. Black pulled a gap on the chasing field, but ran off line when passing a back marker, just over 10 minutes into the race, and crashed out.

After time in the pits, the team rejoined in 51st place. Black continued, and shared the opening stints with Etienne Masson, before the Frenchman crashed as the conditions worsened, having made progress back towards the front.

 

Another period in the pits saw Cocoro Atsumi take over the team's GSX-R1000R in 22nd place. Like his teammates, the Japanese rider began recovering ground before he, too, crashed out heavily.

With Black back onboard and keen to recover ground and remain in the hunt for the win or the podium - as the teams around them also suffered from crashes - he suffered three further crashes in the tricky conditions. He remounted twice, losing little time, before another heavy fall saw the GSX-R suffer damage and spend time in the pits.

 

Despite all this happening before a little more than a quarter of the race had been run, the team and riders continued to dig in, and as night fell the laps were ticked off and SERT climbed up through the order to claim sixth place at the end of a tough 24 hours.

Black said, "Of course, the outcome was not what we had hoped for. That's racing. What I'll take away from this year's race is the incredible amount of work put in by the whole team, despite the difficulties.

 

"As far as the riders are concerned, we gave it our all in every stint. That's also the strength of our team. We don't give up and we proved that with six crashes and a sixth place finish."

 

Masson said, "All the crashes and repairs are unheard of for us. But the team worked really well to get the bike back on track every time. That's the positive point. The other satisfaction is that we showed we had the right pace in the race. The negative point is that all these crashes have deprived us of a podium finish or even victory. We lost a lot of points in the championship. We made some mistakes, and we need to learn from them to come back even stronger at the next race.

 

Atsumi added, "I've never finished a 24-hour race before, so I'm pleased to do this. I got caught out in my first stint. However, after that, I managed to adapt my riding a lot better to the track conditions which enabled me to make progress.."