86 Stats in 86 Days Until 86th 24 Hours of Le Mans – Day 20, Most Cars to Finish Race (April 10, 2018)

The 86th annual 24 Hours of Le Mans is 67 days away! This is the 20th day of the 86 Stats in 86 Days Until the 86th 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Each day from now until the Friday before the 24 Hours of Le Mans, we’ll post a list of stats related to the race. Some are well-known statistics, while others are a little more in-depth.

Here is a look at the top 10 races with the most cars to finish that year’s event. The 2017 and most recent race, the 85th edition of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, had a staggering 48 cars that were running at the finish. That’s a record by four cars, as 44 cars were running at the finish of the 2016 race.

While advanced and improved technology has been reset on numerous occasions in the last 10 years, the bar for more than 80-plus years (70-plus races) was the inaugural, 1923 race, were 30 cars finished. It wasn’t until 1993 that that mark was even touched; the 1993 race also saw 30 finishers. However, it wouldn’t be until 2008 that the mark was broken, when 33 cars were running at the checkered flag.

Most Cars to Finish Race (cars that started race in parenthesis)

- 2017: 48 (60 cars)

- 2016: 44 (60 cars)

- 2013: 41 (56 cars)

- 2014: 38 (54 cars)

- 2015: 37 (55 cars)

- 2008: 33 (55 cars)

- 2012: 33 (56 cars)

- 2009: 32 (55 cars)

- 1923: 30 (33 cars)

- 1993: 30 (47 cars)

Notes of Interest

- While technically there were 49 cars running at the end of the 2017 race, the No. 13 Vaillante Rebellion Oreca Gibson caught an unlucky break. The car was disqualified after officials found the team had made illegal modifications to the car. That dropped the classified finishers to 48, still enough to reset the record.

- The 1993 race saw an increase of 18 cars from the 1992 race, due to an added class for GT cars for the first time since the 1986 race. However, 50 cars competed in the 1987 race, despite it being the first year in the history of the 24 Hours of Le Mans that no homologated entries competed.

- The 1923 race saw 30 of the 33 cars competing, with one of the lowest attrition rates in the history of the race (90.9 percent of starters finished the race).