Race
The Mark IIs took the lead at the start, but lost a part of their advance in frequent refuelling. It would later appear that the Mark IIs refuelled more often than required due to the uncertainty of their fuel consumption. The weather was hot, and overheating began to hit the GT40s. Bob Bondurant and Umberto Maglioli's No. 7 had head gasket failure before 20:00 and on the same lap, Herbert Müller and Ronnie Bucknum's No. 6 overheated terminally.
After the failure of the Fords, four Ferraris were leading. By then, the top Ford-powered car was the Dan Gurney/Jerry Grant Cobra Daytona coupe. Around midnight, Gurney and Grant had risen to third overall. That was when the Cobra's motor mounts began to crack and Gurney had to park the blue coupe after 204 laps.
This left the Ferraris on top, but the P2 began to suffer excessive disk brake wear, probably due to heat. All the leading prototypes had pit stops to change disk brakes, an operation that required between 20 and 30 minutes.
As the 275LMs put less stress on the brakes, two of them were leading at 04:00; Pierre Dumay's Belgian yellow car led the NART 275LM of Jochen Rindt and Masten Gregory. The NART Ferrari had lost time struggling with ignition problem, but now the engine was sounding clear and the car gained several second on each lap. Soon after 13:00, the Belgian Ferrari had approximately one minute over the American one, but Rindt was driving 12 seconds per lap faster. As the leader needed only one refueling stop to finish the race while the NART car would have to stop twice, a close finish was expected.
Then, a tire began to deflate on the leading car, and soon disintegrated, destroying a large part of the thin aluminum rear bodywork. It took the Belgian team five laps to have the car ready to rejoin the race. This was more than enough to give the victory to Rindt and Gregory.
Read more about this topic: 1965 24 Hours Of Le Mans
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