After a seven-year hiatus, Team Africa Le Mans makes its return to the 24H SERIES at this year’s Hankook 24H BARCELONA, doing so with overall 24 Hours of Le Mans winners Emanuele Pirro and Jan Lammers. 

The South African privateer most recently competed with CREVENTIC in 2017, during which it contested the Hankook 12H IMOLA and the TCE-only Hankook 24H MISANO on consecutive weekends in Italy. For its 24H SERIES return, Team Africa Le Mans has confirmed that 1988 Le Mans winner Jan Lammers and five-time overall winner Emanuele Pirro will compete at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya with record three-time Hankook 24H DUBAI Jeroen Bleekemolen (also a Le Mans LMP2 class winner in 2008), team founder Greg Mills and Pirro’s son Cris, a performance engineer with Sauber / Stake F1. 

“It is a great honour for us to be lining up at a 24H SERIES race, a series that always makes us feel at home,” Greg Mills explains in an official statement. “It’s a special privilege to once more be racing with the likes of Jan, Emanuele and Jeroen, all winners at Le Mans and across multiple other sports-car races and disciplines. 

“Perhaps,” he adds, “Team Africa Le Mans is a throwback to a different age!”

Established in 2015 in a bid “to carry the continent’s flag into international competition,’ Team Africa Le Mans has also run a prominent ‘Stop Poaching’ livery in its previous races in support of a charitable anti-poaching cause in South Africa, and will do so again in Barcelona. 

As in its previous entries, Team Africa Le Mans will run a Ginetta G55 GT4 – “bought as a bit of a wreck and rebuilt by the same team of friends, while being based at Midway Garage in Witchford, UK” – in the GT4 category. With 11 entries confirmed, the 2024 Hankook 24H BARCELONA is set to feature the joint-second biggest GT4 field since the category was introduced to the 24H SERIES as a standalone category in 2018. 

“Team Africa Le Mans prides itself on being a team of friends, all unpaid volunteers, including the mechanics and drivers, which contains some of the greatest names in the world of sportscar racing,” Mills continues. “We race for the love of the sport, and the fun of being on the grid. Whatever the case, we are thrilled to be giving it another try at Barcelona.”

Interestingly, the 2024 Hankook 24H BARCELONA marks only fourth international endurance event for Team Africa Le Mans, three of which have been with CREVENTIC. Prior to its 2017 run (sadly a potential class win at Imola was lost to differential failure), the South African team debuted at the Hankook 24H CIRCUIT PAUL RICARD in 2016 – also with a Ginetta G55 GT4. Mills and Lammers, who competed at the event with Nick Adcock, Terry Wilford and 11-time South African Rally champion Sarel van der Merwe, went on to finish on the SP3 podium. Its most recent endurance event however came in 2019, when the South African GT team entered a Bentley Continental GT3 for that year’s ‘Road to Le Mans.’

This weekend also marks the second 24H SERIES entry together for Pirro and Lammers, the Le Mans legends having previously competed together at the Hankook 24H MISANO in 2017. Despite suffering two broken ball joints, two failed differentials, AND a loose power steering hose, Pirro and Lammers, competing that weekend with Mills, van der Merwe and Graham Vos, battled on to an eventual 3rd place in SP3-GT4. 

Synonymous with Le Mans, Pirro debuted at the event in 1981 aboard a Martini Racing Lancia Beta Monte Carlo and would later embark on an incredible run with Audi’s R8 from 1998 to 2008, during which the Italian took the top prize five times (’00 to ’02, and ’06 to ’07), secured an additional class win in ’03, and finished on the overall podium nine times consecutively. An event record to this day. 

Further afield, Pirro has twice won both the famed Sebring 12 Hours (in 2000 and 2007) and Spa 24 Hours (1986 and 1990), and was crowned overall champion in the American Le Mans Series in 2001 and 2005. 

After a brief foray in Formula 1, and having made a quiet debut aboard a Zakspeed Ford Capri Turbo, Jan Lammers meanwhile competed full-time in the World Sports Car Championship from 1983 to 1992, and was just one win shy of claiming the overall title in 1987. The Dutchman’s sports car tenure, followed by an infamous season in the British Touring Car Championship with Volvo’s 850 Racing ‘wagon,’ included two overall wins at the Daytona 24 Hours in 1988 and 1990, as well as his famous ’88 win at Le Mans aboard Jaguar’s XJR-9.

In total, Lammers made 24 starts at La Sarthe’s famous endurance race – the fifth most in the event’s history – between 1983 and 2018. The 35 years in-between first and last starts still standing as a record in 2024.