The brief

  • What happened: Doriane Pin was fastest in LMP2 in first practice and the opening qualifying session at the 2026 24 Hours of Le Mans. She then completed 95 race laps across three stints as the No. 30 Duqueine Team Oreca shared with Julien Andlauer and Richard Verschoor led for much of the race.
  • Why it matters: The result was a retirement, but Pin’s week supplied something more useful than hype: repeatable evidence that her prototype pace holds up over qualifying laps, long green-flag runs and changing track conditions.
  • What to watch: Pin returns to the European Le Mans Series at Imola on July 3–5. That race offers the next chance to convert the No. 30 crew’s pace into a result.

Fast before the race

Pin’s Le Mans case began with a stopwatch. She put the No. 30 Duqueine Team Oreca on top of LMP2 in first practice with a 3:35.248, finishing 0.710 seconds clear of Kévin Estre in second. The official ELMS session report credited Pin with the car’s fastest lap.

She went quicker in the first qualifying session. The official timing sheet lists Pin first among the LMP2 drivers at 3:34.662, 0.567 seconds ahead of Ian Aguilera. Duqueine ultimately started sixth in class after Hyperpole, but Pin had already shown that the car’s speed was not coming only from Porsche factory driver Andlauer.

What the long runs showed

Pin drove 95 timed laps in three race stints, beginning in the fourth hour and returning twice through the night and morning. Pitwall Brief’s review of the official lap-by-lap race timing found 79 green-flag laps under four minutes after excluding pit-stop laps. Her median time across that sample was 3:40.802.

That number needs context rather than worship. Traffic, tire age, fuel load and time of day prevent a perfect driver comparison at Le Mans. Even so, the same screen produced a 3:40.838 median for Verschoor and 3:39.674 for Andlauer. Pin was effectively level with Verschoor and a little more than a second from the most experienced member of the crew over a large race sample.

The car’s position backed up the timing. The No. 30 was the LMP2 leader at the four-hour mark and again at halfway, while ORECA’s eight-hour update described a clean opening third from the entire crew and pit wall. This was a shared endurance performance, not a solo one, but Pin carried her portion without becoming the weak stint in a front-running car.

The result that got away

Duqueine led for the majority of the race before the two Inter Europol entries closed in during the 21st hour. The official ELMS post-race account says Verschoor stopped with a technical problem on lap 303 while leading the class. DailySportsCar reported the failure as a brake issue at the Daytona Chicane. Pin was not in the car when it failed.

That distinction defines her Le Mans better than the DNF beside the entry. Pin did not get a class trophy, and the No. 30 did not complete the final hours. But she left a week of evidence—fastest in practice, fastest in first qualifying and competitive through roughly six hours of race driving—that makes her return to endurance racing look like a credible route forward, not a retreat from single-seaters.

What changes next

Imola is where the promise has to become points. Pin, Verschoor and Giorgio Roda will return to the No. 30 in LMP2 Pro/Am, without Andlauer in the Le Mans-only seat. The useful question is no longer whether Pin can run at prototype pace. It is whether Duqueine can carry that pace through a shorter race with no mechanical escape clause.