STÉPHANE ORTELLI

After more than two decades of LMP prototypes racing at Le Mans, 2021 sees the introduction of the Le Mans hypercar class, reinstating a link from race cars back to highly exotic road cars that’s been absent since the GT1 era. And it just so happens the last GT1-specification car to win at Le Mans was the Porsche 911 GT1-98, driven by Allan McNish, Laurent Aïello and Stéphane Ortelli in 1998. Total 911 recently chatted over that landmark win with Ortelli.

Now 50 years old and still super-competitive, Ortelli was a young hotshot in 1998 who’d won in touring cars for BMW, raced Porsche 911 GT2s at Le Mans in 1995 and ’96, and had one previous attempt at outright Le Mans victory, the year before in ’97. That year he’d raced the Porsche 911 GT1-Evo for Roock Racing, in large part because of his performance in a one-off entry in Supercup at Imola, the fiercely competitive one-make 911 series that supports the Formula 1 calendar. “I was the only driver other than Mika Häkkinen to win my first ever Supercup race,” says Ortelli, “but I did it with a team that had never been in the Supercup or Carrera Cup before. I had only one day testing, and I did it from