Luca Ciancetti, who leads the Glickenhaus motorsport programmes at Podium Advanced Technologies, made the claim despite the team falling down the Hypercar order from its podium finish behind the two Toyotas last year and fourth place in 2021.
He insisted the team could have “no complaints” after scoring a top-six result with the best of its Glickenhaus-Pipo 007 Le Mans Hypercars in the face of increased opposition from Ferrari, Porsche, Peugeot and Cadillac at the blue riband World Endurance Championship round.
“For a small niche manufacturer like Glickenhaus being among all these big-name car makers is like a dream,” Ciancetti told Autosport.
“We are absolutely happy about our results this time.”
The best of the Glickenhaus 007s, the full-season entry driven by Romain Dumas, Olivier Pla and Ryan Briscoe, moved into the top six late in the penultimate hour after the #5 Porsche 963 LMDhs hit driveshaft problems.
Both 007s had been running in the top six on Sunday morning before Pla in #708 and Franck Mailleux in #709 car he shared with Esteban Gutierrez and Nathanael Berthon both spun into the barriers after taking too much exit kerb at the Indianapolis left-hander.
“The drivers made some mistakes, but shit happens in motor racing,” said Ciancetti.
“Everyone makes mistakes: we didn’t tighten a front wheel properly on #709 during the night.
“Even if you kind of clean up our race and factor out the crashes and the mistakes, I don’t think we would have been any higher than fifth or maybe fourth.
“The time we lost didn’t make a lot of difference in terms of our overall result in the end.”
Pla backed up Ciancetti’s comments, adding that marque founder Jim Glickenhaus had been relishing the chance to go up against more big manufacturers
“Considering the problems we had, including my mistake in the morning to finish in front of some big manufacturers is what Jim was hoping for,” said the Frenchman.
“Of course, you always want more, but I think this was about the maximum we could achieve.
“We were not expecting or hoping for DNFs from the others, we just wanted to do our race and see what we could achieve — P6, in the end, is good.”
