The Art Car OAK Racing Costa, official car of 90 years of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, was unveiled this afternoon at the Welcome Center at the 24 Hours circuit. This work of automotive art was designed by Fernando Costa who wanted through art pay tribute to this legendary race, as well as to road safety.

The idea for the Art Car is to bring together art and competition. The base is an LM P2 chassis of OAK Racing that has participated four times at the 24 Hours of Le Mans with the team. On this car, the artist first applied 120 pounds of metal plates. Then, 1000 rivets were necessary and 20,000 welds to fix the 250 kg of panels. This work represents a complete lap of the circuit of the Le Mans 24 Hours where you can find the name of each of the turns of the track as well as dozens of road signs.

At the 24 Hours of Le Mans 'pesage' (scrutineering) on Sunday the 16th of June, the "Art Car" will be officially presented to the public. The Morgan Nissan 2013 will be fully decorated, to match the Art Car, but using stickers not steel !

Jacques Nicolet: "One of the goals of the Art Car was to broaden the scope of interest that may exist around the race. This project was born from a meeting with Fernando Costa through one of his works that I saw in Paris. When I later met the artist, I wanted even more to do an Art Car! Fernando is a great artist and an avid enthusiast of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, it is in its 20th Le Mans 24 Hours as a spectator. Between us something important happened and we had this idea of the Art Car.”

Pierre Fillon: "Le Mans and art have a very long story. It all began with Hervé Poulain and BMW in 1975. Many others like Warhol and César also designed Art Cars for 24 Hours of Le Mans. In this anniversary year of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, we had to mark the event. When Jacques Nicolet and Fernando Costa came to present the project to me, I thought it was an excellent opportunity to renew this tradition and the result is just superb. "

David Bristol