Watch: This Le Mans overtake is straight out of Initial D

The 24 Hours of Le Mans is perhaps one of the most exciting races in the World Endurance Championship (WEC) calendar. Anything and everything can happen within 24 hours. Heavy rain could cause some accidents, or the leading car could suddenly drop out of the race at the last minute. That's what happened to Toyota in 2016 when they lost power near the end of the race.

While most of our attention is on the new hypercar class, great battles are also happening in the LMP2, GTE Pro, and GTE Am classes, and this video is possibly the best example of that.

A video circulating on social media shows what is supposedly a Ford GT Le Mans' racer trying to overtake a Ferrari 488 GTE in the night. The Ferrari wasn't making it easy though, blocking the GT's every opportunity to make a pass. Faced with this conundrum, the driver of the Ford GT decided to take some inspiration from Takumi Fujiwara of Initial D fame to overtake the Ferrari driver.

The driver in the camera car did Takumi's signature “blind attack” move by turning off the headlights going into the corner. By turning off his headlights, he was able to catch the Ferrari off-guard and find space to creep up along the side at the exit. With the position secured, the driver turned his headlights back on to continue his charge up the field. Props to whoever edited the video too. They did a great job overlaying the Eurobeat soundtrack used during the same scene in the anime.

After searching around, it seems the blind attack was done during the 2019 Le Mans race and not during this year's event. For reference, Ford did not join the 2020 and 2021 series, which is why there was no Ford GT in the lineup in the aforementioned years.

Will we ever see another driver pull off another overtake using the blind attack? We hope so. Whatever the case, props to the driver for attempting and successfully pulling off Takumi's signature move in real life.