Ask any endurance fan whether Hypercars are slower than the LMP1 hybrids and you will get a confident answer. The number behind it is rarely the same twice, because it usually comes from a qualifying lap in one specific year.
We took a different route. Both eras raced on 7 of the same circuits, so we compared the fastest race lap of the top class on each of them — 66 LMP1 races against 39 Hypercar races, measured the same way.
The answer at Le Mans: 3:17.297 in the LMP1 era against 3:25.041 in the Hypercar era, a difference of 7.7 seconds per lap. And that is the point of the rule change, not a failure of it: the field grew from 12 marques in the top class to 13.