The ACO credited Sauber with the 1989 Le Mans overall victory. The winning car was the Sauber C9, entered by Team Sauber Mercedes and powered by a Mercedes-Benz engine, but the Automobile Club de l’Ouest classified the constructor as the Swiss marque Sauber.
The No. 63 C9 was driven by Jochen Mass, Manuel Reuter and Stanley Dickens. It completed 389 laps, covering about 5,265 kilometres, and finished five laps ahead of the second-placed car. Sauber’s result was especially significant because its Group C prototype combined Swiss chassis engineering with Mercedes-Benz’s turbocharged V8 power.
A common mix-up is answering Mercedes-Benz or Sauber-Mercedes. Those names accurately describe the partnership and race entry, and many modern summaries call the victory a Mercedes-Benz win. However, this question specifically asks for the ACO’s constructor attribution, for which the record notes Sauber. The 1989 victory was Sauber’s sole overall Le Mans win and came before Mercedes-Benz’s later 1991 victory with the C11.