EARLY FINISH HELPS REBELLION
REBELLION LED BY FAR THE MOST LAPS ON Sunday as it wrapped up a second LMP2 victory of the season with its #31 ORECA-GIBSON 07. But the Anglo-swiss team didn’t have the fastest car for the conditions and drivers Bruno Senna, Nicolas Prost and Julien Canal, who didn’t actually get to climb behind the wheel on race day, reckoned there was an element of luck to their win in the foreshortened event.
The Signatech Alpine squad did have the fastest car, but ended up second with Nicolas Lapierre, Andre Negrao and Gustavo Menezes (who also didn’t get to drive). They were convinced that they would have gone on to take their second win of the season had the race not been red-flagged, and run to its full duration.
The winning Rebellion (below) would have needed to spend more time in the pits over the remainder of the race than the chasing Alpine-badged ORECA. And with Negrao closing on Prost in the laps before the safety car that led into the final red, the French team’s insistence that it should – and would – have won was entirely believable.
Lapierre had charged through from what the team admitted was a disappointing fourth on the grid, after dropping briefly to fifth, to move into second behind Senna inside 20 laps. Negrao briefly put the car into the lead for the first time in the fourth hour before stopping under the safety car. But its pit strategy ultimately meant it wasn’t leading at the all-important time when the race reached its premature conclusion.
“Alpine was flying out there,” said Senna. “They had the fastest car and we had the second fastest. We were lucky, but that can happen when the race turns into a bit of a lottery like it did today.”
“It’s infuriating to see the win escape our grasp, despite being the fastest on track,” said Signatech boss Philippe Sinault. “The engineers did a fantastic job and the car was quickest in these tricky conditions.”
Third place went to the championshipleading Jackie Chan DC Racing ORECA, which like the cars ahead of it only managed to cycle two of its drivers, Oliver Jarvis and Ho-pin Tung, through the cockpit - silver-rated
Thomas Laurent remaining on the sidelines. Third, reckoned Jarvis, was as good as it was going to get for a car that he admitted was “fairly average” in the conditions.
The TDS Racing squad claimed fourth, as the first team home to have used all three of its drivers in Francois Perrodo, Emmanuel Collard and Matthieu Vaxiviere. That made the French squad something of a moral winner, it reckoned.
That the top three finishers didn’t use all their drivers was not without controversy, even though WEC rules allow for it under a force-majeure clause inserted in the rules following the 2013 Fuji debacle. The debate was fuelled by the exclusion of the second of the Rebellion entries because Mathias Beche hadn’t completed the necessary duration in the car after taking over from Nelson Piquet Jr, and silver driver David Heinemeier Hansson didn’t drive at all. The fact that the car had been crashed by Beche and wasn’t running at the finish – though was initially classified – made the exclusion meaningless. It did, however, add to the controversy.