Alonso begins his Daytona challenge
THERE’S ONE VERY SIGNIFICANT difference between Fernando Alonso’s latest jaunt off the Formula 1 piste in this month’s Daytona 24 Hours and his famous assault on last year’s Indianapolis 500. Beyond, of course, the Daytona ‘roval’ featuring right turns as well as left.
Neither Alonso, nor anyone following the pre-daytona 24 Hours test – dubbed ‘The Roar Before the Rolex 24’ – that took place last weekend, expects the Ligier-gibson JSP217 he’s driving to be as competitive as his Andretti Autosport-run Indycar. After all, the Andretti team was the quickest around Indy last May.
But regardless of whether the United Autosports Ligier he shares with Mclaren protege Lando Norris and Asian Le Mans Series LMP3 champion Phil Hanson can emerge as a serious threat for victory on pace, or must rely on trying to ‘stealth’ its way to the front, Alonso’s contribution will be one of the big stories of the race.
The bare facts of his outing in the Roar are as follows. During the three days of running, split into seven sessions and including a nebulous, but entertaining, ‘qualifying’ to decide pitbox and garage order for the 24 Hours, he completed a grand total of 64 laps of the 3.56-mile track. Alonso admitted he was a little surprised by how little track time he logged, which reflects more the schedule of the test than how the team used the available time. He did run in the 15-minute ‘qualifying’ session on Saturday afternoon, posting the 12th fastest time. But this was 1.709s off the pacesetting Cadillac DPI of old F1 sparring partner Felipe Nasr.
Outright pace is only part of the picture, albeit a bigger part of the endurance-racing equation than it once was. And Alonso’s single-lap pace is a given. “With drivers like Fernando and Lando, in terms of pure speed we know where they are,” says Gautier Bouteiller, race engineer of the
#23 Ligier. “But single-lap performance doesn’t really matter to me. What I want is consistency over the stint, no mistakes, respecting the procedures, working on the fuel economy.”
Consistency is dependent on traffic management, and that’s the great unknown for Alonso heading into the Daytona 24 Hours. After logging 13 laps during the sole night session on Saturday night, Alonso reported no problems given the significant illumination at Daytona, which has none of the dark spots of, say, Le Mans. So that box is ticked. Traffic is still a work in progress.
“Traffic is clearly new to him and it’s really important in the US,” says Bouteiller. “Most of the time, if you are able to stay on the lead lap and fight at the final restart, that’s where you can make the difference being strong through the traffic. We had planned a longer run for each
of them [on Sunday morning], but Fernando’s run was cut by three red flags, so that’s bad luck.
“But when going for a longer run the focus was to identify the places where it’s possible to overtake the GTDS and GTLM cars, try different places – ‘here I can overtake and it’s easy; here I can do it but it’s a bit risky so do it less in the early part of the race’. They learned quite a lot while setting a good lap without traffic.”
Alonso certainly acquitted himself well and, while he did use the word ‘afraid’ of his initial approach to lapping the slower cars, any trepidation was swiftly eliminated. And this was not really fear – what he really means is respect for the challenge.
Performance-wise, that Alonso will be strong is a given. Even among high-calibre endurance specialists, he will be able to hold his own and the main question is how he responds to the cut-and-thrust in traffic when it really matters.
But what will play a far bigger part in his Daytona result is the competitiveness of the car. And that’s where things become more difficult, as the man himself admitted after the test.
The Ligier JSP217 was introduced last year and it’s not well suited to Daytona, which comprises two long blasts along the 31-degree banking, one infield section and a brisk chicane on the backstretch.
There’s nothing United can do about the fundamental characteristics of the car, but there was some hope. Ligier has played its ‘joker’, allowing it to introduce an upgrade package. Most significant is the revised front end, which offers more downforce, and the car overall is supposedly more aero efficient. As well as getting its three Daytona virgins up to speed, United also had to work on that and try to understand the Continental tyres used in IMSA.
United ended the test in relatively good spirits having taken a few, understandable, wrong turns over the three days while working to get on top of the car.
The team, and Alonso, will put in all the work required to get the most out of the car come the race itself, but there’s still one imponderable. This is sportscar racing, of course, so Balance of Performance comes into play. The speed of the pacesetting Cadillac Dpis may prove too strong for IMSA not to pull them back, which could also change things.
“The Ligier JSP217 is not well suited to Daytona”