WHY AN LMP2 CAR COULD WIN
An LMP2 car came close to pulling off a remarkable shock by winning the Le Mans 24 Hours overall last year. So surely that was the big chance for a car from the secondary prototype division to win the big race. Or was it?
If a privateer LMP1 can triumph in the 2018 edition of the French enduro, then so too can a P2 car. One of the pack of P1 independents is only going to win if the Toyotas run into major trouble, and what’s to say it isn’t going to be an LMP2 that’s sitting pretty as best of the rest ready to benefit if that happens?
That’s certainly how United Autosports co-owner Richard Dean sees it. “All the privateer P1 competitors are unproven,” says the Briton, a class winner at Le Mans in
2006. “If you were a betting man, there isn’t enough of them to say with any confidence that one is going to get through the race without problems.
“There are enough P2s, and good P2s with strong driver line-ups, to get through the race without issues, which is what we saw last year. One of those is just as likely as a privateer P1 to be in third place if the Toyotas have to spend an hour and a half in the pits, crash out or whatever.”
Dean reckons this Le Mans is going to be a race in which “anything can happen”. That could be a one-two for Toyota with the pair of TS050 HYBRIDS 20 laps to the good. Or it may be something altogether more surprising.
He points out that last year the United Ligiergibson JSP217 shared by Filipe Albuquerque, Hugo de Sadeleer and Will Owen finished fifth overall, and fourth in P2, despite being more than three seconds off the pace of the best of the ORECA 07s ahead of it.
“Le Mans is all about having a clean run,” he says. “It was just our luck to have that kind of run last year when we didn’t have a competitive car.”