LMP2: G-drive wins before exclusion
Jean-eric Vergne, Andrea Pizzitola and Roman Rusinov were the favourites, and after a cautious start they took the lead and held it to the end
Pressure on the shoulders of pre-event favourites was a familiar theme at Le Mans, and it wasn’t just Toyota that felt the weight of expectation on race day.
Jean-eric Vergne, Andrea Pizzitola and Roman Rusinov were hotly tipped for
LMP2 glory in the #26 G-drive Racing ORECA after following up their domination of the World Endurance Championship opener at Spa with another comfortable victory in the European Le Mans Series at Monza, but translating latent speed into a result at Le Mans is never straightforward, as Rusinov well knows.
Although the Toyota comparison doesn’t quite bear scrutiny, the Russian has been close a few times before, finishing third in 2015 with OAK Racing and going one better in ’16 after switching allegiance to Jota Sport. Last year was meant to be his crowning glory as part of the TDS Racing stable, but it didn’t happen – and his race ended in the Porsche Curves barriers, with a three-minute penalty carried over to the next WEC round adding insult to injury.
Rusinov offered cautionary platitudes about the #26 crew’s status as favourite before practice got under way: “I love and I hate this race at the same time because it takes you so long to prepare it and it can all go wrong.” But such was his car’s dominance come the race that his caution proved unfounded.
Although Vergne slipped back from third to seventh at the start, as Nathanael Berthon’s Dragonspeed ORECA took the lead from pole position man Paul-loup Chatin’s IDEC Sport ORECA, his pace around the first pitstops cycled the #26 car into a lead it would not lose for the rest of the race – all 360 laps of it.
With no on-track incidents or unscheduled pitstops required to solve mechanical problems, the #26 car made it look “a bit too easy” for Pizzitola’s liking. But as the hours ticked by and the car continued to run like clockwork, two laps clear of the field, no bad luck was forthcoming and the team was left to ponder one of the most comprehensive victories you’re likely to see at Le Mans.
“I was really surprised about the reliability of the car,” admitted TDS team boss Xavier Combet. “It was amazing; you cannot imagine that it’s so easy in the end.
“We never had pressure because we all
prepare really well and we try to imagine all these situations [where something could go wrong] and in the end it did not happen.
“This time it’s the perfect race. We’ve never been in this situation. I am like somebody who is in a cloud. It’s just a dream I would say.”
With such a huge margin over the chasing Signatech-alpine car of two-time class winner Nicolas Lapierre, Andre Negrao and Pierre Thiriet, Vergne spent much of his race in conservation mode, a task he said was not as easy as it looked from outside, as he attempted to balance looking after the car with keeping his concentration.
“Having such a big lead, there is no point to push, but as a racing driver you want to make the fastest times, you want to have the fastest average,” he said. “In the traffic I was taking absolutely zero risk – you need to drive like your grandmother sometimes just to bring the car back home!”
Despite this, Thiriet felt that G-drive was out of reach. Aside from a hapless spin exiting a slow zone at Arnage towards the end of the sixth hour, Signatech also had a trouble-free run, but simply didn’t have the pace to stay with the leaders when Lapierre wasn’t in the car and had fallen off the lead lap by the 11th hour.
“They were faster in the box, faster on the track and faster everywhere, it was difficult,” said Thiriet. “Against us was
a very strong team. G-drive did an amazing job.”
The IDEC ORECA, a transformed prospect this year with former Peugeot ace Nicolas Minassian installed as sporting director, was among the few cars able to match G-drive on pace, particularly in the hands of 2014 ELMS champion Chatin, but a fuel-pick-up problem from the start of the race meant it was limited to nine-lap stints, one fewer than the rest, and would therefore require an extra stop once in every 10.
Even so, Signatech-alpine’s second place was still not completely out of reach until the IDEC car’s gearbox temperature rocketed and further inspection revealed that the casing had cracked. Game over.
IDEC’S departure followed an attritional 20th hour in which Ligier’s hopes collapsed. Its cars had taken a major step forward courtesy of an ACO
‘joker’ intended to improve the relative performance of its Le Mans aero kit, which proved such a disaster that it was abandoned by most teams last year. Will Stevens qualified the #23 Panis-barthez Competition entry just shy of last year’s pole time.
Stevens briefly led the race during the first pitstop sequence and consolidated second position after moving ahead of Negrao in the early hours of the morning before clutch problems cost him, Julien Canal and Timothe Buret over an hour in the pits and relegated them to an unrepresentative 11th at the finish.
“Basically the clutch engaged, so I lost drive and then the clutch went super-stiff and I couldn’t manage to get it back,”
“It was weird, I just understeered off. It wasn’t like I went too deep” JUAN PABLO MONTOYA
Stevens explained. “I’m obviously extremely disappointed, there’s nothing we could have done as a team to prevent it happening.”
Panis-barthez’s heartbreak followed an enormous accident for Paul di Resta in the best of the #22 United Autosports Ligiers at the Porsche Curves, which ended his day on the spot.
Battling back after losing seven minutes in the second hour to fix the Fia-mandated GPS tracker, di Resta had passed Chatin for fourth – which would have become third after the delays for Panis-barthez – following a restart for track repairs.
But he crashed out three laps later.
That left the #32 United Autosports car of Juan Pablo Montoya, Will Owen and Hugo de Sadeleer to uphold Ligier honour, after Montoya had lost a lap with a mistake at Indianapolis in hour six.
“It was weird, I just understeered off to be honest,” he explained. “It wasn’t like I went too deep or anything, I was trying to make a bigger arc and got on the dirt a little bit.”
The car was running fourth in the penultimate hour when a left-rear puncture for de Sadeleer dropped him to fifth, leaving Onroak Automotive’s Philippe Dumas unsure whether to smile or cry.
“It’s a mix between because the level we showed this week is something special after all the trouble last year,” he said. “G-drive was unbeatable this weekend, but with our car we clearly had the pace to finish on the podium and to fight against the Alpine and the others. It’s promising, but frustrating”.
The battle for third eventually went down to the wire between the unheralded #39 Graff-so24 ORECA of Tristan Gommendy and Loic Duval’s #28 TDS Racing ORECA, which had bronze-rated Francois Perrodo on its driver roster and had lost time when Matthieu Vaxiviere got stuck in the gravel in hour 17.
Having recovered from a one-minute stop/go penalty for speeding in a slow zone in the 14th hour, Gommendy, Jonathan Hirschi and Vincent Capillaire had a 25s buffer after Duval’s final pitstop with a little under half an hour to go, but anyone who thought the matter settled had reckoned without Duval’s determination.
The 2013 winner – who set the fastest time in qualifying before it was deleted for missing the scrutineering light – got his head down and charged, finishing just 2.5s in arrears.
“It would have been great to bring Matthieu and Francois on the podium,
I feel that we really represent what LMP2 is today,” said Duval, prior to being docked a lap for Perrodo exceeding the maximum of four hours’ driving time in any six-hour period by four minutes. “We have a real amateur and it would have been great with him to be up there, but a thousand times we will find the 2.5s we missed at the end of the race. For sure we didn’t do everything perfect but that’s the way it is.
“In the end I have to say I’m really proud of the guys, my team-mates and proud of myself. After the crash in 2014 [which forced him to miss the race], the ’15 and ’16 car was not the quickest, Formula E was not going well and then the first year in DTM. It’s great to be back and it shows that when everything goes right I can still drive!”