HOT FAVOURITE TAKES LE MANS AND THE TITLE
United Autosports felt its unbeaten 2020 run could come unstuck in the 24 Hours, but Paul di Resta, Phil Hanson and Filipe Albuquerque won again
United Autosports boss Richard Dean didn’t like the idea that the Yorkshire-based squad was the pre-race LMP2 favourite. He reckoned pole, a second car in the top six in qualifying and an unbeaten record of half a dozen races spanning the World Endurance Championship and the European Le Mans Series coming into the race meant nothing.
He reminded anyone who’d listen that “one small problem can put you out here”. One small problem did remove one of the United ORECA-GIBSON 07s from contention, but the pole-winning entry shared by Paul di Resta, Filipe Albuquerque and Phil Hanson came through to claim the class win and with it the World Endurance
Championship P2 crown. United had two strong cars, which was exactly why the smart money was on the team.
The winning United car and the sister entry shared by Alex Brundle, Job van Uitert and Will Owen between them led 279 of the 370 laps completed in LMP2 last weekend. But it was still a close-run thing at the end, if not quite as close as the team expected.
Hanson needed to stop for a splash of fuel in the closing stages, and the team was convinced that the chasing Jota Sport ORECA with Anthony Davidson at the wheel wouldn’t. That explains the ferocity with which the 21-year-old British driver entered and exited the pits, crashing the car over and beyond the kerbs on the way in and then cutting the Dunlop Chicane on the way out.
Hanson emerged with a narrow lead over the Jota car Davidson shared with Antonio Felix da Costa and Roberto Gonzalez, but one lap later Davidson was in the pits. He, too, needed a splash of fuel.
“I was being told that I’d rejoin side by side with the Jota car, so I had to push like crazy – Le Mans and the championship were on the line,” said Hanson. “It was a bit nervewracking, but I’m glad it ended like that because it feels like we’ve earned it.”
Hanson and his co-drivers also had to work for their money during the night in the battle with the sister car. In the cooler conditions it looked like Brundle and his
team-mates held the upper hand and were also gaining a second or two in the pits at every stop, but it wasn’t to be. A fractured oil line ended their bid for victory, the 45 minutes lost to repairs restricting them to an eventual 13th position in class.
The United cars were both losing time to their rivals in the pits, somewhere in the region of six to eight seconds for the winning entry and slightly less for the other car. Dean didn’t have an explanation. “Let’s just say our pitstops looked fairly leisurely compared to some others and that was purely down to the fuel-fill time,” he said. “It is something that we are going to have to investigate.”
Those seconds lost by United in the pits were one of the reasons why Jota made it look close at the end. The winning margin was just 33s at the chequered flag. “Our strength,” said Davidson, “was that we were making up time in the pits.”
Second place, he reckoned, was a decent result for a crew that didn’t include a young and hungry ‘super-silver’ like Hanson, although 44-year-old amateur Gonzalez put in a much more solid performance than last year. Former Peugeot and Toyota LMP1 driver Davidson also pointed out that the Goodyear tyres on which Jota ran weren’t a match for the Michelins used by the majority of the field.
“We weren’t competitive with the quickest cars out there during the daylight hours, though we were much stronger when it was cooler at night,” he explained. “We
were good in the pits, though we had too many little problems.”
They included three punctures and a twisted seatbelt that brought da Costa straight back into the pits after taking over from Davidson in hour 14.
The problems for the entry Jota runs under its own name in the WEC were nothing compared to those of the car that it fields under the Jackie Chan DC Racing banner. The ORECA shared by Will Stevens, Ho-pin Tung and Gabriel Aubry was running at the head of the field at the end of hour seven when it ground to a halt under the safety car.
The alternator had failed on Aubry straight out of the pits. He somehow got it going again and made it back, only for the car to be excluded. That ‘somehow’ involved illegal assistance from a team member who’d rushed out to the car.
An unspecified component had been passed to the French driver to allow him to fire up the ORECA. After 40 or so more laps, the car was disqualified.
Tung reckoned they were well placed to challenge for the class victory, pointing out that the car had been in one safety-car queue and the chasing pack in the one behind. The Chan/dc machine had made its second stop early to avoid any delay in the pitlane, a tactic that appeared to have paid dividends.
Chan/dc’s wasn’t the only hard-luck story up and down the pitlane among the expected P2 frontrunners.
The G-drive Racing ORECA had the pace to win, and remarkably gained back a lap after losing two around midnight with an electronic glitch that delayed Roman Rusinov. The Russian, who shared the car with Jean-eric Vergne and Mikkel Jensen,
slowed or stopped multiple times over the course of two laps before finally coming in for attention.
Sending him past the pitlane entry after the problem first reared its head looked on the face of it to be a mistake, but G-drive technical director David Leach argued to the contrary. “We weren’t ready for him and when he did come in there was probably a minute and a half before we set to work because we were still understanding the problem,” he explained. “Leaving him out on track meant we lost less time.”
The fightback brought the Aurus-badged ORECA back up to third, only for a bolt in the front upright to fail on Vergne into the Indianapolis left-hander early in the final hour. Repairs in double-quick time allowed the TDS Racing-run G-drive machine to make it home fifth in class.
“When you are fighting back from two laps down you are inevitably going to use the kerbs pretty hard,” said Leach by way of explanation of the problem. “We came here to win or bust.”
An only slightly less impressive comeback was masterminded by the Signatech Alpine squad. Its bid for a hat-trick of Le Mans class victories in LMP2 was derailed on the opening lap, when rising water temperatures brought Andre Negrao into the pits.
The team believed that a connector in the water system had been dislodged in a hit at the Dunlop Chicane at the start.
Two laps were lost, which, combined with a drivethrough penalty because Negrao had ducked into the pits so late, left Signatech three laps down at the end of the first hour.
That was still the deficit of the Alpinebadged ORECA, co-driven by Thomas Laurent and Pierre Ragues, at the end of the 24 hours after an ultra-clean run interrupted by a solitary spin. Fourth place was the team’s reward.
The Racing Team Nederland ORECA was another car to be delayed by early overheating issues, though the TDS squad that runs the entry came up with a different explanation to Signatech’s. It blamed the
“When your are fighting back from two laps down you are inevitably going to use the kerbs hard” G-DRIVE’S DAVID LEACH
slow pace of the course vehicle over the latter stages of the formation lap for the problems that cost it two laps.
Nyck de Vries, who’d qualified the car third in the Hyperpole session, had a coming together with the Scuderia Corsarun Weathertech Ferrari during the night and then Frits van Eerd had a spin, leaving the car 15th at the finish.
The problems for the more-fancied teams allowed Panis Racing to claim a surprise third with its Goodyear-shod ORECA shared by Matthieu Vaxiviere, Nico
Jamin and Julien Canal.
“We don’t have the resources of some of the bigger teams and we were a bit slow in the pits compared with the WEC teams,” said Vaxiviere. “We lost a bit of time in the slow zones and the safety cars, but we didn’t have single problem. That’s why we’re third today.”