Anyway what about qualifying.. it actually turned out to be rather more riveting than we had expected. We also suspect that Audi are a tad miffed that they failed to occupy the front two rows of the grid. There was an interloper fresh out of its Bento Box delivered hot foot from Japan... Toyota! As is often the case qualifying hotted up right at the end of the session. Lotterer was flying and had already secured pole with a blindingly quick 3:23.787.. that is brisk! This was about 0.70 secs quicker that last year. The man whose job it was to try and spoil Audi’s ambitions was young Mr Davidson in the #8 Toyota.
It may have been clever timing by Toyota.. or bad timing by Audi but Davidson got out of the pits just ahead of Kristensen in the #2 Audi and put in a couple of terrific laps and squeezed his Toyota onto the second row just 1.055 secs behind the pole sitting #1 Audi.
We have a feeling that Toyota will be fairly happy with that .. as will the #7 Toyota which was a very healthy 4th . You have to scroll down to 7th to find the first petrol powered car, the #17 Pescarolo Dome Judd.
As usual the spotlight and of course TV homed in on the LMP1 cars and it was easy to forget that we still had LMP2, LMGTE Pro and Am to keep an eye on. But before that what happened to the #0 Nissan Delta Wing? That is rather a good question; they wound up 29th overall and 16th ‘in LMP’. They ran at what looked like a comfortable but conservative 3:42.612 sec lap. The team keep on telling us that they are going fine and trying not to upset anybody. We think there is a bit more to come.. OK .. quite a lot more to come!
LMP2 is the province of Oreca..Of the first six cars five of them are Oreca Nissans. Credit then to the Oak Racing Morgan Judd which is 2nd on the grid. Of the nineteen LMP2 cars no less than twelve of them are Nissan powered. The #25 ADR –Delta Oreca 03 driven by John Martin, Jan Charouz and Tor Graves is on LMP2 pole.
LMGTE Pro is led by the #59 Luxury Racing Ferrari 458 Italia followed by the #97 Aston Martin Vantage V8 and then the #74 Corvette Racing C6.R. Nice mixture of very competitive cars. It is bit of mystery how the highly professional #79 Flying Lizard Porsche 911 RSR is an ‘Am’ car but even so it went very rapidly. LMGT Am is now the playground of the newly revitalised Porsches.
Ok so it now raining but our weather guru has looked at the tea leaves and predicts that it might be a wettish start but it should dry out during the 24 hrs.
For those of you that didn’t make the pilgrimage to La Sarthe this year it seemed busier that we had expected. The lack of Peugeots may not have had the catastrophic consequences some had predicted .. even so this could still be an Audi walk-over. Your scribe still reckons that Toyota have brought the fight to Audi and rattled their cage .. they may not last the distance but it will have been a very impressive debut.
Let’s see what happens !
Saturday, June 16, 2012
'Mad' Friday
Friday... for some of you lucky chaps this is a ‘rest day’ so that you can build up the stamina needed for the challenges ahead and get terminally blatted! We have the same basic ambitions but the ‘Day Job’ has conspired to mess things up. The website we contribute to is a greedy beast that constantly devours raw meat by the hundredweight. However all is not lost since the ‘Club Arnage Militant Tendency’ is utterly determined to take a break and drift off to our secret restaurant and have a lazy lunch. OK so we can dream! This project has not gone well over the last couple of years since the ‘Day Job’ beast has simply got hungrier and hungrier!
Anyway what about qualifying.. it actually turned out to be rather more riveting than we had expected. We also suspect that Audi are a tad miffed that they failed to occupy the front two rows of the grid. There was an interloper fresh out of its Bento Box delivered hot foot from Japan... Toyota! As is often the case qualifying hotted up right at the end of the session. Lotterer was flying and had already secured pole with a blindingly quick 3:23.787.. that is brisk! This was about 0.70 secs quicker that last year. The man whose job it was to try and spoil Audi’s ambitions was young Mr Davidson in the #8 Toyota.
It may have been clever timing by Toyota.. or bad timing by Audi but Davidson got out of the pits just ahead of Kristensen in the #2 Audi and put in a couple of terrific laps and squeezed his Toyota onto the second row just 1.055 secs behind the pole sitting #1 Audi.
We have a feeling that Toyota will be fairly happy with that .. as will the #7 Toyota which was a very healthy 4th . You have to scroll down to 7th to find the first petrol powered car, the #17 Pescarolo Dome Judd.
As usual the spotlight and of course TV homed in on the LMP1 cars and it was easy to forget that we still had LMP2, LMGTE Pro and Am to keep an eye on. But before that what happened to the #0 Nissan Delta Wing? That is rather a good question; they wound up 29th overall and 16th ‘in LMP’. They ran at what looked like a comfortable but conservative 3:42.612 sec lap. The team keep on telling us that they are going fine and trying not to upset anybody. We think there is a bit more to come.. OK .. quite a lot more to come!
LMP2 is the province of Oreca..Of the first six cars five of them are Oreca Nissans. Credit then to the Oak Racing Morgan Judd which is 2nd on the grid. Of the nineteen LMP2 cars no less than twelve of them are Nissan powered. The #25 ADR –Delta Oreca 03 driven by John Martin, Jan Charouz and Tor Graves is on LMP2 pole.
LMGTE Pro is led by the #59 Luxury Racing Ferrari 458 Italia followed by the #97 Aston Martin Vantage V8 and then the #74 Corvette Racing C6.R. Nice mixture of very competitive cars. It is bit of mystery how the highly professional #79 Flying Lizard Porsche 911 RSR is an ‘Am’ car but even so it went very rapidly. LMGT Am is now the playground of the newly revitalised Porsches.
Ok so it now raining but our weather guru has looked at the tea leaves and predicts that it might be a wettish start but it should dry out during the 24 hrs.
For those of you that didn’t make the pilgrimage to La Sarthe this year it seemed busier that we had expected. The lack of Peugeots may not have had the catastrophic consequences some had predicted .. even so this could still be an Audi walk-over. Your scribe still reckons that Toyota have brought the fight to Audi and rattled their cage .. they may not last the distance but it will have been a very impressive debut.
Let’s see what happens !
Anyway what about qualifying.. it actually turned out to be rather more riveting than we had expected. We also suspect that Audi are a tad miffed that they failed to occupy the front two rows of the grid. There was an interloper fresh out of its Bento Box delivered hot foot from Japan... Toyota! As is often the case qualifying hotted up right at the end of the session. Lotterer was flying and had already secured pole with a blindingly quick 3:23.787.. that is brisk! This was about 0.70 secs quicker that last year. The man whose job it was to try and spoil Audi’s ambitions was young Mr Davidson in the #8 Toyota.
It may have been clever timing by Toyota.. or bad timing by Audi but Davidson got out of the pits just ahead of Kristensen in the #2 Audi and put in a couple of terrific laps and squeezed his Toyota onto the second row just 1.055 secs behind the pole sitting #1 Audi.
We have a feeling that Toyota will be fairly happy with that .. as will the #7 Toyota which was a very healthy 4th . You have to scroll down to 7th to find the first petrol powered car, the #17 Pescarolo Dome Judd.
As usual the spotlight and of course TV homed in on the LMP1 cars and it was easy to forget that we still had LMP2, LMGTE Pro and Am to keep an eye on. But before that what happened to the #0 Nissan Delta Wing? That is rather a good question; they wound up 29th overall and 16th ‘in LMP’. They ran at what looked like a comfortable but conservative 3:42.612 sec lap. The team keep on telling us that they are going fine and trying not to upset anybody. We think there is a bit more to come.. OK .. quite a lot more to come!
LMP2 is the province of Oreca..Of the first six cars five of them are Oreca Nissans. Credit then to the Oak Racing Morgan Judd which is 2nd on the grid. Of the nineteen LMP2 cars no less than twelve of them are Nissan powered. The #25 ADR –Delta Oreca 03 driven by John Martin, Jan Charouz and Tor Graves is on LMP2 pole.
LMGTE Pro is led by the #59 Luxury Racing Ferrari 458 Italia followed by the #97 Aston Martin Vantage V8 and then the #74 Corvette Racing C6.R. Nice mixture of very competitive cars. It is bit of mystery how the highly professional #79 Flying Lizard Porsche 911 RSR is an ‘Am’ car but even so it went very rapidly. LMGT Am is now the playground of the newly revitalised Porsches.
Ok so it now raining but our weather guru has looked at the tea leaves and predicts that it might be a wettish start but it should dry out during the 24 hrs.
For those of you that didn’t make the pilgrimage to La Sarthe this year it seemed busier that we had expected. The lack of Peugeots may not have had the catastrophic consequences some had predicted .. even so this could still be an Audi walk-over. Your scribe still reckons that Toyota have brought the fight to Audi and rattled their cage .. they may not last the distance but it will have been a very impressive debut.
Let’s see what happens !
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