Qualifying. Toyotas fast but Audis faster.

Been a few bits of drama and stress amongst the team here … your scribe discovered just how difficult it is to get an appointment to see those nice people in London who hand out passports. Why is this relevant? Weeeell your scribe had the misfortune to ‘lose’ his passport between Dover and Le Mans. Not easy when you think we only stopped for the ferry, fuel and a beer at Arnage. Having begged and grovelled to get and appointment it was all pretty straightforward. Memo to staff .. don’t lose your sodding passport. Your scribe had time to reflect on why it is possible to cover every inch of Europe by road without ever showing a passport but then have to show it when you come and go in UK? The next hiccough was our chum Dan who had flown in all the way from Canada, via Paris, TGV and Le Mans station.. he arrived at the right time and at the right place.. spot on .. but his luggage remained safely in Canada. OK so he faced a knicker shortage but more importantly his was short of a race suit and helmet for use in the pits. Your scribe leapt into action and before heading south packed two race suits and crash helmet. Now.. you need to know that Dan is of ‘sensible’ size.. your scribe is not. One is 6’ 4” and built like a fully functioning brewery.. guess which is which … as it turned out he didn’t look quite as silly as we had all hoped, which was disappointing. Anyway he has now been reunited with his luggage and God is in his heaven and Dan is a happy bunny and looking less like an bright yellow oompalumpa and more like a serious photographer! Your scribe sadly missed the thrills and spills of Pesage or scrutineering as we call it while he sorted out the passport saga. But ‘The team’ were there and so were the public.. lots of them! The whole show took place in the Place de la Republique in the centre of Le Mans. They were ensconced in the luxury of the Borse de Commerce rather than the leaky tent village that is more usual. It is a wee bit tricky to generate much fire and brimstone over scrutineering but it is great chance for the some of the media and the public to meet and chat with drivers. Our chaps however were stuck indoors and missed a fair bit.. not ideal! Plus this time it rained.. quite a lot! The next couple of days seem to have disappeared into a semi alcoholic haze with the team generating words for the Le Mans website. Finally on Wednesday the cars hit the track and at last they got to see some cars. This session and the following ‘into the night’ session threw up very few real surprises. With people wondering which Audi would win and who would come, maybe 3rd or 4th ( assuming not too many of them get destroyed in huge accidents). Your scribe was keeping an eye on the Toyotas. Rest assured these are pretty darned serious bits of kit. They were on the pace and looking pretty cool. However our pit lane chums say they are downright dangerous.. they make no noise! Even ‘blasting’ out of the pits is all wrong.. it sort of clicks very quietly and then barely even hums away.. ( bit like a bee farting apparently) .. no tyre noise .. no drama.. no chance of hearing it just prior to when it runs you over! Is this the future? The Audis are nice and raucous ..thank goodness for that.. back to the plot. Some cynics are suggesting that Toyota will wind the elastic bands up really tight and have a serious go at ‘pole’… then probably expire in haze of sparks and lightening about an hour or so later. We are not quite so sure… they seem to be taking this seriously. During qualifying they were definitely mixing it with the Audis but as we have learnt to get used to the moment when Mr Audi finally says ‘OK enough is enough lets go and blitz them’ ( bad choice of word maybe!). So, very politely and with great precision they sorted themselves out into numerical order. #1:#2:#3.. The #7 Toyota was demoted to 4th place. The gap? A very respectable 1.738 secs behind the leading Audi. As you now know the other ‘star’ car for us is the outrageous ‘Nissan DeltaWing’. This is getting fascinating. It seems that a tentative sort of deal was struck between the team and The ACO that they should run at a ‘target’ time of 3:45.00secs .. this would put them up amongst the LMP2 cars but not upset anybody. That proved rather easy and they eventually popped out on fresh tyres and did a 3:42.612 sec lap. There was no indication that this had been unduly stressful and there was clearly plenty more to come. However to use a technical phrase things went tits up when Michael Krumm slipped up. He planted the front wheel precisely in the right spot for the apex of the corner but he forgot that backend is rather wider than the front end! The result was that he rattled the car over the kerb with some enthusiasm.. so much enthusiasm in fact that it caused the exterior fire extinguisher switch to shake loose and unload the entire contents of the system to put out an imaginary fire.. messy and it stopped the car! We are told that it has been hoovered out and will be ready to run today. Another casualty was the #51 AF Corse Ferrari 458 Italia. . Fisichella threw it at the wall, with some enthusiasm, in the Porsche Curves and wounded it so badly it needed a new chassis. The ACO allowed the team to make the change and new chassis was put on a truck at the AF Corse workshops in Piacenza and driven 700 miles over night to reach Le Mans at 09:45hrs. Overnight the team had been busy and stripped the ‘old’ chassis down and were ready to rebuilt the MarkII from scratch on Thursday. Wow! We will watch this with interest. The drivers will be doing their mandatory night laps in the #71 sister car. Luckily Bruni, Fisichella and Vilander are all well seasoned Le Mans veterans so everybody is pretty well OK with all this . Next up will be qualifying for the Group C cars and then the serious business of qualifying starts again ..