Were it a standalone race, it would have been absolutely fantastic (except for the safety car). Unfortunately, it was miserable for trying to make predictions for Le Mans. The theme of the race was everybody breaking. A lot of reliability failures and a lot of crashing punctuated the race and made pulling data from the race even more useless than ever.
The Porsches were faster than everybody, but they both broke down first. The #2 survived as it was only the ERS that broke. Notably, it was about a second a lap faster as a non-hybrid than the privateers.The Toyotas were faster than the Audis, but they broke down second fastest. The Audis were faster than the privateers, but then one of those broke and the other needed a brief garage stint.
If ever there was one year that switching from Rebellion to a front running LMP2 car was an unlucky decision, this was about that one.
Alexandre Imperatori was again impressive for the Rebellion crew, running their fastest stint. The R-One was decidedly faster than the CLM P1/01 and broke less, which is encouraging for Rebellion to run away with the privateer win. Once again, the Bykolles star was again James Rossiter, His first stint was 1.6 seconds quicker than Simon Trummer's fastest and his fastest lap was 3 seconds quicker than Trummer's fastest. Oliver Webb was farther behind. This is also encouraging for Rebellion since Rossiter is the one being dropped for Le Mans.
LMP2
The immediate takeaway from this class is that the Oreca 05 is the best car. Now this is a little like saying the first takeaway from the shower is that water is wet, but it is important to have basic logic mastered. There were five Oreca 05s present (counting the Alpine A460 entries). The five fastest cars by their top 20% average lap time were all five 05s. Sorting drivers by the same metric, nine of the fastest ten were driving 05s, exception being Giedo van der Garde in the Gibson 015S in seventh.
Still using the 20% metric, Will Stevens (2:09.842) was the fastest of all the LMP2 drivers in the Manor, followed by René Rast (2:10.046). Nathanaël Berthon (2:11.025) was sixth. Berthon's stint was interrupted by code 80, but he was roughly 1-2.5 seconds per lap slower over a full stint than Stevens. While reports that Berthon was slower than Rusinov exist and are false, it should still be reasonably obvious why Rusinov made the switch. Brutal, perhaps, but on paper alone, a good choice.
And now, some notes about teams that double stinted tyres:
- Rusinov double-stinted successfully, 44 laps on a set without losing time
- Van Overbeek double-stinted, 45 laps and improving second stint
- Derani double-stinted, 37 laps, didn't drop off until the very end
- Both ESMs double-stinted with every driver, the ones not mentioned lost time
- Manor double-stinted a lot with mostly losses - Matthew Rao did it successfully (41 laps)
- Nico Minassian, Maurizio Mediani and Kirill Ladygin all double-stinted in the BR01 with reasonably disastrous loss of time.
Rao's performance was quite impressive. His stint pace matched James Jakes and nearly matched Richard Bradley's, although his optimum pace was a little shy. Manor may have a shot yet at Le Mans despite running two silver drivers, although they will not match the front runners on ultimate pace.
GTE Pro
I spit most of my thoughts about the class in the Silverstone post, but here's a little more.
As for the state of BoP, certain things are very obvious. I can expand on this because I didn't hit post until after Le Mans qualifying. At Silverstone, the Fords were two seconds down on Ferrari while being the slowest car in a straight line. The very next race, they are like magic the faster cars in a straight line and still a second down and they're losing it all in the middle sector. Where did all the cornering go? Turns out it didn't go anywhere and they were suddenly the faster car. Everybody saw it coming.
That said, Ferrari have been 1-2 seconds faster everywhere and now that the track is twice as long, they're now 3-4 seconds faster than everybody except the Ford. I'm struggling to understand why people are also accusing Ferrari of hiding their ultimate pace. They didn't set a quick time in the test, but they haven't been toodling around all season pretending to be victims of modern GT racing.
Of course, as I was updating this, the ACO took a fairly massive swing at the BoP and now everybody who isn't a Corvette fan is wondering if AMR and Corvette were running sub-optimally in the rather useless qualifying sessions. Sod if I know, all I really took away from qualifying is vindication in my assessment that Billy Johnson is slow. Regardless, it has nothing to do with the race this post is about.
I did make comments before that Pla and Tincknell were fantastic prototype drivers but that they needed to learn to be GT drivers while I was on a podcast, struggling to wake up and find the words I wanted to say. Seems they did, Tincknell was the fastest of the Ford drivers and Pla was right on Mücke's pace. That problem was solved.
All four Ferrari drivers essentially went the same speed the whole race until the #51 lost a motor.
Stanaway was the quickest of the AMR driver, but I'm led to believe based on the lap times that he got to run a softer tyre to set some quicker hotlaps on (or that he pushed too hard, too early). His times completely fell off at the end of the first stint. Marco Sørensen in the sister car suffered a similar fate, as did Pedro Lamy in the Am car. Dunlop still has some work to do, but I think we all expected that).
GTE Am
We learned absolutely nothing new here. Pedro Lamy (2:21.432) was the fastest driver in the class followed by silver Rui Águas (2:21.599), the amateur hobbyist who was not good enough to keep his gold rating. Perhaps a little less expected was Ben Barker running a second a lap faster than Adam Carroll, moreso because of Carroll's skill than Barker's. Paul Dalla Lana was running times closer to silver than the rest of the bronze drivers, as he is wont to do. As for BoP, the Corvette and the Porsche were a little off, but nothing significant and they would need an awful lot of help anyway to beat the Am drivers in the #83 and the #98. As far as pace goes, it's business as usual in GTE Am.
And they're still lucky as all hell that JMW were denied an entry.
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