Dear Ultimatecarpage.com visitor,

At exactly 6 pm on Wednesday afternoon, the 55 entries of the 78th annual 24 Hours of Le Mans took to the track for the first time for a six hour practice session. With no test day this year, the teams were pressed for time to get the cars set up and the new drivers qualified for the race. To complicate things even more, the track was wet at the start of the session and it started to rain not much later. Despite the difficult conditions, remarkably few cars got badly damaged and certainly not beyond repair. An Audi was quickest but the times were hardly representative.
Meanwhile a dark cloud of protests hung over the evening as Peugeot had officially protested the legality of the Audi's nose. Not surprisingly the initial protest has been thrown out by the ACO but Peugeot is persisting and plans to take it all the way to the FIA World Council in Paris. Hopefully we will not get the race decided behind the green table.
Thursday evening was reserved for two two-hour qualifying sessions. This time round the track was actually dry so the teams had to find a balance between finding a good race setup and get a good time in. Audi focused mostly on setup and investigated just how far they could push the Michelin tires. The #1 car managed to do four stints on one set. In the dying seconds of the first session fresh rubber was fitted to car enabling McNish to put in a stellar lap. It took Stephane Sarrazin two sets of tires and six laps to beat it some two hours later. In doing so he scored his and Peugeot's third Le Mans pole in a row. Behind them the two Porsche RS Spyders clinched the LMP2 class by a landslide. GT1 was a similar story with the Works Corvettes clocking much faster times than the rest. The second GT class was a little closer but the two fastest Porsches were still nearly a second faster than the Ferraris. The race for the overall as well as the GT2 class will most likely go down to the wire.
Warming up for the race we were trackside on both days and have added a further 60 shots to our growing 24 Hours of Le Mans gallery.

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Regards,
Wouter Melissen