Ambitions thwarted at Alpine and Richard Mille Racing

The crew of theAlpine A480 knew he was condemned to a race of waiting and patience, unable to play for victory on a regular basis. Unfortunately, a clutch control failure and an ignition coil failure shattered the carefully established road plan in one hour, relegating the blue car to 35th place in the general classification, more than 7 laps behind the racing head. 

Philippe Sinault and Giuseppe Bizzoca © Germain Hazard / DPPI

At daybreak, the efforts of Nicolas lapierre, Andrew negrao and Matthieu Vaxiviere were rewarded with a return to the Top 20. Unfortunately, at 09:15 a.m. Matthieu Vaxiviere hit and went off the track at the entrance to the turns Porsche following a misunderstanding with a GT. A change of left front half axle pushed back theAlpine away from his stand for long minutes.

Philippe Sinault: “We turn well, but not very fast... We have difficulty getting the tires up to temperature, the grip does not trigger as we want so theAlpine made LMP2 times. With these cooler conditions, the gap between our engine and that of the LMP2s is closed so we have a lot of difficulty managing the traffic. You can spend several laps stuck behind a P2. We're a little stuck. We're getting back to regularity, thanks to the work of the team and impeccable pit stops, but it's a bit laborious. »

More calculations, attack for the Richard Mille Racing Team © Alexandre Guillaumot / DPPI

No technical problem for the Richard Mille Racing Oreca but a 1 minute penalty synonymous with relegation out of the Top 10 in this ultra competitive category where the gaps are measured more in seconds than in laps. Sunday morning at Le Mans being conducive to incidents of all kinds, Lilou Wadoux, Charles Milesi and Sébastien Ogier spare no effort.

Giuseppe Bizzoca (Team Manager of the Richard Mille Racing Team): “For her first relay, we made the choice with Lilou to place her in a transition phase with the start of the daytime relay to find her rhythm and slide towards the night. She did a great job for this baptism of fire at the 24 Hours of Le Mans with a solid triple relay. Sébastien took over and unfortunately missed entering the pits due to a misunderstanding with a GT which earned us a 1 minute penalty to which must be added the 35 seconds needed to cross the Pit Lane. It's a shame because at that time we were fighting for a place on the podium and since then we have been sailing between 10th and 13th place. Charles and Sébastien rode a lot last night with quadruple stints. We are now starting again with a slightly more aggressive strategy with triple relays and if there are a few places to grab, we will be there. We enter the hours when everything gets a little crazy so we count on that to come back up without doing anything stupid. »

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