Philippe Sinault: “Nico Lapierre performs the perfect lap”

Philippe, a very nice third place for the team Alpine Elf behind them Toyota.

The Toyotas played very intelligently with us, monitoring our performance before unleashing their last strength into the battle. They managed the session well, even very well. 

You had the best time for a long time at the end of the session.

It was the track limits that decided this suspenseful scenario. The Toyotas had their times canceled twice, so did we. In the end Nico (Stone) performs a perfect lap, THE perfect lap. There is no longer any notion of traffic thanks to this hyperpole so we are not hampered in a straight line as we may have been during free practice. It's certain that it helps us, but we have to keep in mind that this won't be the case in the race.

You finally end up in front of the two Glickenhaus.

For me the surprise is the performance of the Glickenhaus. We really thought they could do much better than that. I don't know to what extent they were impacted by the track limits, but it's honestly a surprise.

So it’s not a disappointing third place?

No, it's good, it's really very good. Without flattery, I would like to salute the work of the ACO and their attentiveness. Very honestly, they took our comments into account. Before giving us extra power which was really necessary, they took the time to analyze and measure. They have always remained open to dialogue, which is really appreciated.

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