Imsa Performance, bad luck

Luck definitely doesn't want to smile on the team Imsa Matmut performance in LMS this season. Winner of the 24 Hours of Dubai, on the first step of the podium during race 1 of the last round of the Open GT, the French team fails to achieve success in the label's races Le Mans. On June 12 and 13, during the double round of the Sarthois clock, the results were mixed. In the moment, the Porsche #76 was delayed by a clutch problem on Sunday morning. But Raymond Narac, Patrick Pilet and Patrick Long still, unlike the last two years, reached the finish line, in an honorable fifth place in GT2.

Barely a month after the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and a week after a magnificent victory in Open GT at Magny-Cours, Franck Rava and his men headed to Portugal for the third round of the Le Mans Series at Portimao. But half an hour after the start, the Rouennais saw their race ruined by a mechanical problem.

“It is in fact the idle wheel which has loosened and which has lodged itself towards the accelerator cable, declares Franck Rava. As a result, it got stuck and it took us several minutes to repair. In the end, we lost four rounds in the process.

The level of the GT2 category being extremely high, this loss of time will prove crippling, annihilating any hope of a good result.

“While Patrick had made a good start to the race, we suddenly found ourselves at the back of the peloton simply because a part came unscrewed? deplores Raymond Narac. There, obviously, we took a very big blow to morale because you only need to see how many GT2s have abandoned today to get a clear picture of the competitiveness of the category. Any delays made are not made up for and despite all the efforts of Patrick, who dug deep into his reserves to recover as much time as possible, it was mission impossible. We finished in the top ten, we achieved the best time of the Porsches, we were first in the GT category at the Michelin Green worked very well yesterday to give us a good car for the race. With Porsche, we will of course analyze what precisely happened but we will quickly have to move on to something else to forget this sad race. »

Something else ? This is precisely the question starting next week. What better way to turn the page than to immediately dive back into another competition? Saturday July 31, the Imsa Performance Matmut team will field two Porsche 997 GT3 RSRs at the start of the 24 Hours of Spa. One of the two models will be entrusted to Christophe Bourret, Pascal Gibon, Jean-Philippe Belloc and Richard Balandras. The sister car will see the usual trio of Raymond Narac, Patrick Pilet and Patrick Long take turns, the three men being joined by the Austrian Richard Lietz, who knows the team well having frequented it in 2007 and 2008 And it is victory that the Rouen team will aim for on the Ardennes slide.

Find the full report of the Le Mans Series round at Portimao in your AUTOhebdo magazine, on newsstands tomorrow.