WEC
Alpine wins seven-hour race at Sebring
Photo: DPPI
It was a strange ending to the race we witnessed at Sebring. As the event entered its final hour, a red flag was displayed due to the risk of storms and tornadoes on the sidelines of the Florida circuit. After tens of minutes of waiting and questions, the race never resumed apart from a few laps under Safety Car.
The French team thus won its first victory in the Hypercar category after a race dominated from start to finish from pole position. Andre Negro, Nicolas lapierre and Matthieu Vaxiviere are ahead of the only Toyota on arrival, number 8 of Sébastien Buemi, Brendon Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa. The nº7 retired after a big off-track by José Maria López halfway through. Glickenhaus takes his first podium in the general classification of an event of the WEC with Ryan Briscoe, Romain Dumas and Olivier Pla.
In LM P2, United Autosports USA won with the No. 23 of Paul di Resta, Oliver Jarvis and Joshua Pierson, who became the youngest winner in WEC history at 16 years old. The #31 WRT took second place with Sean Gelael, Robin Frijns and René Rast. The second WRT lost everything during the few laps under Safety Car during this funny last hour due to an emergency refueling, the third place on the podium being recovered by Prema (Lorenzo Colombo, Louis Delétraz, Robert Kubica). At least initially, because the race management, in view of the exceptional circumstances, placed the second car of the Belgian team on the final podium.
Porsche wins in GTE Pro with Kevin Estre and Michael Christensen in the #92 ahead of the Corvette C8.R of Nick Tandy and Tommy Milner. Third place goes to the #91 Porsche of Gianmaria Bruni and Richard Lietz.
Aston Martin dominated the Am peloton by signing a double: Northwest AMR (Paul Dalla Lana, David Pittard, Nicki Thiim) ahead of TF Sport (Ben Keating, Marco Sorensen, Florian Latorre).
Relive the race hour by hour:
1000 Miles of Sebring – H1: Alpine lead the dance
1000 Miles of Sebring – H2: Alpine cowardly Toyota
1000 Miles of Sebring – H3: Alpine still ahead of the Toyotas, Ogier on the track
1000 Miles of Sebring – Red flag, Toyota nº7 damaged
1000 Miles of Sebring – H5: Alpine always dominates
1000 Miles of Sebring – H6: Alpine starts the last two hours in the lead
1000 Miles of Sebring – H7: Red flag one hour from the finish
Valentin GLO
Journalist. Endurance reporter (WEC, IMSA, ELMS, ALMS) and sometimes F1 or IndyCar.
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Mauro Caldi
19/03/2022 at 10:04 a.m.
How can we take Alpine seriously in Wec? They have been putting their name on a car for almost 10 years (Oreca, Oreca-Rebellion) without manufacturing anything... The hypercar created for the manufacturers, they are not even there and benefit from regulations adapted to them to continue racing with an LMP1...
DANIEL MEYERS
19/03/2022 at 12:18 a.m.
Yes, it's the law in Florida, and yes it's absolutely ridiculous, in 50 years of mechanical sports. on TV I thought I had seen everything, well no, now we can stop a race because there might be a storm and rain. It's up to the FIA to take the necessary measures by stopping spending crazy money organizing an endurance race in this region. As for Lagorce's reaction, it comes from the heart, he is there to see and comment on the car race, except that he seems to have forgotten that for several years at Le Mans it has been the same music, we stop as soon as it rains a little heavily, when there is fog, they even did three quarters of an hour under SC at the start because the track was a little wet and then the sun had returned!!! As for Eurosport live, no thanks to them who broadcast in full on E1 even though it was planned and announced everywhere on E2 only from 20:30 p.m., I had 3 hours of live (cast and therefore not very good quality) official FIA/ACO not commented in French for nothing.