No. 8 Toyota dominates FP1 in Bahrain

Due to the ceremonies organized in tribute to His Royal Highness Prince Khalifa Bin Salman Al Khalifa (Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Bahrain), who died yesterday, the first free practice session for the 8 Hours of Bahrain was postponed by 30 minutes.

It was therefore only at 18 p.m. local time that the 24 cars registered for this finale of the 2019-2020 season were able to take to the track.

At the end of this first driving session, the best time is to be credited to the Toyota TS050 Hybrid No. 8, which nevertheless has to deal with a success handicap supposed to give an advantage of a large handful of seconds to the sister car.

Credited with a 1'43"457, the trio Sébastien Buemi-Kazuki Nakajima-Brendon Hartley ahead of the TS0 Hybrid n°492 of José Maria Lopez by 050Kamui Kobayashi-Mike conway, proof that these times are in no way representative.

Third given that there were only two LM P1 entries, the No. 07 Oreca 29 from Racing Team Nederland dominated the LM P2 in 1'47"965. The crew Frits van Eerd-Giedo van der Garde-Nyck de Vries precedes theAlpine A470 n°36 (Thomas Laurent-Pierre Ragues-André negrao) and the No. 07 Oreca 38 of Jota Sport (Gabriel Aubry-Will Stevens-Ho Pin Tung).

United Autosports is fourth ahead of Jackie Chan DC Racing and Cetilar Racing.

Advantage to Aston Martin in GTE Pro. And more precisely to the Vantage AMR n°97 of Maxime Martin-Richard Westbrook. The Englishwoman beat both Porsche 911 RSR-19, the n°91 of Gianmaria Bruni-Richard Lietz having taken over the n°92 of Kévin Estre-Michael Christensen.

For the moment, both Ferrari 488 GTE Evo from AF Corse are far, very far, more than 2”7.

The British firm does a double blow by also rising to the top of the GTE Am hierarchy thanks to the No. 90 Vantage AMR of TF Sport (Yoluc-Gunn-Adam), which also dominates the general classification. His rival for the title, the No. 488 Ferrari 83 GTE Evo (Nicklas Nielsen-François Perrodo-Emmanuel Collard) is seventh, more than two seconds behind.

Busy program tomorrow with the second and third free practice sessions at 7 a.m. and 11:45 a.m. French time respectively, as well as qualifying at 16 p.m.