Le Mans – Porsche n°20 on very provisional pole

If several teams had planned to go "slam a time" this evening from the first qualifying practice session, the starting grid for the 82nd edition of the 24 Hours of Le Mans will be a long wait since the drivers only benefited from one hour of testing following a red flag which undermined the efforts of each crew. It was an exit of the No. 99 Vantage of Fernando Rees which forced the stewards to end the session prematurely when the testing time had just passed and Porsche had placed its 919 Hybrid at the forefront.

Brendon Hartley took advantage of the first minutes of the session to set the provisional best time with a time of 3'23"157. Sister car #14 is closest with seven tenths behind, while the Toyota follow in the second line two seconds from the reference time with n°7 preceding n°8 of Stone-Nakajima-Buemi. However, the TS040 Hybrid showed its first sign of weakness when Stéphane Sarrazin stopped at the side of the track following a mechanical problem. The two remaining Audis (crash of R18 n°1 this afternoon) follow three seconds ahead of the two Rebellion R-Ones who are still around ten seconds behind the best time.

In LMP2, G-Drive Racing has its first option with the #26 Morgan-Nissan credited with a lap time of 3'38"843 set by Julien Canal. L'Alpine A450B follows half a second behind with Paul-Loup Chatin while Nelson Panciatici had just taken to the track with new tires to chase the time. The #03 Oreca 47R-Nissan in KCMG colors driven by Bradley-Imperatori-Howson completes the top three ahead of the #2 Oak Racing Ligier JSP35-Nissan driven by Mardenborough-Brundle-Shulzhitskiy.

The GTE report can be consulted on this link.

Qualifying practice will resume tomorrow evening from 19 p.m. for two sessions, the last ending at midnight. The rest of the qualifications will be followed live on AUTOhebdo.fr. Photos of the tests are available on this link.