24 Hours of Le Mans: News, Photos and Travel Tips

It’s been a difficult race so far. Both Aston Martin LMP1s gave up, first one after only laps. We all knew the Astons were not ready for a 24 Hours race but we would have expected a bit more than 2 laps. Anyways, the Aston Martin Racing boss apologized to fans and asked them to have faith in the future.

And it looks like this race is turning into a nightmare for Audi. First Allan McNish crashed in the most spectacular way and broke his car into pieces. He was lucky enough not to get hurt. Man, did you see that crash?

And now Mike Rockenfeller also crashed, in a quite spectacular way too, not sure if the car is out or not. The four Peugeot are going steady without taking any chances, as Sebastien Bourdais explained earlier in an interview.

So now after Mike Rockenfeller brought out the safery car, the Audi R18 no 2 is the overall leader, followed by the three factory Peugeot 908 and the Oreca Peugeot.

Leading the gas prototypes is Pescarolo, followed by the two Rebellion Lola-Toyota within the same lap.

The safety car is expected to stay out until about midnight.

Audi managed to secure the first to spots on the starting grid at the 2011 edition of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. A couple of factory Peugeot 908s are third and fourth, followed by the third Audi, the third factory Peugeot and the Oreca Peugeot.

Audi could have gotten the first three spots but Kristensen pushed to hard and ended up in the gravel.

As far as the gas powered LMP1s goes, it was a tight race between Pescarolo and Rebellion, with Rebellion taking the lead by less than 200 milliseconds.

The Astons have dissapointed again, ending up 22nd and 25th on the grid.

So what conclusions can we draw from weekend’s 24 Hours of Le Mans test days?

Audi and Peugeut are head to head. This is good news for Audi because it means the brand new closed top R18 drives well. Brute timing shows the fastest Audi, driven by Capello / Kristensen / McNish performed better than the fastest Peugeot driven by Sarrazin / Davidson / Montagny but only by 63 milliseconds. Everybody knows official tests are a cat and mouse game, where each team observes direct competitors and try to only outperform them by as little as possible in order to hide their real potential for as long as possible. So maybe Audi didn’t unleash the full power of the brand new R18 or maybe Peugeot held off just a little, get Audi to feel just a little to comfortable… We’ll never know. A more realistic confrontation between the two diesel teams will happen at Spa, for the Le Mans Series race that’s also part of the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup.

As far as gas powered P1s are concerned Pescarolo Team are the big winners and Aston Martin Racing the big losers. Highly motivated, the Pescarolo team proved their success at Le Castelet was no accident. The Pescarolo-Judd no 16 outperformed Rebellion’s Lola – Toyota and everybody else. Aston Martin Racing on the other hand, went through hell. The AMR-ONEs barely set their wheels out of the boot and when they actually made it on the track, the performance and reliability of the newly developed prototypes was so bad they couldn’t even compete with GTE Am teams. The 007 only finished 25th in official tests while the 009′s best lap was the worst across categories – the car driven by Fernandez, Primat and Mayrick ranks 54th ( that’s, last ) on the final test results. Results were so catastrophic and hopes to get he cars running so low that AMR drivers deserted the testing session two hours before the end. As a result Aston Martin Racing decided to cancel their participation to the 24 Hours of Spa and stay home instead, in an attempt to fix the cars.