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Poor old Mark Webber. You have to feel for the guy. Has there been a driver in recent memory who has shown incredible speed but fallen prey to mechanical gremlins more often than the lanky Australian?
We saw it for years in Formula One, through a teething year in 2014 when he spearheaded Porsche’s return to endurance sports car racing in the FIA World Endurance Championship.
Again in the first event of a new WEC season, those gremlins have reared their ugly heads once more.
To my mind, there hasn’t ever been whispers in the paddock suggesting that Webber is notoriously hard on his equipment – a tag that follows some drivers around – so the lack of mechanical reliability in the cars underneath him that so often seems to cruel his speed seems to be just plain old bad luck.
Sunday’s Six Hours of Silverstone started out brilliantly for Webber, whose Porsche 919 hybrid started on pole and streaked away to a lead of more than ten seconds, basically lapping the venerable British circuit without seeing the second-placed car, his teammate, in the rear-view mirror.
As far as opening stints go, this was one to savour. Webber was easily the class of the field – no mean feat considering the resumes of some of the drivers further down the order – and wasn’t headed for all of the first hour and then into the second.
That was when disaster struck. Webber’s car, in for a pit stop that the Radio Le Mans commentary team noted was oddly-timed, was hitched to the dollies and taken into the garage. In endurance sports car racing, that’s generally the death rattle.
Those dollies mean big issues. Perhaps not always race-ending issue but certainly one that takes a car out of contention for the win.
Although New Zealander Brendon Hartley was seen to get into the cockpit, it wasn’t long before word came back from pit lane that the car was retiring, and you could just about hear the collective sigh of race fans across Australia – and in New Zealand, too, where Hartley, a rising star, didn’t even turn a lap in anger.
From hero to zero for Webber and co. – and not for the first time, either.
The positive for Porsche and Webber is that the car showed great speed, and if they can fix reliability issues, there’s plenty to like about the #17 919 hybrid as the series switches to Spa-Francorchamps in a couple of weeks.
As much as there is a World Championship up for grabs, teams are eyeing the bigger prize, a victory in the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and the first two rounds of the World Endurance Championship are often glorified tests at race pace for the twice-around-the-clock classic at Circuit de la Sarthe.
If that’s the case, however, then Audi’s rivals have cause for worry. Once more, despite not being the fastest in qualifying (or the pre-season test), Dr Wolfgang Ulrich’s squad counted on their bulletproof cars, and went to the front at Silverstone, despite having to make two pitstops in the last fifteen minutes of the marathon race.
Marcel Fassler, lead driver of the #7 Audi R18 e-tron quattro, stopped for a splash-and-dash fuel stop, and was then handed a stop-and-go penalty for going beyond the limits of the track in the process of overtaking an Aston Martin GT racer. Fassler’s lead was thirty-seven seconds after the fuel stop and just nine after the penalty, yet he managed, cool as you like, to hold off the hard-charging Porsche of Neel Jani (who shared the car with Marc Live and Romain Dumas) for Audi’s first win since Austin last September.
Porsche had led the race – first through Webber’s car, then the #18 Dumas/Jani/Lieb combination – until Andre Lotterer got past Dumas in the fourth hour and, being able to double-stint it’s tires, led from there to the checkers. Previously, the battle between the two cars had raged for second and third behind Webber into the second hour, a back and forth contest over a handful of pulsating laps. The Porsche had an advantage down the straight, the Audi had it through the corners.
The fact that Porsche couldn’t double-stint it’s tyres meant the #18 fell for a time behind the #1 Toyota TS 040-Hybrid of defending world champions Anthony Davidson, Sebastien Buemi and Kazuki Nakajima. However, they were able to avoid a late-race fuel stop that Toyota could not, allowing Jani to pop into second and, very nearly, chase down the leading Audi.
For Porsche, though, it will be a case of missed opportunities. Audi obviously had pace throughout, and were able to reel in the second Porsche eventually, but with the speed Webber had shown in that blistering opening stint, and his ability to make the 919 hybrid prototype ten feet wide where necessary, it might well have been Porsche’s race to lose.
Of course, we will never know.
The LMP2 battle was comprehensively won by the G-Drive Racing team, whose Ligier-Nissan JSP2s finished first and second in class.
In the hotly-contested GTE-Pro class, the #51 AF Corse Ferrari of Gianmaria Bruni and Toni Vilander started the defence of their 2014 championship title with a over the 919 Porschge RSR of Team Manthey’s Michael Christensen and Richard Leitz. As expected, it was a furious battle among the factory entries. GTE-Am was won by the Aston Martin Vantage GT3 of veteran Pedro Lamy, son of a racing gun Mathias Lauda and Canadian gentleman driver Paul Dalla Lana.
The World Endurance Championship heads to Belgium and the legendary Spa circuit for the second race of the season beginning in the late hours of Saturday May 2.
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