If a casual endurance racing cognoscente tries to tell you that this weekend’s Le Mans will be won by statute in a race executed in geological time, check to see if they’re on Bernie Ecclestone’s payroll, because Le Mans 2015 could prove to be tighter than a hairpin in first gear.
Porsche swept the first three positions in qualifying, with Neel Jani’s number 18, 919 Hybrid leading the #17 and #19 sister Porsches.
Audi duplicated this performance to lock-out fourth, fifth and sixth, with Toyota left searching for a strategy back in seventh and eighth.
With Jani having effectively phoned-in pole position for Porsche on Wednesday night, most of the LMP1 field concentrated on race set-up rather than attempting to chase an impractical hurdle.
Clearly Porsche’s one-lap advantage around La Sarthe is ominous, but Audi’s long-run pace again appears to be quick and consistent – as was evident at the Silverstone and Spa World Endurance rounds. At the inaugural round at Silverstone, Marcel Fässler’s Audi snuck home a mere five seconds ahead of the second-placed Porsche with Toyota just 10 seconds in arrears.
But the devil was in the detail. Jani’s Porsche and Fässler’s Audi R18 resembled squash opponents jostling for position lap after lap, as the Audi’s superior grip allowed Fässler to overtake Jani on corner entry, only to watch the Porsche hit warp speed when it hit anything straighter than Christopher Pyne.
Tyre grip however has been an Achilles heel for Porsche since their debut last year, with the 2015-spec 919 still displaying an unhealthy appetite for rear Michelins. High down-force corners such as the Porsche curves and Indianapolis shouldn’t pose an issue for Porsche at La Sarthe, but lower speed corners (where tyre grip can’t be masked with aero performance) could expose the crew at Weissach.
The last qualifying session saw an outbreak in development from Nissan, but even a heroic lap from Harry Tincknell couldn’t inch the GT-R LM NISMO ahead of the quickest LMP2 entries.
While Nissan will be concentrating on reliability to slowly eke out more performance, their presence alone could play a major factor in the overall outcome of the race. With a straight-line speed some 6 km/h faster than Porsche and cornering speed way down on even the mid-range LMP2 entry, it creates an awful headache for Porsche, Toyota and Audi. The last thing any of those teams want to face coming out of a pit-stop is the rear-end of a Nissan acting as an industrial strength hair-dryer. Not only would such a situation compromise their overall lap-time, but potentially sabotage their entire race strategy.
The best strategists and engineers will have factored the Nissan-effect into their equations as a tangential scenario, while attempting to juggle their own agendas. Audi’s head race engineer, Leena Gade is notoriously gifted in this department, so endurance racing aficionados will be hanging on her every pit-to-radio call like nine-year-olds at a One Direction concert.
So if you’ve got a spare 24 hours to watch the most technologically advanced thoroughbreds bang wheels in a flat-out chess match, send the kids to your mum’s and teach the dog to use a can opener – you’re in for a busy weekend.
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