Porsche is the fastest on a soaking wet Le Mans test day

Posted on 31-05-2015 20:05 by JordyS – 21 Comments”

About exactly two weeks we will know who the 24 hours of Le Mans has won, but for the time being, the focus is mainly on the preparations. Today was the official test day on the program.

The largely wet test yielded few surprises, for Porsche, Audi and Toyota occupied the first eight positions. Brendon Hartley was the fastest (3:21.061) in the Porsche 919, at about one second, followed by Porsche-colleague Neel Jani. Hartley recorded his fastest lap time at the beginning of the second hour, when a short dry remained on the Circuit de la Sarthe. Jani did that morning, just before it started to rain.

Secretly, we were especially curious about the performance of the Nissan GT-R LM NISMO. If we are the testing times are as a guide, than we need this year not to take into account the Japanese. Olivier Pla (18th) was thick, twenty seconds slower than Hartley, and even had different LMP2 cars (painful detail: almost all of them with engines of Nissan). Also the other two fabrieksauto’s of Nissan (29th and 32nd) were no pots to break.

The Belgian Laurens Vanthoor recorded the fastest time in the LMP2 class, in which he with the Ligier-Honda JSP2 driving for OAK Racing. Darren Turner was the best GTE Pro, the Aston Martin Vantage GTE. Aston Martin-colleague Pedro Lamy flikte the same trick in the GTE AM class.

The full results can be seen here.