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Wednesday comes, you’re ready, the car is looking beautiful sat in the garage and you can’t help but feel anxious to get in the car and get working on collecting data and improving the car!
We had a good couple of first tests, making good progress with the car set up and posting some pretty reasonable times. For me this was my first experience of an LMP1 car at Le Mans so it was a pretty exciting time! There are some quite major differences with the car too compared to other circuits that I have driven on. We run a huge amount less downforce for Le Mans to get the top speed up. As Le Mans is a seriously fast circuit, it’s important for the car to be in full low downforce specification.
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Unfortunately, not all went to plan. In the later session of the first on-track day we had an issue with the engine. The issue was serious enough that we had to stop running early. After some further investigations it was decided that we would change to the race engine early for the Thursday sessions. That meant we had only 20 laps available to us pre-race to be sure that the engine would not exceed its pre-determined maximum mileage limit! Not a great start but these things happen!
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We made some pretty big changes for the Thursday test sessions. Due to the early engine change it was decided that the car would be built up into full ‘race spec’ during Thursday, ready for the last session, where we would have a few laps to check that everything on the car was running well and have a little qualifying run, new Michelin tyres and low fuel.
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The last session was upon us, the team had done a great job of finishing the car in time and after the first installation lap the car was feeling great! Now we had 20 laps of ‘credit’ to try and complete the set up so that we all had a comfortable car for the 24 hours of running fast approaching on Saturday!
I was given the last three laps, new tyres and low fuel for a qualifying attempt. Not really ideal, as I had only ran five laps previously on the Wednesday but I was more than happy to give it a go! Always bearing in mind that any mistake would potentially, massively compromise our race!
