An assertive performance in qualifying for the 2015 Le Mans 24 Hours saw Porsche lock out the first three places. The battle for pole position was essentially settled during Wednesday evening’s ‘Q1’ when Switzerland’s Neel Jani put the N°18 Hybrid 919 (Dumas/Jani/Lieb) on top with a time that must have demoralised rivals Audi and Toyota, even though it wasn’t exactly a surprise.
This week’s programme included three two-hour qualifying sessions (one on Wednesday, two today) totalling 360 minutes, yet it took Neel Jani just seven minutes and fifteen seconds to claim the 2015 Le Mans pole position!
The Swiss driver’s first flying lap at the beginning of Q1 produced a 3m16.887s which not only bagged the best position on Saturday’s grid but also smashed the previous record for the track in its current form which had stood since Sarrazin’s 3m18.513s during qualifying for the 2008 race.
The N°17 Porsche (Bernard) also beat that benchmark, while Tandy (N°19) came within four-tenths of the Frenchman’s memorable lap for Peugeot to hand Porsche the top three places.
In a race where strategy, consistency and reliability play as a big a role as outright speed, that’s no guarantee of victory (ask Toyota after 2014!), of course. However, the German make – which only returned to prototype racing last season – will clearly be proud to see its three prototypes sitting at the very front of the grid at 3pm Saturday.
In the end, Thursday’s two sessions made no difference to the early pecking order, most probably because Toyota had decided to focus solely on its final race preparations, while Audi surely decided that chasing pole at all costs simply wasn’t worth the risk.
As it turned out, there was a clear pattern to the final order which was Porsche 18, Porsche 17, Porsche 19, Audi 8, Audi 7, Audi 9, Toyota 2, and Toyota 1, followed by the two non-hybrid Rebellion prototypes.
“Having the three Porsches in front will obviously be good for the photos, but we now need to look closely at our final race preparations,” observed pole-winner Jani.
There were no changes either in the three other classes where Aston Martin Racing collected ‘pole position’ in both LM GTE Pro and Am with its N°99 (Rees/MacDowall/Stanaway) and N°98 (Dalla Lana/Lamy/Lauda) Vantage V8s.
Ferraris figured pretty well in both categories but, in contrast to the success of its prototypes, Porsche’s GTE Pro cars (N°91 and N°92) disappointed with third- and second-last positions. At least they are still in the race, however, which might not be the case of the N°63 Chevrolet Corvette C7R which suffered a big smash at the end of this evening’s Q2. Can the damage be repaired in time?
In LM P2, the N°47 Oreca05 (KCMG, Howson/Bradley/Lapierre) went unchallenged at the top after its effort on Wednesday. A time of 3m38.032s put it almost a second safe of the N°26 Ligier (G-Drive, 2nd) and the N°41 Gibson (Greaves, 3rd).
So that’s qualifying for the 2015 Le Mans 24 Hours over. The next time we shall see the cars in action will be at 9am Saturday for the warm-up session, followed by the big start itself six hours later. Le Mans pole
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