Young British racing driver, Sam Hancock, endured a challenging Petit Le Mans event last weekend where, having qualified the Binnie Motorsports Lola in 2nd place in the LMP2 category, the car ultimately retired from the race with engine problems.
The blue-ribbon Petit Le Mans is a challenging 10 hour endurance race held on one of America’s most revered ‘driver’s’ circuits - Road Atlanta, Georgia. It is the penultimate event in the prestigious American Le Mans Series and attracts some of the world’s very best sportscar teams, not to mention tens of thousands of spectators.
For London-based Hancock, it was the fourth time in four races that he had qualified 2nd on the grid – something the 25-year old couldn’t quite decide on being a great statistic or a frustrating one!
“Endurance racing is all about a delicate balance between raw pace and flawless reliability, “ said Sam, “Three of these 2nd place qualifiers have been with my current team Binnie Motorsports, and I’m really pleased for them because having not had any reliability this year, they deserve to walk away with something to show for their outstanding efforts. On a personal level though, I have to say I struggle to get excited unless I’m on pole position!”
Hancock and the team also hoped Petit Le Mans would be an opportunity to assign reliability troubles of the previous few races to the past but while the car ran faultlessly for the first four hours of the race, it soon picked up a steering problem and then ultimately suffered a terminal engine failure.
“ I have been with Binnie Motorsports for three races now and we have managed to extract some great pace from the car, but we have yet to find sufficient reliability. We suffered both engine and electronic problems at Silverstone and the Nurburgring, but rather than taking the easy option to hide away in a cosy testing environment we thought we should get out here and get stuck in to one of the toughest races on the calendar. There’s nothing like the pressure of a race weekend to help the learning process, which afterall is exactly what we need to do - we need to understand where the weak-spots of this car are and why they fail, and there is no doubt that the challenges we faced this weekend will help shape the car’s development over the winter.”
The Binnie Motorsports team will now embark on a winter of behind the scenes preparations for 2006. Hancock meanwhile, has impressed this year and has been approached by several teams interested in his driving services for the remaining round of the American Le Mans Series in Laguna Seca, California next week, and the final round of the European-based Le Mans Endurance Series in Istanbul on November 13th.
