With the race having settled down, it was now a case of waiting for patterns to emerge; these having been hard to discern so far owing to so many cars being out of sequence.
The #7 Toyota continued to lead the race and was looking strong, with Stéphane Sarrazin pitting early into the sixth hour – just fuel this time. The Frenchman would stay in the car for another 40 minutes before handing over to Kazuki Nakajima for the first time. Just before he did, however, there was a suspicion of fluid of some kind emanating from the rear of the car.
Incidents were quite few and far between and of the minor variety. The #75 Am Prospeed Porsche stopped briefly on the track before getting going again and continuing, while the #61 AF Corse Ferrari had a spin at Arnage and almost collected the Sofrev ASP 458; both cars continuing without further delay or incident. Jan Charouz took the #24 Sébastien Loeb Oreca for a quick trip through the Mulsanne gravel, while Romain Brandela performed the impressive feat of spinning out of five-car-snake on the approach to Arnage and suffering nothing more than the lightest of taps with the barrier.
At the head of the field the stops continued to be just regular ones – both surviving Audis making sub one-minute stops – but this wasn’t the case for Rebellion, with the #13 R-One back in the pits for another lengthy stop and dropping down to 42nd.
The #66 JMW Ferrari had a quick spin in the hands of Spencer Pumpelly. It seemed innocuous, but the American brought the car straight in to the pitlane and the car went into its garage.
As the race reached the six-hour mark, the #7 Toyota headed the #2 Audi by some 35 seconds, while Mark Shulzhitskiy briefly relinquished the P2 lead to the #36 Signatech Alpine of Oliver Webb.
Richard Westbrook headed GTE-Pro in the #74 Corvette by just a few seconds from Jörg Bergmeister’s #91 Porsche. Christopher Nygaard was more comfortable at the head of GTE-Am in the #98 Aston Martin, with a lap advantage over the #95 sister car.
MH
