After being quickest of all the runners for the majority of the four-hour morning session to kick off Day 2 at the WEC prologue, Toyota ended up second on the screens after a very late lap by Brendon Hartley in the #1 Porsche 919 Hybrid. The New Zealander’s continued Porsche’s form from Day 1 with a 1:37.886, just under four tenths quicker than Anthony Davidson’s best lap in the #5 Toyota, a 1:38.273.
Despite Davidson setting a promising time for the Toyota Gazoo Racing crew, it wasn’t a straight forward session. The car stopped on track with 45 minutes remaining in the session after being reported to have lost bodywork a few minutes prior with Kamui Kobayashi at the wheel.
The car – running in its high-downforce configuration, once again did the fewest laps of the three factory P1 cars, clocking 55 laps, as opposed to Porsche’s 73 and Audi’s 69.
On the subject of Audi, it was not the smoothest of morning’s for them either. The team had to swap cars this morning before the session started, to prevent the #7 car from the day earlier from sustaining further damage to the suspension.
Once it got underway though, the Audi completed longer runs, but was 1.6 seconds off the leading Porsche.
Heading LMP2 was the Alpine team once again with Gustavo Menezes leading the trio in the #36. A time of 1:46.974 also happened to be the quickest LMP2 lap of the test to this point, by two thousandths of a second compared with Jonny Kane in the Strakka Gibson’s time from yesterday.
The Jota G-Drive Racing Oreca came in second in the class, seven tenths back from the Alpine, with the BAXI DC Alpine setting a 1:47.962 to round out the top three.
In GTE Pro it was an AF Corse 1-2 once again, with the #71 leading the #51. Their times were 1:58.083 and 1:58.362 respectively.
It wasn’t a clean session for the #71 though, as Sam Bird made contact with Tor Graves’ Manor Oreca, damaging the bodywork of both cars during the session. Both cars continued afterwards however.
“I am happy with how the car behaves,” Bird said to DSC’s Mat Fernandez. “Yet, we don’t really know where competition is standing. I am still a GT rookie so I know at this stage that there is room for improvement in my driving. We have already covered a lot of items in our test program today and yesterday. There is not much more we need to go through, we should have a fairly relaxed afternoon.”
GTE Am saw the Gulf Racing Porsche finish top of the sheets after a tour of 1:58.818.
Stephen Kilbey
