The opening ELMS track session at the Circuit de Catalunya-Barcelona saw the #28 IDEC Sport ORECA of Paul-Loup Chatin fastest overall.
He set a time of 1:35.757 early in the session around the hot 4.675km complex, operating at nearly 60% humidity and a track temperature over 35 degrees Celsius.
Just one-tenth behind was Bent Viscaal in the #19 Algarve Pro Racing, followed by Alessio Rovera’s #88 AF Corse in third, a time set early in the session before the #83 hit trouble.
The top 10 in the class were rounded off by just under one second during the 90-minute running.
After just six minutes of green flag running, Rovera stopped on track.
A Full Course Yellow period was deployed to recover his stranded Oreca 07- Gibson and returned to the team with no visible damage.
The first red flag came after David-Heinemeier Hansson in the #43 Inter Europol Competition car had a brief off-track excursion at Turn 9. The Dane brought himself back to pitlane with minor front-right damage.
In LMP3, it was the Monza-winning #13 Liger JS P320-Nissan driven by Nico Pino who topped the class of 13 entries.
The FP1 session ended around 5 minutes early under a red flag when Pino in the #13 had a spin into the gravel at Turn 4. By then his best of 1:41:527 had edged out the #6 of 360 Racing as the pair of United Autosports’ Ligiers finished close behind in fourth and fifth.
The fastest competitor in the LM-GTE category was the Aston Martin Racing works driver Marco Sørensen, who set a 1:45:744 in the #69 Oman Racing with TF Sport Vantage.
The top-five was covered by half-a-second, with the #57 Kessel Racing Ferrari 488 GTE Evo missing out on the top spot by just over 1-hundredths.
In third was the fastest Porsche 911 RSR GTE Evo, the #18 Absolute Racing. Behind them was the #60 Iron Lynx, and the most recent GTE race winner, the #77 Proton Competition Porsche.
Free Practice 2 for Sunday’s 4 Hours of Barcelona will commence at 11:10 tomorrow.
