The #29 Panis Racing ORECA may be racing under a different banner, with a new livery and a tweaked driver line-up, but the result in today’s season opener at Barcelona had a familiar feel to it for the defending champions. With Le Mans Cup graduate Louis Rousset inserted into the line-up to race alongside last year’s title winners Oliver Gray and Esteban Masson, securing the overall victory made for a dream start to the season.
The final classification made it look rather simple, but the reality was very different. It was a hard-earned result, a recovery drive after a flurry of early penalties that left the crew with a mountain to climb.
It was always going to be somewhat of a baptism of fire for 27-year-old ELMS LMP2 debutant Rousset, who has shown he has raw speed to keep the team in the mix, but lacks crucial experience. Taking the step from Le Mans Cup straight to ELMS LMP2 was never going to be easy, and he found out immediately this weekend, costing the team valuable time during his stint.
A botched start, plus an awkward moment at Turn 2 in which he gained an advantage and failed to use the escape road correctly, saw him handed a drive-through and two 10-second pit-stop penalties by race control. On another – less chaotic – day for the ELMS pack, it could have been game over. But thankfully, after Rousset got his head down and both Gray and Masson tag-teamed the second half of the race, they were able to force their way back to the front.
“We know Louis has the pace, he just has a lot to learn,” Gray told DSC post-race. “But he’s adapting pretty quickly. Today could have gone slightly better, but he’s just got to make progress. He’s got a good presence with us in the team.”
If Rousset can get to grips with life at the top of the ELMS quickly, then the other 10 crews in the class should fear a repeat of last year’s title romp from Panis Racing, as this is a line-up that oozes potential. Gray – the winner of the first Goodyear Wingfoot Award of the young season – continues to show improvements in his speed, maturity and race craft, and Esteban Masson is clearly a star of the future, sitting in a waiting room ahead of an increasingly likely call-up to Hypercar in the near future.
The ELMS’ opening week in Spain was, and always is, a taxing one. Two days of pre-season testing, followed by a brief gap, and then a race weekend are tough on the competitors. With so much track time on offer, by race day, everyone is charged up, raring to go and eager to make an early impression. Look no further than the carnage on the opening lap for proof of that.
It was mightily impressive then that Panis Racing – and its band of engineers who have returned to work on the #29 – found a way to dig deep and remind everyone of its capabilities as an LMP2 outfit in the face of adversity.
“It was a bit of an unknown coming into today,” Gray explained. “With all the different run plans being experimented by everyone during testing and practice, you don’t really know where you are.
“We knew we had a pretty good car; it felt good underneath us, but until you jump in the race, you don’t know for sure. In the end, though, it was incredible. I was spurred on a little, I was frustrated, and I wanted to win back the time we lost through the penalties. But without the car we had, we wouldn’t have been able to do it.”
With Gray’s rock solid middle stint over, Masson was entrusted to take on the role that Charles Milesi did last season and close the show. The Frenchman admitted post-race that he wasn’t entirely clear on where he was in the standings during his run, but that didn’t stop him from fighting tooth and nail with fresher rubber on the left side of his car than those around him.
His move to take second from fourth amid a battle with ex-F1 driver Jack Doohan and United’s Ben Hanley with just over 10 minutes left will live long in the memory. As will his quick work to take the lead from Inter Europol’s Reshad de Gerus, with time expiring.
“I was just pushing. I didn’t know I was fighting, I was just trying to pass everyone,” Masson said.
“He’s pretty unstoppable with the car underneath him,” added Gray.
The title race, clearly, is far from over. It’s early days in the season, and there are promising signs up and down the pit lane in LMP2.
The #22 United ORECA – which was fully rebuilt early in the week by the team after a fire in testing – looks like a contender with Griffin Peebles in the Silver chair. Inter Europol’s two line-ups look strong, Nielsen Racing’s #24 car with Doohan strapped in late in races is sure to be a tough nut to crack, IDEC Sport’s #18 crew lacks no speed and a Turn 2, Lap 1 crash robbed us of a true sense of how strong the Ford Hypercar drivers in Proton’s ORECA are going to be.
Thankfully, we don’t have to wait long to see the field in action again, as in just three week’s time the ELMS travelling circuit heads to Paul Ricard for what will serve as a pre-Le Mans tune-up for many of the teams and drivers.
