Rollcentre at Le Mans - Day Three

Thursday Qualifying

The predicted storms didn’t materialise on Thursday evening, which resulted in a big push from most of the LMP1 runners to improve their times on a cleansed track. Rollcentre had already put the race engine, gearbox and suspension on the car however and had no intention of risking the car by joining in the scrap.

This is GT racer Pat Pearce, working on the rear wing earlier in the day.

“I expected to drop two places and that is exactly what happened, not that I want to get a reputation as a soothsayer” joked Martin Short. “We ran for the last fifteen minutes only of the first two hour session, to check the car was behaving as it should after all the work done since Wednesday. Then we sent Joao out on qualifiers to have a go at the start of the second session, along with nearly everyone else.”

Joao had a good chance to improve his time by getting himself fourth in the ten o’clock queue at the end of the pit lane - and making plenty of space for himself on his out lap. Short was watching hawk-like from the garage and was impressed “to see Joao’s time in the first sector, but then by the second sector he was four seconds off, with time lost behind a Ferrari. We decided to bring him in at that and I don’t see any point in pounding round and round before the race. Plenty of teams have and I am sure they have good reason to do so, but I am doing this my way. We are new at Le Mans as a team and I am being cautious.”

So relatively limited running compared to some of the competition, but for all the right reasons - by choice, rather than due to any problems. “We did find a few niggles yesterday which would have given us a headache if we only found them on Saturday morning, in warm-up, but we will be ready by then.”

Cautious they may be but Martin believes “the car is massively capable, possibly more capable than the drivers, so we are not going to run to any kind of laptime all the way through the race. We are just all going to drive it as fast as we can.” LMP1 looks all set to be one hell of a race and Rollcentre will be right there in the thick of it. Bring it on…
Paul Slinger