Introduction and entry
A fouth round of the Le Mans Series is being held at the Nürburgring this weekend. After an excellent entry in Spa where we could follow a strong field of 51 cars, we are now down to only 38, which could be even lower if Aston Martin did not decide to enter a third factory coupe in the race in order to make their chances in the championship against currently leading Pescarolo higher. On the other side the factory Pescarolo team is down to only a single car. A real disappointment is an absence of the team Oreca, which is apparently doing their business in the USA. After a new class structure was announced by IMSA, they are guaranteed entire prototype class for their products only, so they opted to do Petit Le Mans and had to save a budget elsewhere... Peugeots were not expected to enter at all as well as the Spa winning Porsche LMP2, but it is sad that Lamborghinis (GT1 & GT2) are absent as well. Among other missing teams seen at Spa we can name KSM Lola, which car was still not completely repaired after their Le Mans crash, or Randaccio Lucchini, which would however hardly do any good result here anyway. GT1 is down to just two cars: a Luc Alphand Corvette and a Larbre Saleen, which is one of very rare entry additions compared to the Spa race.
Practice sessions overview
Despite we were afraid of Aston Martin domination during the race, challenged only by the lone Pescarolo, practice sessions showed that the race might not be that bad at all. In combined free practice times we have 9 cars in less then 2 seconds. It is interesting that one of Aston Martins is not among them and since we have only 10 LMP1 and one of them is a Lavaggi, which is nowhere near the top (in fact beating just one LMP2 prototype), there is a place left for the best LMP2 car. It is an ASM Team Ginetta-Zytek of Amaral/Pla, who were really only 1.8 seconds slower than the fastest car - the factory Pescarolo, driven here by Jean-Christophe Boullion and Christophe Tinseau. It is followed by the Strakka Racing Ginetta-Zytek, which is nice but we can hardly expect this car to be at the front for a longer period in the race. Regular Aston Martins 007 and 009 follows but it is worth to note that they were really far from being dominant as a team in any of the sessions. For example, while yesterday the 007 won one of practices, today it was only 9th. A private 2008 Lola Aston Martin was fifth fastest in combined practice time order followed by improving Courage-Oreca of team Signature Plus, which is a nice surprise. Kolles Audis follows, and despite it does not look as a great result, it seems they are getting a form. In some sessions they featured really very high (even among top 3) and if everything goes well with the team in the race, a podium result is possible. Then we have the already mentioned LMP2 leader, followed by 008 Aston Martin sandwiched among a trio of Lola LMP2 coupes and another LMP2 Ginetta-Zytek. No other manufacturer in LMP2 is able to match Lola Coupes or latest Ginetta-Zyteks, despite we have here a nice selection of Courages, Pescarolos, WR, Lucchini, etc., the foreseeable future of the class would probably belong to Lola and Ginetta.
In GT1 the Saleen was surprisingly ahead of the Corvette but generally Luc Alphand's team just needs to finish races to became a champion, so there might be hardly expected any real battle in the class. Larbre neither did appear in all races, nor featured the best driver line ups, while the early championship favourite, Reiter Lamborghini, disappeared from the scene too early. So the Corvette remains the only real regular in the class.
The GT2 class was dominated by two Ferraris so far: number 92 of Robert Bell and Gianmaria Bruni (team JMW) and Allan Simonsen with Pierre Kaffer (Team Farnbacher). The best Porsche comes from team Felbermayr-Proton but a real nice surprise is a performance of a lone Spyker, which was fourth fastest in class so far.
The qualifying starts soon within an hour, so then we will see what the real performance of cars we can expect prior the race and if those several surprises will continue though the rest of the race weekend.
