Porsche lead Le Mans after four hours

“It was essentially a trouble-free tonight, just one minor excursion at the Porsche Curves and the vehicle continues to be vice-free and reliable”.

The World Champion trio are splitting the factory Toyota team in what is set up to be a four-way battle for the remainder of the race, with the second factory Porsche auto in fourth on the lead lap.

Q3 was worse, the session was red flagged for 57 minutes due to heavy rains forcing the stewards to determine the grid positions using results from Q1.

“In these conditions, it was extremely hard to work out a flawless set-up for the race”, said Head of Audi Motorsport Dr. Wolfgang Ullrich. We managed to do a good job with the team and stayed out of trouble and in the end, fortunately for ourselves our rivals had reliability issues and some problems and it meant that we were able to come out on the top step of the podium.

The No. 7 auto is climbing back up the field after troubles early in the race, but the No. 8 is in fifth position after a delayed stop to replace a door. It didn’t spin, though, because the driver is a true hero and pulled off what’s easily the save of the year.

Behind the safety auto, the first strategy machinations began to shake themselves out, as Tequila Patron ESM brought Pipo Derani in to hand over to Chris Cumming. The competition will be fierce and the spectators can look forward to a thrilling race.

The World Endurance Championship regulars took down the top spots in the LMP2 class, with René Rast setting the pace in the No. 26 G-Drive Racing ORECA 05 Nissan.

The game will be live-streamed through Twitch‘s homepage, where fans can also interact directly with the hosts and racing teams via the Twitch chat feature.

Porsche’s GT racing honcho, Frank-Steffan Walliser, was so upset by the latest BoP change that in an emotional press conference on Friday he choked up when asked about it. “We need BoP, we don’t need this kind of BoP”, he said. I did lose quite a bit of lap time.