Silverstone FIA/WEC Qualifying

Air temp: 10.3 C  Track: 11.1 C   Humidity: 58%  Track dry.

As often happens, the spotlight was again on LMP1. For some reason the powers that be seem hell bent on making things as incomprehensible as possible (at least to our addled brains) as far as regulations are concerned. This year, as in F1, there is the knotty subject of fuel flow. The commentary team came up with a neat beer analogy... something your scribe understands!  Imagine you are going out on the town and have allowed yourself  a maximum of ten pints for the whole evening, however it is down to you to decide how you consume the stuff.. maybe you fancy slurping the lot down in the first few minutes and become legless almost immediately or maybe you prefer to spin them out over the whole evening and then get bladdered more slowly.. You still consume the same amount but the ‘flow’ is different. As in F1 the teams are allowed a given ‘flow’ of fuel and should they exceed that flow they will get excluded, whether it is in qualifying or in the race. So we may have the odd post qualifying drama.

‘Regulars’ will remember the slightly tortuous method of establishing final grid positions… two of  the drivers from each team go out and set their two fastest laps.. the time keepers then take the average of these four times and bingo, you have a grid position based on that average. In some ways it is rather clever because it gives an indication of the ‘team’s’ performance rather than just their fastest driver.

Toyota will be very chuffed,(however that translates into Japanese), with their pole position. The #7 car (Wurz,Sarrazin and Nakajima) was a ‘comfortable’ 0.005 secs ahead of the #1 Audi (Di Grassi,Duval and Kristensen). The #14 Porsche 919 (Dumas, Jani and Lieb) were just 0.313secs behind the leading Audi. The first six LM P1 cars were separated by just 0.452 secs.  Proof this formula seems to be working.

Sadly the underpopulated LMP2 class went largely unnoticed but pole was taken by G-Drive Racing Morgan Nissan (Rusinov,Pla and Canal) next up was the #47  KCMG Oreca 3 ( Howson,Bradley,Matsuda) and third was the #37 SMP Racing Oreca 3 (Ladygin,Shaitar and Ladygin).

In the GT classes honours were evenly shared.. in GTE Pro pole went to the #51 Ferrari F458 Italia (Bruni,Vilander). Porsche persist in calling everything a 911! However these beasts  are the latest ‘RSR/991’ cars armed with the next engines that were debuted last year at Bahrain. They are now right on the pace with  #91 Porsche Team Manthey (Pilet, Bergmeister and Tandy) second and the porsche Team Manthey #92 car was third (Holzer,Makowiecki and Lietz).

In GTE Am it was Ferrari again with the #53 RAM Racing Ferrari 458 Italia behind them proving that Aston Martin hadn’t lost their edge was the #98 Aston Martin Racing Vantage V8 (Dalla Lana,Lamy,Nygaard) and third was #61 AF Corse Ferrari 458 Italia (Perez-Companc,Cioci and Venturi)

There were no on-track dramas except for the #13 Rebellion Racing which had a spin and rejoined.

Pictures : Dave Davies (c) 2014