Friday
The
schedule for the Le Mans Series weekends has
changed for 2009, with the number of free
practice sessions reduced from three to two,
but the length of each has been increased
from an hour to 90 minutes. In a move intended
to trim some of the cost to teams, the original
intention had been to cut the number of active
days from three to two by compressing all
the practice and qualifying periods into a
single day. However, the logistics of doing
this for the first race of the year have proved
too challenging, and a compromise has been
chosen that does lend a more relaxed atmosphere
to Friday.
With
just one afternoon session, there was more
time for the teams to prepare their cars,
and then an extended run between four-twenty
and five-forty in the afternoon.
For
the past week this region of Catalunya has
been subjected to some pretty dire weather,
with heavy rain that has left the soil damp
and the area around the circuit prone to early
morning mist. Another down-side is an all-pervading
aroma of raw sewage, which detracts somewhat
from the excellent food being served to the
team by the staff at The Smoking Dog.
The track itself is also very "green",
and quick times were not expected for some
while.
First
Free Practice
Regular
service is resumed, as Thomas Erdos takes
the RML Lola Mazda out onto track at the start
of the first practice session of 2009. The
format is much the same as it always is, with
the Brazilian under instruction to complete
a short series of six shake-down laps and,
if he thinks the car is ripe and ready, hand
over to Mike Newton for the next stint. That's
the usual plan anyway, but this Friday at
Barcelona is going to be a little different.
Within
moments of getting up to racing speed, he's
on the radio complaining about a severe vibration.
The steering wheel is holding steady, but
the whole car is shuddering so violently that
he's finding it hard to focus. "It was
a very severe vibration," he stated later.
"My vision was so blurred that I could
hardly make out the track in front of me."
The
telemetry suggests there's nothing fundamentally
wrong with the Lola, so he presses on for
several more laps, and having been among the
first out, briefly holds top slot in LMP2.
In the cockpit, however, the situation is
worsening, and he's eventually forced to pit
just before the first red flag of the weekend.
With
action suspended, the team took their time
in checking over the car and, finding nothing
obviously at fault, fitted a new set of wheels
and tyres ready for the re-start. When the
session resumed Erdos was back out again and
reporting back that the vibration was better
than it had been, but was still in evidence.
Having
replaced one set of wheels and found the vibration
still causing problems, it might have been
logical to assume that the fault lay with
the car itself. However, the third set of
tyres proved that there was nothing wrong
with the Lola. This time the vibration disappeared
completely, and later examination confirmed
that an imbalance in all four tyres had been
the problem with the first set, and then two
imbalanced tyres on the second. On the one
hand, good to discover a relatively minor
root cause to the problem, but on the other,
half the session lost striving to find a problem
that ought never have arisen.
Having
established that all was hunkydory with the
Lola, Tommy handed over to Mike, who began
his first stint of the year at ten-past five.
Six steady laps later, and he was routinely
back into the pits. Red flags for the Bruichladdich
Radical and the Pegasus Courage disrupted
the next ten minutes, but there was just enough
time at then end for Tommy to complete a final
run of four flying laps.
"The last run felt a lot sharper,"
said Tommy. "The vibration had gone,
and the engine was pulling strongly. It felt
so much better!" Mike was less happy,
although his own run had gone without a hitch.
As CEO of AD Group, he shares his responsibilities
fairly equally between duties in the cockpit,
and proving, developing and managing the car's
on-board CCTV and video recording equipment.
The vibration had not been helpful, and the
images captured by the cockpit camera reflected
the juddering that drivers, car and equipment
had been subjected to during the ninety-minute
session. The images below depict the rear-view
camera.
"That
was a very bitsy session," suggested
Phil Barker, the Team Manager at RML. "We
had to contend with a string of niggly problems
that were not of our making, and we ended
up spending most of the time just trying to
put things right. It appears that two sets
of tyres were not balanced properly. We're
using exactly the same wheels that we used
last year, so the cause of the problem isn't
immediately obvious. The net result of that,
and the succession of red flags, was that
we lost too much track time today. We'll just
have to hope that tomorrow goes better.
While
RML had been tackling their gremlins, the
rest of the LMP2 field had been tackling theirs.
Fastest in class, the Quifel ASM Zytek was
already making good the pre-season predictions
that they'd be front runners in 2009. A fastest
lap by Olivier Pla of 1:37.241 was significantly
better than anyone else could manage, but
still fell short of the quickest time at this
stage last year, which had been a 1:34.008
from Jos Verstappen in the Van Merksteijn
Porsche.
Quick
out of the box, at their first event, was
the #29 Racing Box Lola Mazda, while third
for the Speedy Sebah Lola was true to form.
For Tommy to claim fourth fastest after such
a troubled ninety minutes was actually cause
for some optimism.
LMP2
Times - Session 1
Pos |
No. |
Overall |
Team |
Driver |
Car |
Time |
1 |
40 |
9 |
Quifel
ASM |
Amaral/Pla |
Ginetta
Zytek GZ09S |
1:37.241 |
2 |
29 |
11 |
Racing
Box |
Ceccato/Francioni/Piccini |
Lola
B08/86 Coupé |
1:38.512 |
3 |
33 |
12 |
Speedy
Sebah |
Belicchi/Pompidou/Zacchia |
Lola
B08/80 Coupé |
1:38.806 |
4 |
25 |
14 |
RML
AD Group |
Erdos/Newton |
Lola
B08/86 Coupé |
1:38.946 |
5 |
41 |
15 |
GAC
Racing Team |
Ojeh/Gosselin/Peter |
Ginetta
Zytek GZ07S |
1:39.063 |
6 |
39 |
16 |
Kruse
Schiller |
Marsh/Noda
/Sini |
Lola
B05/40 |
1:40.054 |
7 |
30 |
18 |
Racing
Box |
Biagi/Bobbi/Piccini |
Lola
B08/86 Coupé |
1:40.192 |
8 |
37 |
19 |
WR
Salini |
Salini/Salini/Gommendy |
WR
Zytek |
1:40.906 |
9 |
26 |
20 |
Bruichladdich |
Bruneau/Moseley/Greensall |
Radical
SR9 AER |
1:41.931 |
10 |
35 |
21 |
Oak
Racing |
Ajlani/Lahaye |
Pescarolo
Mazda |
1:44.331 |
11 |
24 |
22 |
Oak
Racing |
Nicolet/Hein |
Pescarolo
Mazda |
1:44.780 |
12 |
38 |
24 |
Pegasus |
Schell/Thirion |
Courage
AER |
1:46.463 |
13 |
43 |
28 |
Q8
Oils Hache |
Moncado/Cortez/Armetta |
Lucchini
Judd |
1:43.937 |
14 |
42 |
42 |
Ranieri
Randaccio |
Randaccio/Giammaria |
Lucchini
McLaren |
1:54.134 |
14 |
28 |
43 |
Ibanez
Racing |
Ibanez/da
Rocha/Cavailhes |
Courage
AER |
no
time |
The
second Free Practice session is scheduled
for 10:45 am tomorrow.
There
are high resolution images posted in the
Barcelona Gallery
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