Le Mans 24 Hours – Warm Up – Damp and Greasy All 55 remaining entries took to the track within the first minutes of this morning’s session, despite the tricky conditions. Intermediate tyres were the order of the day and might remain so in the early stages of the race. The latest forecast is a relatively low risk of very light showers through until this evening with a dry and occasionally bright Sunday in prospect. Chances then of gloriously dirty, used and abused cars taking the finish then, to the equal delight and distress of fans and sponsors respectively. Despite low cloud, murky skies and constant rain throughout the night, this morning’s entertaining Porsche Cup and Group C races have almost completely dried the circuit already. A chance of a completely dry race remains. There was much incident, particularly among the prototypes, but thankfully none of it race-threatening. The Audis of Lotterer (missing the corner at Arnage) and Dumas (spinning luridly on his outlap at Tertre Rouge) demonstrated that the conditions were tricky, but they were pushing more than the Peugeots early on. The Racing Box Lola had the exact same spin twice, caused by different hands and feet but occurring both times as first Pirri, then Perrazini came off the brakes into the Playstation chicane. The team are probably asking for consistency from their drivers, but not like that! Most of the spins occurred on braking but Bryan Willman managed it under power coming out of Mulsanne Corner and Nigel Mansell likewise at the Michelin chicane. Slowing sufficiently at Arnage proved difficult for many, including Jonnys/Johnnys Kane and O’Conell, but all were able to jink left and into the escape road, avoiding the traditional front-end impact into the tyres that will be almost inevitable at some point in the race. Escape roads were also in use at both chicanes by Hughes, Mucke and the Jaguar. Miguel Amaral had the dubious honour of spinning at both chicanes on the Mulsanne straight on his out lap. The only real casualty of the session was the Bruichladdich Ginetta-Zytek, into the barriers in the hands of Tim Greaves, damage to the front left but nothing too serious and he was able to recover to the pits. The GT’s had a quieter time in the drying conditions, although #73 did pick up a left rear puncture. With 2/3rds of the session gone the Peugeots were picking up pace and Gene headed the times with a 3:52.4 from Montagny, Treluyer and Rockenfeller. The gaps between these four were all two seconds. McNish looked extremely confident with the #7 Audi R15 Plus, his 3:52.122 was the quickest of the session in the dying minutes, improved to a 3:51.401 by the end. The Audis and Peugeots had then taken their expected occupation of the top seven places with Jarvis, Turner, Bellichi and Jani behind. Jani then improved to a 4:01.952 to put Rebellion best of the rest, but this was 1.4 seconds behind 7th placed Panis. Bouchut then put the #14 Kolles car ahead of the #14 Rebellion too, so the R10 does seem to have strengths in the wet, at least in the hands of its more professional drivers. In P2 Strakka had a quiet and slow session, leaving Highcroft to be the only ones in class to go at anything approaching a reasonable pace with a 4:08. The Marc VDS Ford looked great fun in the conditions, sliding rather than twitching its way to a quickest 4:28.942 quickest in the class, with the Matech girls next. Peter Kox only did a single lap in the GT1 Aston, but there were no dramas when the car returned to the box. This team is doing as little running as possible, but given that they found a good set-up within the first practice session, why should they do more. GT2 was #95 from #80 and #82 in the low 4:30s, with a gap back to the rest. #77 went to technical checking at the end of the session. Having had brand new suspension fitted it was worth checking all was in order before the start of the race. Richard Lietz was at the wheel, but Marc Lieb offered a summary of the GT2 straight line speed position. “We are not so bad on speed, the Ferrari is the same as us, but it gets there faster. The Corvette is in another league, it is very fast, it has so much torque. It also has so much downforce around here...” The Lola Aston Martins are running the direct injection engines for the race, but they haven’t used them so far this week. | 
