Le Mans Series – Silverstone – Sunday Morning
Bright Day, Sad News

An overcast start to the day over Silverstone, but it had brightened up by the time the warm up session took place (Peugeots 1-2, then the LNT and Arena Zyteks) – but then came the sombre news that Colin McRae and his son are feared killed in a helicopter crash near their home in Lanarkshire.

That news cannot be officially confirmed until the victims have been formally identified. Sincere condolences are offered to the whole McRae family.

There’s more sad news too, because Marcel Manthey, the 18 year old son of Olaf Manthey, was killed in a road accident last Monday. Michael Cotton passes on the news that the Porsche Supercup cars at Spa this weekend will each carry a black ribbon in honour of the young man.

Jeroen Bleekemolen set the pole position yesterday at Spa, with Richard Westbrook second and Damien Faulkner fourth.

As we scurry about gathering news of set-up problems and other little dramas, the above news is a wake-up call that there are far more significant events going on in the wider world.

Anyway, we’ll carry on with what we’re doing here, and hope that we have a safe race today – and a very good one. Spa was a hugely disappointing race, except in GT2, and we deserve a good one today, on the occasion of the last full LMS grid of the year.

Some pre-race updates: the Chad Panoz has been in gearbox trouble until today, a legacy of the accident with the Kruse Pescarolo at Spa – and the fact that the team was unable to find anywhere to test in the UK before the Silverstone race. There was hidden damage to the gearbox, so on Saturday, the Panoz was fitted with a ‘box from John Hartshorne’s TVR, “which seemed to have Le Mans ratios in it!”

Another ‘box went back in last night.

The #72 Gavin / Policand / Goueslard Corvette was fastest in GT1 this morning. Team Modena co-owner Rik Bryan reckons that the form of the team’s DBR9 this weekend is a result of “Antonio and Darren working hard on the set-up – and Antonio set a storming lap in qualifying”.

The quick cars in GT2 this morning were the #96 Virgo and #77 Felbermayr-Proton cars (six-tenths separated them), and the #85 Hezemans / Dumbreck Spyker (a second or more slower than the Porsche). It’s looking like another cracking 96 / 77 race in prospect, and we’ll be writing about the GT2 race live, with the other three classes – but Paul Truswell will tell the whole story of GT2 once the race is over, and he’s had time to reflect on everything that has happened.

The #88 F-Proton Porsche was the only car not to go out this morning.

Rob Barff: “It's great to be out there, even if we did take a huge step backwards in qualifying. We know what it is though, we changed the dampers and we had the wrong settings, which gave us really nasty oversteer. Before that we had been moving consistently forwards by about 8/10ths a session. We put a much more compliant setting on for the warm-up and Pedro went a full two seconds faster than he has before. We’ll never have the pace of the works Porsches but it would be good to be about 1.8 to 2 seconds off Marc Lieb knowing how we are around Silverstone, and try to get a good result. We’ll all single stint, right from the off.”

Lawrence Tomlinson: “We’re struggling a bit this weekend but we know where we’re going with it and have identified some key areas that we are working on. The circuit is OK for the Panoz, Spa didn’t suit us this year, but we are two seconds faster than we were here last year. The problem is everyone else seems to be going four seconds faster than last year, or certainly everything has moved on.

"We’ve no real plans with the P2 car, we’re just having some fun with it this weekend, running it for Zytek, you could say things are going OK so far. [Tongue firmly in cheek for the understatement of the weekend] If we get reliability in the race then we should have a good run, it's nice for my two drivers to be able to showcase their talent too.”

Chris Buncombe: “We’re happy with where we are, third in class and eighth overall in the warm-up with full tanks. We know the Zytek is in a different class, so to be ahead of everyone but RML is good. For the race the aim is a class podium, it would be nice to have a top ten overall too. The first lap could be tricky for me because I have two Pescarolos behind me. They will be faster down the Hangar Straight but then I’m quicker at the complex at the end of the lap so I need to try and hold them off.”

We'll post starting drivers as soon as we get them (they are posted now ).

The race starts at 12.00 BST, and with a race length of 196 laps, if it stays dry, we're expecting a race duration of about 5 hours 20 minutes. There is a suspicion that some rain might fall later today - but it doesn't look likely at the moment.