Le Mans 24Hr Test Day - done

Today saw the running of the official Test Day at the Circuit de La Sarthe ahead of next weekend’s running of the 89th Edition of the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the fourth round of the World Endurance Championship.

Under virtually clear blue skies and sunshine, the three full season WEC Aston Martin Racing V8 Vantage GTE’s from TF Sport, D’Station Racing and Northwest AMR (and this time joined by TF Sport’s European Le Mans Series entered AMR GTE) all put in a appearance for the days two, four hour sessions as all four crews were mandated to do as were running with LM24 rookie drivers.

Session 1 pace setters were the #98 Northwest AMR crew of Paul Dalla Lana, Marcos Gomes and Nicki Thiim who came away fastest in GTE Am with the #777 D’Station Racing crew of Satoshi Hoshino, Tomonobu Fujii and Andrew Watson a not-so-distant P4. Looking through the individual times, a debuting Fujii was quicker than Thiim but it was another debuting driver – Marcos Gomes from the #33 TF Sport entered AMR with Ben Keating and Dylan Pereira who was the quickest Am driver of the session before they averaged out back in P12.

It wasn’t all plain sailing for the AMR contingent however, as both the #777 and #95 TF Sport car of John Hartshorne suffered accident damage after varying degrees of contact with the barriers – more so for the #95 which lost them a significant period of time as the TF Sport team set about repairing and getting the Hartshorne, Ollie Hancock and Ross Gunn back out before the end of the day.

The timing board however showed a different set of results by the end of the days final session with all four cars featuring in the second half of the table. Nothing to be concerned about their as the test day is about setting the record straight with attending where necessary and also housework within the time as in brake bedding, general familiarisation and practice before the more formal sessions of Wednesday where minimum lap times and compulsory day and night laps will also be needed from those who haven’t raced at the circuit before.

That all starts this Wednesday afternoon, by which time we should be blessed with the sights and sounds of a paying public lined around the circuit for the first time since 2019.

Photo credits – TF Sport / LM24 / Teams