Le Mans 24 Test Day completed by the four Aston Martin (Racing) powered runners today
Sunday, June 08, 2025
Having already taken to the streets of Le Mans old town yesterday evening for the now traditional car parade, today saw the two new Valkyrie Hypercars from the Heart of Racing team tick off another first to finally realise that initial hope and desire of racing a true road to racetrack hypercar at the hallowed circuit.
Two, three-hour sessions were again available to all the Hypercar/LMP2 and LMGT3 crews – split either side of an hour lunch break but as usual, there was little to no time to do anything other than prepare both the car and the crews for the start of the officially timed sessions which begin on Wednesday.
For the rookie drivers, that included attaining their minimum ten laps to advance into night qualifying and from what we can make out from the timing results is that both Derek DeBoer and Eduardo Barrichello aboard their #10 Racing Spirit of Leman Vantage LMGT3 as well as Zacharie Robichon and Mattia Drudi did as well aboard their #23 Heart of Racing Vantage LMGT3 across the two sessions.
Track activity didn’t exactly get off to the best of starts, however, as the #007 Valkyrie of Tom Gamble was pinged for speeding within the pit lane at the start of the session 1 which saw him and the team get a fine as well as the loss of all his lap times up until that point. Fortunately, that was the only transgression (other than track limits) that any of the four crews suffered within the test although the #009 car of Marco Sorensen did have an off at Indianapolis which did reduce its overall lap count in session 2.
Between the four cars, we calculated that they covered just over two thousand miles between them with two hundred and forty-two laps of the 8.467-mile circuit being ticked off with their early setups and systems checks and preparatory works.
Like usual to any FIA World Endurance Championship round, pushing the envelope of performance is never on the agenda for Aston Martin powered teams but all cars sat comfortably within the time spread between all cars in each class – 4.8 seconds in hypercar and 4.3 seconds for LMGT3 in session one and 3.1 seconds and 4.9 seconds respectively in session 2.
Whilst this was the first time that anyone could see the new Valkyrie perform at Le Mans within its LM24 specific Balance of Performance, the old tradition with all classes with ‘sandbagging’ is a usual point of caution. Only with the start of Free Practice 1 will we start to see and understand the true situation with performance across all classes.
Tomorrow sees no track or paddock activity before rolling into the autograph/pit walk and pit stop challenge sessions on Tuesday before the cars get back on the track later on Wednesday.
Photo credits – Kelvin Pope (Red Firecracker)
