Diesels On Pole In Le Mans!!

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<h1 class="cN">History in the making: Audi's diesel R10 takes Le Mans Pole-By David C. Schilke</h1>

For the first time ever at Le Mans a diesel will lead the field at the 74th running of the 24 Heures du Mans. In the last two hour qualifying stint Audi put its new project, the R10 powered by a V12 R10 diesel, one-two at the circuit La Sarthe.

Rinaldo Capello takes the credit for flying the number 7 Audi nearly two seconds faster than last years pole time. "I wasn't really trying to improve our time, but the car had been running well," says Capello. "I got a perfectly clean flying lap, so I was lucky. Marco Werner, in the sister No.8 Audi, wasn't so lucky, so he lost a couple of tenths of a second. He could very well have taken pole from us. We are not using qualifying tires, as they don't even last us a full lap, because of the tremendous torque on this car. We are using the softest possible race tires we have."

Team Pescarolo will have both cars on row two for Saturday's start. It would seem they tried to answer Audi's challenge but traffic played a critical role. Sebastian Loeb comments on team member Franck Montagny's interference, "He was clearly on a quick lap. Nevertheless, were are not going to fight over two tenths of a second in qualifying when there will be 24 hours to deal with!"

The best of the rest as radio Le Mans puts it will be lead by Courage Competition of France and Racing for Holland both running Mugen engines. These are the teams to watch if the factory teams have a terrible 24 hours. Unfortunately, the number 13 Courage was spotted pulling into the pits at the end with smoke coming from the year. The team has all Friday to work out the problem and a shake down on Saturday before the race.

This might be the last year privateers can win Le Mans in LMP2 with teams like Penske Porsche coming next year with factory support. Leading the charge of privately funded but no less professional teams this year is RML's Lola AER which put in a great lap in the first half of the session today and was never challenged the rest of the night. Starting alongside is Intersport racing making it another one-two, this time for Lola AER. Team owner and driver Clint Field comments on his team's performance. "Obviously we wish we were on the pole," said Field, who is driving with Liz Halliday and Duncan Dayton. "But it doesn't matter for the race. We have a very good car and we hope we can keep going until the end. We will have to push, but it has been the car that spends the least time in the pits that has won. Hopefully we'll have a reliable car."

A promising fight on Saturday will be between the LM GT1 factory cars of Aston Martin and Corvette racing. Aston Martin takes home the first prize, a GT1 pole by Thomas Enge. "I love the circuit, I always want to be fastest here," exclaims Enge. "I know we have a fast car, I know we have a consistent car here." Fast car indeed, the UK made car almost swept the top three had it not been for Max Papis doing his best to start the Corvette in third.

This leads to the final class and one of the more interesting stories.

Only at Le Mans can you have the pole sitter for LM GT2 in jeopardy of not starting the race. The Porsche 911 ran by Team IMSA Performance Matmut took the GT2 pole in the first half only to crash in the second half less than an hour and a half later. Driven by Luca Riccitelli the Porsche lost control at the Karting bends, hitting the guard rail on the car's left side.

Romain Dumas speaks about the incident, "Luca went off in the Karting curve; the car is badly damaged. A bunch of our mechanics went out to see the state of the car, and it appears that the chassis is bent. Even worse, Luca's ankle has swollen to twice its normal size. We are not at all sure he will be able to drive this weekend. We put in a very good time, and we could have improved it. However, we do not know if we will be able to start the race."

Amazingly enough no one in the class was able to match Matmut's earlier performance. Starting in second (and runner up for GT2 pole) is the Ferrari of Scuderia Ecosse which beat the favored ALMS Porsches for a good qualifying spot.

The winners are all obviously happy but as the teams that didn't have a golden lap would point out, there is still 24 hours to deal with before the real celebration begins. In that time a lot can happen, weather, track conditions and the thing most feared by the teams -- mechanical gremlins. It's still anyone's race to win or lose. Just ask Zytek Engineering who had an engine failure at the start of the session, worked hours to replace it and still managed to get enough laps in the qualify in the top 10. The lesson here is to never give up at Le Mans; you have 24 hours to get lady luck on your side.

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[Overdrive]

I got this booklet about the lemans AUDI's that came with last weeks AUTOCAR. According to that..

The R10 has a 5.5 litre DOHC V12 based on a stressed aluminum crankshaft case, and aluminum cylinder heads containing 4 valves per cylinder (2 and 2), Two garret turbos with a max inlet manifold presure of almost 3 bar!!

The v12 is controlled by the latest generation MS14 Bosch ECU.

The usable power band of this 48valve v12 lies at 3000-5000 rpm, so the driver does not need to shift that often due to the favourable torque curve.

The LMP1 racing category may be the most technically in all current world motorsport. No other class offers automobile manufacturers so many possibilities to implement new yechnology and to test it for production. Particularly the engine sector (as not in the case in F1 these days)