Porsche leads Ferrari on training Thursday

Holiday atmosphere especially for motorsport fans: The WEC is in Spa-Francorchamps this weekend (race starts on Saturday at 1:00 p.m., live on Sport1 on free TV from 5:00 p.m.). The traditional Belgian circuit is considered important preparation for the following race and simultaneous season highlight on the calendar, the 24 Hours of Le Mans (June 15-16, 2024).

Just in time for the holiday and the start of the World Endurance Championships, the 7,004 kilometer long high-speed track was in unusual condition: with pure sunshine and temperatures of almost 20 degrees! On the previous days it had still rained in the Ardennes and one or two team bosses had unpacked their long underwear.

Fewer tire discussions thanks to sunshine in Spa

Due to the warm weather conditions that are forecast until race Saturday, the WEC will avoid similar discussions as last year, when the focus was on unheated tires and numerous hypercar departures. However, the debate is not over. “Outlaps on cold tires are no fun,” said two-time DTM champion Marco Wittmann at the start of training on Thursday Motorsport-Magazin.com. Ferrari works driver and ex-DTM driver Miguel Molina chimed in: “We’ve been having this discussion for a year, it remains dangerous!”

The teams and manufacturers used the two free practice sessions on Thursday (11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.) primarily to complete long runs before the 6-hour race and to find the best setups. Tire supplier Michelin has the soft and medium compounds in its luggage for Spa this time and does not suspect that drivers will be able to do triple stints in the race. Things were different three weeks ago in Imola than, among other things Ferrari extended their first stints in order to be able to react better to possible rain. As is well known, this went completely wrong.

The qualifying on Friday (2:45 p.m. – 4:05 p.m.) plays a relatively minor role compared to the narrow Imola circuit: Spa offers numerous good overtaking opportunities with its long straights. The track characteristics should benefit the hypercars, which this time will have to take less risk when lapping the slower GT3 cars.

Porsche starts with the best time on Thursday

The fastest training time on Thursday went to #6 PenskePorsche (Estre, Lotterer, Laurens Vanthoor). Frenchman Kevin Estre, from the trio of World Championship leaders, needed 2:04.162 minutes for his best lap in the afternoon session. That was around four seconds slower than the fastest qualifying times last year. “Compared to last year, we have made great progress in the area of ​​dampers, which is paying off here in Eau Rouge,” reported Monsieur Estre, who shares the Porsche 963 with Andre Lotterer and Laurens Vanthoor.

In Spa, the hypercars were around 17 seconds faster on one lap than the representatives of the LMGT3 category. Here the #78 Akkodis-Lexus (2:21.257 minutes) was ahead. Surprisingly, behind the wheel of the Japanese GT3 car was Clemens Schmid, who was only announced on Wednesday afternoon as a replacement for the ill regular driver Timur Boguslavskiy and is celebrating his WEC debut.

“That was a last-minute call,” said the Austrian, who regularly competes in the DTM for the McLaren customer team Dörr Motorsport. Akkodis had previously had to replace regular driver Kelvin van der Linde, who is racing for Abt-Cupra at the Formula E event taking place at the same time in Berlin this weekend.

Training result: Four brands in the top 4

In the Hypercars, things were pretty tight at the front in the second training session: behind the #6 Porsche, the #50 Ferrari (Fuoco, Molina, Nielsen) was in second place. The Italian Antonio Fuoco maneuvered the red hypercar over the asphalt in 2:04.283 minutes, 0.121 seconds behind.

“Our car is well suited to high-speed tracks, we saw that last year,” said Fuoco’s teammate, Spaniard Molina. “Tracks like Spa or Le Mans suit us better because of the fast corners and high average lap times. I see Toyota, Porsche and us as favorites. But you can’t leave out the Cadillac either.”

The Cadillac with starting number #2 (Bamber, Lynn) set the third fastest lap time in the hands of Alex Lynn. With a personal best of 2:04.341 minutes, the Briton was 0.179 seconds short of the top. The #7 Toyota GR010 Hybrid (Conway, Kobayashi, de Vries), surprise winner of the Imola race, took fourth place on the timesheets. This means that cars from four of the nine hypercar brands led the rankings at the start of the race weekend.

Class company in spa training

The #12 JOTA-Porsche (Stevens, Ilott), the starting number #99 from Proton-Porsche (Jani, Andlauer), the #8 Toyota (Buemi, Hartley, Hirakawa) and the private AF Corse followed in places five to eight used #83 Ferrari 499P (Kubica, Shwartzman, Ye). The Peugeot hypercars (P9 & P13), BMW (P15 & P17), Meanwhile, Alpine (P16 & P19) and the only Lamborghini SC63 (P11) were in the back positions.

Numerous violations of the track limits and driving too fast during full course yellow phases in the first training session triggered several 5-minute pit lane penalties for the second session. The hardest hit was the #20 BMW M Hybrid V8 (Sheldon van der Linde, Rast, Frijns), who even had to miss the first ten minutes of training.

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