June 21 201 Audi goes one better in Qualifier before Official Le Mans 24 Hours Begins •Audi R18 e-tron quattro secures first three grid positions at Le Mans •Best time of the day for Frenchman Loïc Duval •First qualifying ended early after incident Ingolstadt/Le Mans, June 20, 2013 – All three Audi R18 e-tron quattro cars are at the front of the field after a shortened first day of practice at the anniversary event at the Le Mans 24 Hours which starts on Saturday at 1500 CEST. Frenchman Loïc Duval secured pole position managing to beat the best time from last year by almost 1.5 seconds. From the beginning the hybrid race cars with the four rings, which remain undefeated in the current season, dominated the 13.629-kilometre track in Western France on Wednesday night. In both free practice and qualifying, Audi maintained the top three positions. The fastest in both qualifying sessions was the number ‘2’ Audi R18 e-tron quattro driven by Loïc Duval (France), Tom Kristensen (Denmark) and Allan McNish (Scotland). The best time of the day of 3 minutes and 22.349 seconds was achieved by Loïc Duval shortly after qualifying started at 22:00. The Spaniard Marc Gené, who is sharing the number ‘3’ Audi R18 e-tron quattro with Lucas di Grassi (Brazil) and Oliver Jarvis (Great Britain) achieved the second-fastest time of the day (3m 24.341s). Trailing them in third place were last year’s winners and current World Endurance Champions, Marcel Fässler (Switzerland), André Lotterer (Germany) and Benoît Tréluyer (France). The fastest lap of car number ‘1’ was driven by André Lotterer in 3m 25.474s. However the focus for all three Audi teams wasn’t to chase the fastest lap times on Wednesday. Rather continue their solid preparation leading up to the race with the emphasis on tyre tests and a perfect race set-up of the three R18 e-tron quattro cars. In addition, all drivers tried to do the mandatory laps at night. All, except for Marcel Fässler, who was stopped twice by red flags, managed this. The free practice and first qualifying sessions were stopped early, due to damage sustained to the guard rails on the track, with teams only completing 65 minutes of the scheduled two hours. Frenchman Loïc Duval, who celebrated his 31st birthday last week noted, “We basically still completed our work tonight as planned. Our plan was to reel off a real qualifying lap on a dry track as well – you never know what the weather will be like tomorrow. I caught a lap without traffic. But our car isn’t perfect yet, simply because the track conditions aren’t so conclusive yet. At this point in time, the outcome after the final qualifying session on Thursday is still completely open.” Head of Audi Motorsport Dr. Wolfgang Ullrich added “It’s nice that the race week has finally begun for good. The weather conditions were better today than expected so that we were able to work well. Unfortunately, there were two longer interruptions because the track had to be repaired after accidents (due to damage to the track). Tomorrow we’re hoping to make optimum use for checking off the final details we’ve got on our action list.” Dr. Wolfgang Ullrich said. From 19:00 to 21:00 and from 22:00 to 24:00 two further qualifying sessions are scheduled at which the final grid positions will be awarded. To date, Audi has started from the pole position seven times at the Le Mans 24 Hours, which celebrates its 90th anniversary this year, and has won the world’s most important endurance race eleven times at 14 runs. Qualifying 1 results: 1 Duval/Kristensen/McNish (Audi R18 e-tron quattro) 3m 22.349s 2 di Grassi/Gené/Jarvis (Audi R18 e-tron quattro) 3m 24.341s 3 Fässler/Lotterer/Tréluyer (Audi R18 e-tron quattro) 3m 25.474s 4 Wurz/Lapierre/Nakajima (Toyota) 3m 26.67 5 Prost/Jani/Heidfeld (Lola-Toyota) 3m 30.423s 6 Davidson/Buemi/Sarrazin (Toyota) 3m 30.841s
Posted on: Fri, 21 Jun 2013 03:29:02 +0000
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