Sports car: Lucky victory for Sébastien Buemi
SPORTWAGEN Porsche's Neel Jani was unable to capitalize on his pole position in the 6-hour race at Spa (B). Instead, Sébastien Buemi won with Toyota as before in Silverstone, although this time he had luck entirely on his side. Upside-down world. Neel Jani captured the best grid position together with André Lotterer, contrary to his expectations. In the race over six [...]
Topsy-turvy world. Contrary to his expectations, Neel Jani and André Lotterer took the best grid position. But in the six-hour race on the 7-kilometer GP circuit at Spa Francorchamps, the German-Belgian was only able to hold onto the lead for ten laps.
Sébastien Buemi, on the other hand, already pointed out a problem with his Toyota TS050 Hybrid after practice, but his team couldn't get to the bottom of it. So the man from the canton of Vaud, with Anthony Davidson and Kazuki Nakajima as his partners, actually started the race with his back to the wall: "We didn't want to make any major changes to this technically very complex car at random, so we just accepted this disadvantage.
Nevertheless, it was enough for the second win of the season in the 2017 World Endurance Championship. Fortunate timing of the pit stops during two caution periods gave the trio a time gain of around 50 seconds. Buemi crossed the finish line after six hours with a two-second lead.
"Today we didn't have the speed, but we had the necessary luck to win," he noted with satisfaction. "Actually, our second-placed teammates Mike Conway and Kamui Kobayashi deserved the win here because they were clearly faster today. But we had so much bad luck last year, so I'm happy to take this win."
Buemi and his two partners now lead the world championship with 50 points ahead of Porsche drivers Earl Bamber, Timo Bernhard and Brendon Hartley with 33 and Neel Jani, André Lotterer, Nick Tandy with 28.
The pole setters did not play a major role in the race. On the one hand, their tires lacked consistency in terms of grip. On the other hand, Porsche's number 1 car, like the second-placed Toyota, was unlucky in the two neutralization phases. But that's also part of endurance racing.
"Our performance here was overall as expected," the Biel native summed up. "We were able to keep up with one Toyota, the other was out of reach. We were unlucky with the timing of two pit stops and lost a lot of time. After that, only rain could have washed us back into the race."
Since 2014, a Porsche 919 Hybrid has been on pole every time. This year, the Stuttgart team again set the fastest race lap by Brendon Hartley, but had to concede victory to its opponents.
"Overall, we couldn't match the pace of the Toyota in high-downforce configuration with our low-downforce aerodynamics because our tire wear was simply higher. But we had the Toyota with low downforce under control," team boss Andreas Seidl summed up. And the latter is important in view of Le Mans, where Porsche will compete in mid-June as the defending champion and Toyota as the big and so far hapless challenger.
Second place again for Rebellion
At Rebellion Racing, second place for Nico Prost, Bruno Senna and Julien Canal, who had already finished second at Silverstone, was celebrated like a victory. The loose radio antenna on the roof of the Rebellion Oreca required an additional pit stop, which meant a time loss of around one and a half minutes. That was a good 30 seconds more than the trio lacked in the end to the LMP2 class winners. Dual citizen Nico Prost is convinced: "With this otherwise perfectly running car we have a very good chance of winning at Le Mans."
Mathias Beche was an ungrateful fourth in the second Rebellion car. Jonathan Hirschi and Simon Trummer finished seventh and eighth in their Manor Racing cars in the LMP2 class, where the battle for overall victories is just as fierce as between Porsche and Toyota. This is how racing is supposed to be.
