The first Free Practice for the Red Bull Ring Four-Hour race, the third round of the 2018 European Le Mans Series took place on Friday morning under sunny skies and Racing Engineering used the ninety-minute session to allow their French drivers, Norman Nato, Paul Petit and Olivier Pla to set up their Oreca 07-Gibson for the Austrian circuit. Once again, as in the previous two rounds, the Spanish team were right on the pace with Norman setting the second fastest time of 1:20.070. Underlining just how competitive the LMP2 class is this year the Racing Engineering car was just 0.003 seconds second behind the fastest car with the third fastest car only .024 further back, in fact the top seven LMP2 cars were separated by 0.5 seconds.

Saturday morning’s Free Practice session saw the weather cloudier with the threat of rain and a little cooler with both air and track temperatures of 16° and 20° respectively. Norman drove for the first thirty-five minutes, setting a best time of 1:19.832, third fastest at the time. Paul then took over the driving duties, but as the session reached the one-hour mark, the rain began to fall, and Paul returned to the pits to have wet tyres fitted and hand over to Olivier. Lap times were now about fourteen seconds a lap slower than in the dry but Olivier, using all his experience, was one of the quickest drivers on the very slippery track even though several yellow flags interrupted his laps. At the end of the session Norman’s earlier fast lap left the Racing Engineering car third fastest.

For the afternoon Qualifying it was warmer with air and track temperatures of 21° and 2° respectively and, fortunately, the rain that affected the free Practice session had now stopped. It was, once again, Norman behind the wheel of the Racing Engineering car and the young Frenchman was flying, on his first quick lap, his third of the session, he went top of the timing sheets with a lap of 1:19.387. At the end of the 10-minute session his lap was good enough for third, just 0.141 seconds from pole.

Practice and Qualifying have gone very well for the Racing Engineering team and, in a four hour race, there is plenty of time to move to the front and the Spanish team and its three drivers will be aiming to be on the podium and to go for their second win of the year.

TEAM COMMENTS

Alan Queille - Technical Director: “We had two busy free practice sessions with changing conditions, which were productive in terms of set up work as well as race preparation. Since the test day on Wednesday the first six or seven cars have been really close and we knew that on a track as short as the Red Bull Ring it would be a question of a few tenths in qualifying. Unfortunately, we didn’t take pole position today, but Norman and the team did a good job and we are looking forward to the race tomorrow.

Norman Nato: “We had a good qualifying session today. We already saw in free practice that we were fast in all conditions, in the wet as well as the dry. It was a tight qualifying in terms of lap time. We are the first car on Dunlop tyres, which is positive and P3 is a good position to start tomorrow’s race from.”