In the team's eighth outing in the celebrated Le Mans 24 Hours round-the-clock classic, Pescarolo Sport got off to a troubled start, with strong pace from its LMP1 machine mitigated by a shunt for the #16 machine and mechanical woes for the sister #17 car.
The Le Mans-based outfit run by La Sarthe legend Henri Pescarolo was founded back in 2000, and in the last four years has finished respectively fourth, second, second and third outright, though overall victory has continued to elude the squad.
As the 2008 edition dawns ever-closer, the #16 entry piloted by Jean-Christophe Boullion, Emmanuel Collard and Romain Dumas ended the first qualifying session seventh-quickest, behind only the six diesel-powered Peugeots and Audis, and Boullion impressively getting to within a second of the R10 TDi of Frank Biela, Emanuele Pirro and Marco Werner.
To be honest, we supposed that the Audi would have been quicker, the former Sauber
F1 star told
Crash.net. We ran during the first session on very hard tyres to make the car comfortable for the race, then we threw a set of very soft tyres on the car to try and get a good place on the grid. The car is fine, but the target is always the race anyway, not the grid.
I think everybody tried qualifying tyres because they wanted to be sure of getting a lap time. We don't know what the weather will be like on Thursday, so I presume that was the main reason for the times being so quick on Wednesday.
We should improve on Thursday. We haven't explored the maximum of the car yet we still have to work on its handling so we should be quicker in qualifying two.
That, though, was where the good news unfortunately ended for Pescarolo Sport, as dropped oil from the Team Modena Aston Martin DBR9's blown engine at the Porsche Curves sent Dumas spinning off and coming into heavy contact with the barriers, not once but twice with the front end of the chassis in particular enduring significant damage.
