European Le Mans

Monza: Michelin race report

A WIN FOR MICHELIN AT MONZA CONCLUSIVE TEST READY FOR THE LE MANS 24 HOURS Today the Italian circuit of Monza saw Michelin score another win in the Le Mans Series, the second round bringing a new victory for the Peugeot-Total-Michelin team, this ...

Published: Apr 29, 2008, 10:47 PM

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A WIN FOR MICHELIN AT MONZA CONCLUSIVE TEST READY FOR THE LE MANS 24 HOURS

Today the Italian circuit of Monza saw Michelin score another win in the Le Mans Series, the second round bringing a new victory for the Peugeot-Total-Michelin team, this time in the hands of Stephane Sarrazin and Pedro Lamy.

Less than 10 laps from the end, the No. 8 Peugeot driven by Pedro Lamy took the advantage, having had a real ding-dong battle with the No. 2 Audi, with Mike Rockenfeller at the wheel. The No. 17 Pescarolo (Tinseau / Primate) finished third.

In LMP2, the Team Essex Porsche RS Spyder claimed victory, while in the GT1 class the Aston Martin of the Modena team finished a little over 10 seconds ahead of the Luc Alphand Adventures Corvette.

As for the GT2 cars, it was the Farnbacher Racing which won.

For Michelin, the Monza race proved to be the perfect testing ground to validate tyres in preparation for the Le Mans 24 Hours. Today, different tyre compounds were used for two stints, and considering the harshness of the Italian circuit, Michelin could well consider trying three stints during the next 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Matthieu Bonardel, Director of Four-wheel Competition

"Firstly, we want to wish a speedy recovery to Stephane Ortelli from the Oreca team, who suffered an incredible "off" today and we hope to see him on the circuits again soon.

With regards tyres, this race was by no means easy. The Monza circuit is highly specific and the evolution of the track today was quite strong. While there was a definite phenomenon of understeer in all categories during practice, it was not the case in the race. Teams therefore had to take this factor into account in their strategies.

Regarding the LMP1 cars, we have seen this afternoon a peculiar facet of Monza. All teams have used more or less different tyre compounds and almost all have tried to find a way to double-stint.

While Audi was restricted to a single-stint strategy, Peugeot has been able to double-stint - they could possibly have even gone a little further - with different compounds fitted left to right. The French team has therefore managed to dissociate left and right to gain in performance; what's more they were able to double-stint without any problem at all, with both cars. This all bodes very well indeed from the perspective of the Le Mans 24 hours.

There was a pleasant surprise from Oreca, who did a lot of the race double-stinting on soft tyres. Just as the Lola Charouz did by regularly double-stinting. An impressive result as they were always thereabouts.

Congratulations to Pescarolo Team ! The only disappointment for us was because we failed to find a solution to double-stint and gain time. We tried both with medium and hard compounds, but we soon found that the mediums lost on performance over time, while the hards didn't have the performance to start with.

In LMP2, all teams managed double stints with soft and medium compounds, and they could have no doubt tried triple-stinting. The results are highly satisfactory both in terms of endurance and in pure performance terms.

In GT1, the strategies for the Corvettes and Astons were to go with a single stint. Only the Lamborghini managed two stints.

In GT2, the Farnbacher Racing used commercially available, customer competition products and was very consistent, taking a well-earned victory.

In conclusion, it was clearly better to try to double-stint, as this strategy paid off. As we gear up for the 24 Hours of Le Mans, this gives us a certain amount of peace of mind about the possibility of our medium and soft compounds to go for two stints or even more. We will have to wait for the test sessions in La Sarthe to decide on the hard tyres

Bruno Famin - Peugeot Technical Director

"We are obviously very happy with the result today. Regarding the Michelin tyres, everything went perfectly smoothly. We opted for a strategy of double-stinting and we saw no drop-off in performance at the end of the second stint. We are therefore very confident for the coming Le Mans 24 Hours race and in Michelin's ability to provide us with tyres that offer both performance and endurance.

-credit: michelin

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