Le Mans 24 Hours: A full house for Michelin at the 2018 Le Mans Test Day

Michelin topped the timesheets in all four classes at the end of the official 2018 pre-Le Mans Test Day. In LM P1, rookie Fernando Alonso caused a stir by posting the fastest lap in the N°8 Toyota TS050 Hybrid/Michelin, while Porsche and Michelin dominated both the LM GTE Pro and LM GTE Am orders. The N°31 Oreca-Gibson/Michelin prototype was fastest in LM P2. Action will resume next week with Free Practice and the first qualifying session on Wednesday, June 13. 

True to recent tradition, the 2018 Le Mans 24 Hours fortnight kicked off on Sunday with the pre-race Test Day. It gave the 60 teams an invaluable first chance to lap the famous 13.626-kilometre circuit, more than 80 percent of which is open to ordinary traffic the rest of the year.

The day is always a valuable exercise for the engineers, drivers and tyre manufacturers as they begin set-up work, (re)discover the track and start thinking about their respective strategies and stints planning for the big race.

Sunday’s run (two four-hour sessions) took place in clear weather and the fastest lap was the work of F1 star Fernando Alonso in the N°8 Toyota TS050 Hybrid/Michelin (3m19.066s), ahead of the non-hybrid N°3 Rebellion/Michelin prototype (Mathias Beche, +0.614s). The N°7 Toyota concluded the day less than a second short of its sister car, but the performance gap between the hybrid and nonhybrid prototypes was relatively small

Porsche and Michelin dominated both LM GTE classes. The Pro classification was topped by the N°93 and N°91 Porsche 911 RSRs, chased by the four Michelin-equipped Ford GTs. The best lap was posted by Patrick Pilet whose effort of 3m52.551s was two seconds quicker than the 2017 Test Day. The fastest Am runner was the N°77 Porsche/Michelin (Dempsey-Proton Racing), less than a second clear of two Michelin-shod Ferrari 488 GTEs.

Michelin has returned to the LM P2 class in the 2018/2019 FIA WEC and the Test Day saw two of its partners claim the two fastest laps, namely Dragonspeed (N°31 Oreca07-Gibson) and IDEC Sport (N°48 Oreca07-Gibson). Nathanael Berthon posted the best time (3m27.228s), ahead of fellow Frenchman Paul-Loup Chatin (3m27.252s). Both these laps bettered last year’s Test Day benchmarks.

The 2018 Le Mans 24 Hours will get under way at 3pm local time on Saturday, June 16.