24 Hours of Le Mans – Free Practice 3: Ferrari unleashes the horses before the Hyperpole
The two Italian cars achieved the best times in this third practice session. Rather calm, this session livened up in the last minutes.
It was a fairly calm session. Most of the teams clearly prepared adjustments for the race. However, that didn’t stop some from attacking. A little too much. Just like yesterday’s free practice 1, track incidents didn’t take long to happen. It only took six minutes. Right at the beginning of the session, car number 31 from Team WRT hit the barrier at the exit of the Indianapolis corner.
The incident did not disturb the two Toyotas, who achieved two interesting lap times. With a time of 3 minutes 27′ 822”, car number 7 took the lead with a 57 millisecond advantage over the sister car. The Peugeots were still trailing, two seconds behind. The Vanwall clearly found new settings as it rejoins the Hypercar pack and is no longer among the LMP2s.
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Ferrari releases the horses
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The session experiences a long disruption with the car number 14 from Nielsen Racing going off track at the end of the Hunaudières straight.
In the last hour, the teams have picked up speed. The Toyota number 8 attempted to regain the lead but lost all its advantage in the final sector and falls short by two tenths of a second from the number 7. In LMP2, the Jota number 28 chose to focus on the hyperpole, setting a time three seconds faster than anyone else (3 minutes 34′ 071”).
Ferrari also set aside its race preparation at the very end of the session. Antonio Fuoco, behind the wheel of car number 50, clocked a lap time one second faster than the Japanese Hypercars (3 minutes 26′ 579”). The second red car also unleashed its horsepower, but lapped four tenths of a second slower.
The off-track incident, at the first chicane in Les Hunaudières, of the Panis Racing LMP2, caused a Full Course Yellow, preventing any team from going even faster.
