The 31 WRT Oreca led the rainy WEC round at Spa for a long time, much to the surprise of driver Robin Frijns
In the Belgian rain chaos, the WRT squad was on the verge of a sensation: an overall victory for an LMP2 car was in the air at the Spa-Francorchamps 6h. At least that was the case until the track dried again in the final third of the race.
During the race, conditions on the Ardennes rollercoaster were so adverse that accidents were surprisingly frequent. The result: three aborts, six safety car phases and five full-course yellows, and a race that was thus unable to get into any real rhythm.
And in the middle of it all was the WRT Oreca 31 (Gelael/Frijns/Rast), which temporarily took the lead thanks to a tyre poker and even managed to pull away from the actually stronger hypercars. That again surprised Robin Frijns in retrospect.
“I was in the lead and had a clear view, but still I expected the hypercars to come back after a few laps. But they didn’t, so I was able to keep pulling away,” Frijns rubbed his eyes in wonderment to ‘Sportscar365’.
As Toyota’s technical director Pascal Vasselon explained, this phenomenon can be attributed to the different car characteristics. The LMP2 car from Oreca not only has less power than the Toyota hypercar, but also more downforce and is lighter. As a result, the car is more docile in difficult conditions.
Robin Frijns didn’t speculate on Spa overall win
But, “When it dried off again, you could see we had no chance of fighting the hypercars. At the end of the day, it’s just a different class.” Still, Frijns never speculated on a possible overall win despite the lead kilometres.
“I wasn’t hoping for anything [in terms of weather],” says the Dutchman. “But I was hoping that there wouldn’t be too much water on the track, because that would just be too risky. We had aquaplaning and that is too dangerous. So I was also quite happy that there were red flags, because it was just not safe to continue. “
We are back to green flag racing on a damp track.WEC 6HSpa pic.twitter.com/AP9N2B1JBD
– WEC (@FIAWEC) May 7, 2022
The WRT trio in car 36 Alpine (Negrao/Lapierre/Vaxiviere) with a gap of 1:06.185 minutes, and consequently won the LMP2 class. But it got hairy in the final phase.
Team-mate Rene Rast was involved in a collision with the 35 Ultimate Oreca (J. Lahaye/M. Lahaye/Heriau), where he damaged the car. “I couldn’t get out of the way. I was fully on the brakes, blocked, but couldn’t avoid to the left or right, so I hit him,” Rast reported.
“Unfortunately, the splitter and the nose of the car broke in the process. After that I had strong vibrations and a lot of understeer. Luckily we only had five minutes left on the clock so we just stayed out and won the race.” Luck of the draw for WRT after the weather gods prevented an LMP2 coup.
