After Jota on Monday, works team Penske follows suit in the WEC test drives on Tuesday – All four sessions go to Porsche – Engine problems at Alpine
The official pre-test for the World Endurance Championship (WEC) at the Losail International Circuit near Doha has come to an end with two daylight test sessions. The nine cars that started in the first session – including the two Jota Porsches – were no longer on the grid for the fourth session.
Nevertheless, the Porsche 963s kept their clean slate. After the two Jota best times on Monday, the Porsche works team Penske went one better on Tuesday. The 6 had finished the morning session in third place.
Of course, the individual times in particular should be treated with caution, as the teams ran different programs. Nevertheless, four best Porsche times are obviously not out of the blue. The fact that Ferrari continued to perform strongly is also an indication that the 499P is working really well in Lusail. The three AF Corse cars finished third to fifth in the afternoon
Ahead of them was the 2 Cadillac (Bamber/Lynn/Bourdais), in which Alex Lynn set the second-fastest time of the prologue in 1:40.458 minutes. The Cadillac underlined the fact that the LMDh concept can now obviously keep up with the LMHs.
Peugeot faster than Toyota
Peugeot provided a positive surprise. The 9X8, in Qatar still in the old version without rear wing, seems to work well on the fairly flat track. The 7 Toyota (Conway/Kobayashi/de Vries) at the worst possible time on Tuesday morning, when there was still a lot of sand on the track. His 1:41.789 minutes were half a second slower than Stoffel Vandoorne’s Peugeot time at the same time.
As on Monday, BMW was the fastest of the new brands in the final standings. Robin Frijns brought the BMW M Hybrid V8 under the 1:42-minute mark in the fourth session in 1:41.958 minutes.
Turn up the volume for WEC cars.
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– FIA World Endurance Championship (@FIAWEC) February 27, 2024
Lamborghini and Alpine didn’t really get going yet. The Lamborghini SC63 missed the start of the first session because work was carried out on the car overnight. The Alpine 99 Proton Porsche (Tincknell/Jani/Andlauer) was also not yet fully operational after overnight work on Tuesday morning, but finished in the top 10 in the afternoon.
LMGT3 promises excitement
As expected, things remain tight in the LMGT3 category. Both fastest times went to the D’station-Aston-Martin 54 (Flohr/Castellacci/Rigon), which finished second in all three sessions in which it took part. In both sessions, nine cars from five brands each stayed within the one-second window.
Ciao, @IronLynx_ @LamborghiniSC
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– FIA World Endurance Championship (@FIAWEC) February 27, 2024
The WRT-BMW, the Manthey-Porsche and the Proton-Ford were still lagging behind. However, the gap narrowed significantly on Tuesday.
After the cat invasion on Monday, there was also an oddity on Tuesday. The afternoon session had to be interrupted because the track cameras had broken down. There were two shorter interruptions in the morning due to cleaning work.
The race weekend of the 1,812 kilometers of Qatar begins on Thursday at 12 noon CET.
