MOTORSPORT: Porsche sets pace for Le Mans

Mark Webber's Porsche 919 Hybrid is the quickest car for the Le Mans 24-Hour in a fortnight, while the radical new Nissan GT-R LM NISMOs are the fastest in a straight line but well off the pace overall.

One of Webber's co-drivers for his fourth Le Mans campaign and second with Porsche, New Zealander Brendon Hartley, clocked the fastest lap of the 13.63km La Sarthe circuit in France at the weekend's official test day for the world's major sports car race.

Hartley's lap time of 3 minutes 21.061 seconds bettered last year's pole position time, while the best time of the three front-engined, front-wheel-drive Nissan GT-R LMs was 3:43.38 – although Nissan's team principal and technical director Ben Bowlby pointed out that that lap was done in damp conditions.

The two four-hour sessions at Le Mans were rain-affected, while conditions were worse in Detroit, where neither of the weekend's IndyCar races ran the full distance.

Australia's Will Power closed to within 11 points of series leader Juan Pablo Montoya on Saturday but left Motor City 21 points behind after a collision with another of his Penske teammates, Helio Castroneves.

Fellow Australian James Davison was second in a sports car race there but his Aston Martin V12 Vantage aquaplaned into a safety truck recovering a crashed Porsche. A track worker is in hospital with broken ribs, a collapsed lung and spleen and kidney injuries as a result of the accident, in which the safety truck was lifted off the ground. It came just a week after a crewman's ankle was broken during the Indianapolis 500 when Davison's car was knocked into another during a round of pitstops for the three Dale Coyne Racing entries in that classic.

On double duty in Detroit, Davison finished fifth in a Pirelli World Challenge race there.

The third and final race of the European Formula Three Championship round at Monza in Italy was abandoned because of what officials deemed unacceptably dangerous driving.

There had been huge accidents, one of them involving Canadian teenager Lance Stroll, who won New Zealand's Toyota Series last summer, is a member of the Ferrari junior academy and has a billionaire father who is a potential F1 team owner.

Driving for Italy's Prema Power, with which Australian Ryan Briscoe had F3 success more than a decade ago, Stroll was blamed for high-speed contact that sent his car barrel-rolling and almost over high catch fencing at Monza.

As the Formula One circus heads for Montreal, where Daniel Ricciardo scored his maiden Grand Prix win a year ago, Red Bull Racing is contemplating installing the fifth Renault engine of the season in his RB11, which would incur a 10-place grid penalty and snuff out any remote chance he has of a repeat victory on the Canadian city's street circuit next Monday morning, Australian time.

The Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) has opened the door for another new F1 team next year, apart from that of American tycoon Gene Haas, with leading GP2 outfit ART – run by FIA president Jean Todt's son Nicolas – mooted to get a franchise, although 2016 would seem too soon for it to enter the world championship.

Brendon Hartley set the best time of the day when the track was dry early in the second four-hour session.

The New Zealander's flying lap was almost 0.9 seconds better than that of Swiss driver Neel Jani in another 919 in the morning session before rain arrived.

Italian Marco Bonanomi clocked the best lap of the Audi R18 e-tron quattros, 0.4 seconds slower than Jani.

The third of the Porsches for the June 13-14 race was fourth fastest, just 0.02 seconds behind the Audi, while the best of the two Toyota TS040s was only seventh and 4.2 seconds behind the fastest Porsche.

Hartley said that only three of the eight hours of testing yesterday were in the dry but that it had been a very constructive day for the crew running the 919 he is sharing with Webber and German veteran Timo Bernhard.

"We made a big step in terms of performance and balance between session one and session two," Hartley said.

Webber said it had been a very busy test.

"It is amazing how much we are still learning [with the 919]," Webber said.

"We knew we would have some rain today, but still all three of us had time in the car when it was dry.

"Anyway, for me it was very beneficial to drive in the rain as well, because I didn't have much experience with a wet track here."

Porsche team principal Andreas Seidl said it was now important to pour over "the huge amount of data we have gathered today".

"It was a great team effort to prepare so well for this test day and make the maximum use of it. Also it was another exercise for us to handle three cars," Seidl said.

Plusses and minuses for Nissan
The fastest lap in a Nissan GT-R LM at the Le Mans test day was set by Frenchman Olivier Pla – but it was slower than the frontrunners in the second-tier prototype category, LMP2, in which Nissan is the dominant engine supplier.

It was the first public outing for the GT-R LM. It had only been tested privately in America after failure to pass crash-testing and teething problems forced the Japanese manufacturer to skip the first two rounds of the WEC – six-hour races at Silverstone in Britain and Spa in Belgium.

But Ben Bowlby, who has created the Nissan challenger after having penned the also-radical DeltaWing and ZEOD sports cars of recent years, put a positive spin on the day.

"We weren't chasing headlines today. It was all about learning and recording data as part of our preparation for our Le Mans debut," Bowlby said.

"At the end of the day our times in the damp conditions were competitive and during the morning runs we recorded the two fastest straight-line speeds overall.

"We know we have a big learning curve ahead of us bringing this unique front-engined, front-wheel-drive car to Le Mans, but after our first day here we have three straight [undamaged] cars in the garage and mountains of data for our engineers to study."

Nissan's global motorsport boss Darren Cox vowed that the GT-R LMs would be ahead of the LMP2 category cars come qualifying, even though there has not been time to develop qualifying tyres for its front-engined cars.

"What did they [LMP2] qualify at last year – a 3:37? We will be way ahead of that," Cox said.

"Judge us on the end of the first driver stint [in the race]. So, in other words, after we have gone through two or three fuel cycles and changed tyres."

Australia's other driver in this year's 24-Hour, American-based Ryan Briscoe, was also at the test in which the Chevrolet Corvette he is sharing with Dane Jan Magnussen and Spaniard Antonio Garcia in the GTE Pro class was 50th of the 67 cars that took to the track.

Some of those cars were given special permission to test, but the line-up for the 83rd running of the race is limited to 56.

Ford is reported to be preparing for an announcement of a two-car GTE-specification entry next year with Chip Ganassi Racing for Le Mans and America's United Sports Car Championship.

The Fords are expected to be powered by a 3.5-litre Ecoboost V6 engine.

A return to Le Mans by the Blue Oval next year will coincide with the 50th anniversary of its first outright victory in the classic, by New Zealand greats Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon in a GT40 Mark II in 1966.

Honours shared in chaotic IndyCar weekend
The rain-shortened IndyCar races in Detroit were won by 23-year-old Colombian Carlos Munoz and French veteran Sebastien Bourdais, who is to partner Lee Holdsworth in a Holden Commodore during this year's V8 Supercar Endurance Cup in September-October.

Aussie Will Power was fourth in Saturday's race, which ended after 47 of the scheduled 70 laps, but was classified only 18th on Sunday, when the second scheduled 70-lapper was cut five laps short as debris from his contact with Brazilian teammate Castroneves in turn two of the street circuit was being removed.

Former Holden boss Mark Reuss, now General Motors' vice-president of global vehicle development and creator of GM's performance division, was the pace car driver for the Detroit weekend in a Corvette Z06 – the most powerful production car Chevrolet has built.

Bourdais drove a Chevrolet-powered car entered by KVSH Racing co-owned by expatriate Australian Kevin Kalkhoven and American ex-racer Jimmy Vasser to victory in the second of the IndyCar races.

It was his 33rd win in American-style open-wheeler racing, including two Gold Coast Indys last decade.

The four-time Champ Car titleholder who also spent 18 months in F1 said he did not have enough fuel to do celebratory donuts after his latest victory – his first since he won in Toronto, Canada, last July.

Eight Honda-powered cars followed Bourdais at the chequered flag in Detroit, while the previous week's Indianapolis 500 winner, Juan Pablo Montoya, ran out of fuel in his Penske-Chevrolet but was classified 10th – giving him a 21-point lead over Power in the series.

Munoz, a Colombian like Montoya, became the second first-time winner of the season on Saturday when he stayed on track as teammate Marco Andretti pitted for fuel and rain tyres.

American Josef Newgarden notched his first win at Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama five weeks earlier.

There have now been six winners in seven rounds of this year's IndyCar Championship.

Munoz's success was the second win for Honda this season, while Andretti's second place on Saturday gave the Japanese manufacturer its first one-two of the year.

Frenchman Simon Pagenaud, another Penske teammate of Power, picked up his first podium since joining that dominant team this season, while Brisbane-born New Zealander Scott Dixon was fifth and 20th (after contact) in the weekend's two races.