MOTORSPORT: Power's back on in Indy racing

Will Power’s a winner in IndyCar racing again after a year-long drought.

Mark Webber reports a “smooth” official test day for the Le Mans 24-Hour, still a fortnight away, although the Aussie in the No 1 Porsche was pipped for the fastest lap of the 13.629km La Sarthe circuit by an Audi.

Porsche has reverted to last year’s battery after problems with its hybrid system in the previous World Endurance Championship round at Spa in Belgium.

The hybrid prototypes are restricted to 7.5 per cent less fuel per lap at Le Mans this year and were a couple of seconds slower at the test day than they were last year.

The Ford GT that Ryan Briscoe shared with Brit Richard Westbrook was the fastest of the Blue Oval’s four entries in the GTE Pro class for its return to Le Mans 50 years after its famous first victory with the GT40.

Michael Schumacher’s 17-year-old son Mick won two of three races in the German Formula 4 Championship at Lausitzring at the weekend, but 20-year-old Australian Joey Mawson still leads that series – by just three points (152-149) from Schuey Junior and both have three wins for the season.

The pair were teammates last year, but while Mawson has remained with Dutch team Van Amersfoort Racing, and scored one podium (a second place) at the weekend, Schumacher switched this season to Italian-run Prema Powerteam for which Briscoe won the Formula 3 Euroseries 13 years ago.

Matt Brabham won the two Stadium Super Truck races at the IndyCar round in Detroit. The other race was abandoned after fellow Australian Matt Mingay flipped, shearing the roof off his truck.

Mingay, best known as a motorcycle stunt rider, has had facial surgery in a Detroit hospital. Brabham, who came from the back of the field for his second win there, is chasing more IndyCar drives after his Indianapolis 500 debut a week ago but could take part in the stadium trucks at Townsville’s V8 Supercar event on July 8-10.

Overdue win on The Captain’s doorstep  
Will Power won the second leg of the IndyCar double-header at Belle Isle Park in Detroit – the 'home ground' of his team boss and the race patron, automotive tycoon Roger ‘The Captain’ Penske.

It was the 2014 series champion’s first victory since the road race at Indianapolis two weeks before last year’s Indy 500.

Power was the fastest qualifier for the second of the weekend’s 70-lap races in Detroit but was relegated to eighth on the grid for interference with Marco Andretti.

He led only 10 laps of the race but a neat move around the outside of one of his three Penske teammates, Frenchman Simon Pagenaud, at three-quarter distance was decisive.

The pair had four cars ahead of them at that point, but all those had to make pitstops over the remaining laps, unlike Power and Pagenaud.

“Man, it’s been a long time – I needed this,” Power said of his 26th IndyCar win.

Pagenaud led 40 laps and finished second, within a second of Power, and has an 80-point lead in the series (357-277) at its midpoint over New Zealander Scott Dixon, who was fifth after an electrical problem the previous day saw him classified only 19th in the earlier race – one place ahead of Power, who dropped out with a loose right rear wheel nut.

Frenchman Sebastien Bourdais won the first leg for KV Racing Technology, which prepared Matt Brabham’s Indy 500 entry.
Bourdais and Dixon, as IndyCar full-timers, both skipped the Le Mans test day but will be in France for the sports car classic on June 18-19 as part of Ford’s four-car squad with its new GT.

Both Detroit victors were powered by Chevrolet, which has won every IndyCar race this season except the one that matters most – the Indy 500.

Alex Rossi, the shock winner of the 500 with a Honda-powered Andretti Autosport car, finished only 10th and 12th in the two Detroit races.

Six drivers have been victorious this season, with Pagenaud the only multiple winner – standing atop the podium three times in his second season with Penske.

Brazilian veteran, another Penske driver, is third in this year’s series, just six points behind Dixon, while Power is seventh now (he was only 12th after Saturday’s race) and Colombian Juan Pablo Montoya ninth after a third in Detroit, then crashing out in Sunday’s race.

The series is at its busiest now, with another round next weekend on the high banks of the Texas Motor Speedway.
German marques on level playing field at Le Mans
Two four-hour sessions were scheduled for the Le Mans test at the weekend and immediately after the one-hour lunch break between them Mark Webber clocked what was then the best lap of the day.

Webber’s 3:22.270 seconds in the No1 Porsche 919 Hybrid bettered the 3:22.334 that Swiss driver Neel Jani had clocked in the No2 Porsche in the morning.

Later in the day Brazilian Lucas di Grazzi turned in a 3:21.375 in one of two Audi R18 e-tron quattros to top the timesheet.

Porsche had no chance to respond with the last half-hour of testing scrapped after a massive crash involving another Brazilian, Oswaldo (Ozz) Negri.

The LMP2 Ligier-Honda run by American team Michael Shank Racing that Negri was driving snapped sideways entering the breaking zone into the Michelin chicane.

The damage to the safety barrier forced the abandonment of the session.

The team was planning on having the car rebuilt for testing tomorrow on the shorter Bugatti track at Le Mans, without the 9.2km of public roads included in the much longer La Sarthe circuit.

The two Porsches 919 Hybrids completed 173 laps – or 2357km – in the 7½ hours of testing yesterday.

“How long you can drive on a single set of tyres is key in the race, so evaluating tyres was top priority,” Webber said.

“The weather held off … the predicted rain didn’t come.

“It was a smooth test for us.”

Porsche’s vice-president on its hybrid sports car racing program, Fritz Enzinger, said that an endurance test at Aragon in Spain and the Le Mans outing since the Spa six-hour race last month had gone “without any issues”.

“We can expect an exciting race … the top four cars (Audis and Porsches) are within 1.2 seconds on a 13.6km-long track,” Enzinger said.

The best laps of Toyota’s pair of TS050 hybrids were 1.822 and 2.346 seconds slower than the fastest Audi – which was the one that won at Spa.

The second Audi did only six laps in the second session yesterday after a shock absorber jammed, while the Toyotas did not get to run on new tyres at the end as planned because of the red flag.

New Zealander Brendon Hartley, one of Webber’s co-drivers, set the fastest lap at last year’s Le Mans test day in a 919 at 3:21.061, while Jani’s pole-position qualifying lap last year in another 919 was 3:16.887.

Porsche has gone back to last year’s battery for the rest of this season after a problem with the No 2 car at Spa.

Team principal Andreas Seidl said that “came as a surprise and we found out afterwards in analysis that we had a production issue with the battery cells”.

“We had to make the call to go back to an older-spec of cells that we used in 2015,” Seidl said.

“Reliability comes first [especially at Le Mans], so it was an easy call to make.”

Seidl would not comment on whether the change has affected performance of the 919s, but he declared that the recent testing in Spain and France indicated “we would have completed the distance at Le Mans without any problems”.

All 60 cars entered for the marathon race were on track yesterday, including 14 in the GTE Pro class.

The AF Corse Ferrari GTEs had mechanical problems early and the class became a battle between two Corvette Racing C7.Rs and two Porsche 9111 RSRs – the latter with two of last year’s outright winners in them.

Brit Nick Tandy and New Zealander Earl Bamber shared the Porsche 919 'wildcard' with German Formula 1 driver Nico Hulkenberg that upstaged the full-time entries for a shock victory.

The Ryan Briscoe-Richard Westbrook Ford GT was sandwiched between the two AF Corse Ferraris on the timesheet at the end of yesterday and was within a second of the class-pacesetting Corvette.

Scott Dixon will join Briscoe and Westbrook in the race, while Sebastien Bourdais will partner American Joey Hand and German Dirk Muller.