Audi win enthalling Silverstone Six Hours

The no. 7 Audi crew of Benoit Treluyer, Andre Lotterer and Marcel Fassler took a thrilling victory in the first round of the World Endurance Championship, as the Six Hours of Silverstone built to a nail-biting crescendo.

After completing a record-breaking 201 laps, the margin of victory was a mere 4.6 seconds as the charging Neel Jani – who shared with Romain Dumas and Marc Lieb – narrowly ran out of laps to deprive Audi of a win which had seemed a near certainty with twenty minutes remaining. However, a stop-go penalty handed to Fassler for exceeding the track limits at Club while passing a GTE Aston Martin threatened to undo all the team’s good work; in particular a stellar treble stint from Lotterer, which saw him first pass and then pull away from Anthony Davidson’s Toyota and the sole remaining Porsche of Dumas.

Marcel Fassler held on despite a late penalty to give Audi
their first WEC win of the year. (Adrenal Media)

But despite also having to stop for a quick splash of fuel to make it to the finish, Fassler still had enough in hand to emerge from his penalty in front of Jani, with reigning World Champions Davidson, Sebastien Buemi and Kazuki Nakajima completing the podium to make it three different manufacturers in as many positions.

Although the Toyota finished only 14 seconds behind the winners, the Japanese marque had never looked likely to challenge to outright victory, which from the word go looked likely to come down to a showdown between Porsche and Audi. Mark Webber led away from pole position and was able to build a comfortable gap over team-mate Dumas in the opening stint, only for a drivetrain failure ninety minutes into the race to put pay to his challenge, before Brendan Hartley and Timo Bernhard could even get behind the wheel.

“It was over pretty quick, I only felt it one lap before,” said a rueful Webber. “But up until then we had a nice lead and it was going well, so it’s a shame for the team. All of us on the no. 17 car had a great build up to the weekend and that was displayed in the start of the race. We have a lot of good potential here, but when you don’t finish obviously there’s no result, so it’s tough.”

That allowed Dumas through to lead, but it was not long before he was coming under severe pressure from Treluyer, who had earlier made an opportunistic pass on Buemi following a period of full-course yellow. The battle was briefly interrupted by pitstops and driver changes, but thereafter the race truly came to life, as Jani and Fassler repeatedly swapped positions, the Audi’s superior downforce enabling it to carry more speed through the corners only for the Porsche time and again to power back through on the straights, much to Fassler’s frustration. However, both men kept it clean, and afterwards praised each other’s fairness.

The sight of Jani and Fassler locked in combat was a regular one (Adrenal Media)

“I must say this was one of the best fights I’ve had in my whole career,” said the victorious Fassler. “It was pretty fair from Neel who gave me space, but it was a bit annoying to be passed all the time on the straights! It was a really exiting race; and what we’ve shown today was a great sportscar race.”

“I enjoyed it, especially when you can trust each other to go side-by-side without touching,” added Jani. “It was a very fair fight, obviously I couldn’t avoid a smile in a straight-line. We’ve had a lot of racing together in go-karts, we just had another one here except it was a bit quicker and in bigger cars. It was like a six-hour sprint race!”

The race took on a different dimension altogether during Lotterer’s stint, the German lapping with metronomic consistency as mistakes began to creep in among the chasing pack. Lieb was fortunate to survive a huge moment at Stowe as he made an adjustment on his steering wheel, banging both elbows in the process as he managed just to pull the car back from the brink of oblivion, while both Mike Conway in the no. 2 Toyota and Oliver Jarvis in the no. 8 Audi suffered contact with GT cars that required attention on pitlane.  

Such was the gap Lotterer was able to pull out on the rest that even the late penalty call would not put pay to Audi’s perfect start to the season, although Toyota, forced into double-stinting to remain in contention, will be optimistic of a return to form at Spa, where they have tasted success in the past.

“I think it’s fair to say that the competition have definitely caught up, maybe overtaken,” admitted Davidson. “Hopefully when we get to some circuits where tyre-wear is a bit more critical than it is here at Silverstone then we can be in a position where we were last year, because our car is a bit kinder on tyres than most. This was never really a strong circuit for us, we’ve always seemed to struggle here and last year it’s fair to say we wouldn’t have won if it wasn’t for the changeable conditions. [If someone had offered us], I think we would have taken third, definitely.”

Toyota struggled at Silverstone, but were content with third (Adrenal Media)

LMP2 was a more straight-forward affair, as G-Drive Racing dominated from the first hour to record a 1-2 finish. Nick Tandy made a terrific start from third on the grid to usurp both front-row men and lead the opening lap on his first start for KCMG, but simply couldn’t live with the pace of the Ligiers on the first outing for the new Oreca 05 and soon dropped back to third, before radiator problems prompted a lengthy stay in the pits, yielding 19^th overall and fourth in class.

That left the way clear for Sam Bird, Roman Rusinov and Julien Canal to romp to a comfortable victory, while polesitters Pipo Derani, Gustavo Yacaman and Ricardo Gonzalez collected second.

“The race went according to plan for G-Drive. We knew that we had a very good package here at Silverstone and it went very, very well. The pitstops were very good, my team-mates drove exceptionally, I did my part and the result came,” said Bird. “There’s going to be tracks where our car isn’t suited to the circuit we’re at, so it’s important that when the car is suited to a given circuit that we make the most of it and that’s happened today, so I’m really delighted.”

“In the end it was a race for them; Sam did a really good job and he pulled a gap from the first two stints that we could never get back,” added Yacaman. “But I’m really happy with all my team-mates, we did a really good job considering we are like the rookies in this and we don’t have the experience Sam has got.  We have good confidence now, we know the car is strong and we’re all strong, so if we make no mistakes and keep running the way we’re running, then we can fight for the championship in the long run.”

Bruni and Vilander carried on where they left off
last season with a win in GTE-Pro (Adrenal Media)

With others hit by setbacks – Paul Loup Chatin’s Signatech Alpine lost a wheel at Copse and crashed, while Danny Watts spun the troublesome new Strakka Dome at the very first corner and had to recover from dead last – Extreme Speed Motorsports collected the final place on the rostrum to give Ryan Dalziel an ideal 33^rd birthday and a perfect swansong for the team’s venerable ARX 03b. Or so they thought. Late on Sunday evening, ESM were excluded from the results after failing a post-race technical inspection, which meant Strakka inherited an unlikely podium for their efforts.

In GTE-Pro, damper problems for Patrick Pilet and Fred Makowiecki allowed 2014 champions Gianmaria Bruni, Toni Vilander and AF Corse to carry on where they left off. However, Bruni was made to work hard for the win by none other than by team-mates James Calado and Davide Rigon, although they were eventually jumped for second in the final pitstops by the no. 91 Porsche Michael Christiansen and Richard Leitz. Polesitters Nicki Thiim, Christoffer Nygaard and sportscar debutant Marco Sorensen were a disappointed fourth in the no. 95 Aston Martin Racing Vantage, ahead of home hero Darren Turner and Stefan Mucke in fifth, after both were caught out by the early full-course yellow.

However, Aston Martin at least had a victory in GTE-Am to celebrate courtesy of the no. 98 driven by Pedro Lamy, Paul Dalla Lana and Mathias Lauda, despite having to pit for fuel with only a few minutes remaining. Ferraris rounded out the podium, with Rui Aguas, Emmanuel Collard and Francois Perrodo finishing a fine second for AF Corse, with Andrea Bertolini, Aleksey Basov, Victor Shaytar third for SMP.