French endurance racer Pierre Ragues has finished on the podium in his first ever GT race in the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC), completing the 6 Hours of Silverstone in third place in the competitive GTE-Am class.

 

Pierre, alongside team-mates Paolo Ruberti and Yutaka Yamagishi, battled hard around the famous British circuit in their Larbre Competition #50 Chevrolet Corvette C7-R to lay claim to a thrilling third place in the closing laps of the six-hour race.

 

The weather was the main talking point of the weekend up to qualifying with heavy snow falling on Silverstone on Saturday morning. The conditions meant that teams could not compete in FP3 – and were reliant on data accumulated during Friday’s practice sessions to prepare for the race. The team qualified third in class on a still green track on Saturday afternoon. 

 

Pierre was given the honours of starting the opening round of the 2016 season under sunny skies on Sunday. It was a tough start to the race with traffic making for some complicated opening laps. It became quickly apparent that the team had been too conservative with their tyre choice, overestimating the demands of the Silverstone Circuit, which is usually hard on tyres. Using the medium compound, however, proved to be too hard compared to those on the softer rubber, which prevented Pierre from making progress early on.

 

Handing over the car to Ruberti after 26 laps, the team switched to softer compound tyres, which gave better performance. Moving up through the class, the team was in third place when a crash for the race leading Porsche brought out a Full Course Yellow. A second incident later on with one of the Toyota cars with 2h44 remaining also led to a safety car period. The bad timing of these two incidents had an adverse effect on the team and resulted in them losing a lap overall to the leader.

 

Yamagishi maintained fifth position on his stint before handing back to Pierre. Running on a different strategy, Pierre had a strong run and kept the team in the hunt for a competitive finish. Problems for other GT cars were a welcome benefit against the team’s earlier misfortune and supported the team’s podium push. The final handover from Pierre to Paolo went smoothly and Paolo enjoyed a strong run to complete the job and take the podium result on behalf of the whole team.

 

Pierre said: “We could not have asked for a better result than a podium to start the season – and particularly for my first ever GT race with Larbre and Corvette. It has been a strange weekend with wet conditions, the snow on Saturday and lovely spring weather on race day. We didn’t have a smooth race but in the end we got a great result. I struggled on my first stint with traffic on the opening laps and then with a tyre compound that was too hard for the conditions. We found more performance when we switched to soft tyres for Paolo’s stint and could move up through the field. The FCY and safety car periods were unfortunately timed and really caught us out – in the end we lost around one lap because of that – and had to fight to regain some positions. My second stint late in the race was competitive and a lot of fun. I learned a lot about dealing with the traffic of the LMP cars and could really get into a good rhythm. I am overjoyed that we can celebrate a podium result together and I’m thankful to Larbre and to Corvette for an incredible car. I am happy for the team, myself and my partners GroupAuto, Sparco and E6 – and I hope this will allow us to build for the next race in Spa.”