Pierre Ragues and the G-Drive by Signatech-Nissan team have accumulated almost 70 laps during today’s first two sessions for this weekend’s 80^th Le Mans 24 Hours race. 

The traditional Wednesday running was split into two separate sessions with the four hour afternoon practice treated as a free practice session and two hours of evening track time to give teams the first opportunity to set qualifying times.

For Pierre and G-Drive by Signatech-Nissan, however, the focus was on improving the base of their Nissan-powered Oreca 03 car and enduring firm foundations were laid for the rest of the week. Pierre completed a run on new tyres in the afternoon, setting the second fastest time in LMP2, which he retained for much of the session. The Frenchman did not use any new Dunlop tyres in the evening session as the team worked on car set-up ahead of tomorrow’s two sessions.

Pierre took over from his team-mate Nelson Panciatici in the first session gathering important data following a slight gravel trap excursion by Panciatici early on. He handed over the Roman Rusinov while running second in LMP2 after a new tyre run, demonstrating the performance potential of the car.

The evening session was slightly more disjointed after running was interrupted by a required change to the engine motor and some gearbox problems that ended the team’s session prematurely. Considering the overcast and windy weather conditions, and the green nature of the track on this opening day, the team will nonetheless be pleased to have accumulated plenty of laps in preparation for more work tomorrow.

Pierre Ragues said: “After a few days of fantastic ambience and build-up with the scrutineering and autograph session, it was good to get some track action today, even if our evening session was cut slightly shorter than planned. Our focus has been really to sort out any immediate teething problems with the car and to continue the work on base set-up and tyre evaluation that we carried out at the official test. I completed some good laps and could feel that the car has real potential but we have more to do tomorrow. I did just a new tyre run in the afternoon, so we have saved some work in this area for tomorrow. We had a slight issue with the gearbox which stopped us early but we’ll work hard overnight in preparation for tomorrow, and I still feel confident we have more to find.”