Michelin ‘Ready for Le Mans’

Michelin scored another win in the Le Mans Series at the weekend, with taking the Peugeot-Total-Michelin team the chequered flag in Monza. The cars, driven by, Stéphane Sarrazin and Pedro Lamy, ended up winning after what company representatives described as “a real ding-dong battle with the No. 2 Audi [of] Mike Rockenfeller at the wheel.” The No. 17 Pescarolo (Tinseau / Primate) finished third.

For Michelin, the Monza race proved to be the perfect testing ground to validate tyres in preparation for the Le Mans 24 Hours. Matthieu Bonardel, Director of Four-wheel Competition commented: “Firstly, we want to wish a speedy recovery to Stéphane Ortelli from the Oreca team, who suffered an incredible “off” today and we hope to see him on the circuits again soon. With regards tyres, this race was by no means easy. The Monza circuit is highly specific and the evolution of the track today was quite strong. While there was a definite phenomenon of understeer in all categories during practice, it was not the case in the race…The only disappointment for us was because we failed to find a solution to double-stint and gain time. We tried both with medium and hard compounds, but we soon found that the mediums lost on performance over time, while the hards didn’t have the performance to start with.

“As we gear up for the 24 Hours of Le Mans, this gives us a certain amount of peace of mind about the possibility of our medium and soft compounds to go for two stints or even more. We will have to wait for the test sessions in La Sarthe to decide on the hard tyres.”

Bruno Famin – Peugeot Technical Director commented: “We are obviously very happy with the result today. Regarding the Michelin tyres, everything went perfectly smoothly. We opted for a strategy of double-stinting and we saw no drop-off in performance at the end of the second stint. We are therefore very confident for the coming Le Mans 24 Hours race and in Michelin’s ability to provide us with tyres that offer both performance and endurance.”