Porsche returned to the top of the timing screens at Bahrain this morning as the teams took part in a final hour of Free Practice running before the important qualifying sessions later today in preparation for the Bapco 6 Hours of Bahrain tomorrow.
Brendon Hartley laid down an early lap of 1m40.917s in the No.17 Porsche 919 Hybrid and the New Zealander's effort, which was 1.2s faster than Marcel Fassler’s best from last night’s session, was not bettered in the 60-minute session this morning.
Making it another Porsche 1-2, the No.18 Porsche 919 Hybrid driven by Marc Lieb, Romain Dumas and Neel Jani appeared to continue to work on tyre strategies in the session. Lieb set the second best time of 1m42.070s this morning.
Audi placed third and fourth with Marcel Fassler’s 1m43.066s lap bettering the 1m43.782s of Oliver Jarvis in the No.8 Audi R18 e-tron quattro.
Toyota Racing once again registered fifth and sixth positions with the Anthony Davidson driven No.1 Toyota TS 040 just out-pacing the sister No.2 car, in which Alex Wurz set the fastest time as he prepares to bow out from his wonderful 23-year racing career this weekend.
Signatech continued to show sparkling current form as Paul-Loup Chatin claimed the top position in LMP2 with the Alpine A450b-Nissan on a 1m52.019s lap. The French youngster set the time early in the session and although it came under threat from the KCMG ORECA 05-Nissan, the Shanghai-winning car stayed on top of the pile.
The title leading G-Drive Racing Ligier-Nissan finished the session third with Sam Bird setting a 1m52.564s lap. Bird, who shares the car with Roman Rusinov and Julien Canal, know that a fourth place finish in the race tomorrow will be good enough to seal the LMP2 titles.
The Team ByKolles CLM 01/P1-AER managed to head the privateer LMP1 times for the first time this weekend as Pierre Kaffer’s 1m48.696s was not beaten by the two Rebellion R-One-AER machines.
The session this morning saw a brief Full Course Yellow period to retrieve the damper hatch bodywork of the Strakka Racing Gibson 015S which had become detached from the car and settled on the track.
There were several spins this morning including gyrations for Nicolas Prost in the No.12 Rebellion, Gianluca Roda in the Larbre Corvette C7.R and Pierre Kaffer in the ByKolles CLM P1/01-AER.
The qualifying sessions for the Bapco 6 Hours of Bahrain are scheduled to begin at 17.00 this evening.
All results from the two practice sessions so far can be found HERE
