Stoffel Vandoorne says he's prepared as much as he could ahead of his Le Mans debut with SMP Racing.
Speaking to Motorsport Week, he explained he's done as much studying as he could ahead of the historic endurance race this weekend.
"Well, I’ve done my homework as much as I could," said Vandoorne. "I’ve watched a lot of onboards, I’ve managed to see how to deal with traffic, what I can do and can’t do, where to position the car and where to not position the car, how to deal with different situations, that’s kind of the only thing I can do. Because it’s my first experience, I can’t do a lot more."
The Belgian thinks the low downforce specification of his BR Engineering BR1-AER will prove the biggest difficulty in his debut:
"I think the fact that the car is running in a low downforce configuration makes it just tricky kind of everywhere, because the car is feeling very light, very low on downforce and very fast on the straight. So it’s very easy to just kind of overshoot it. You always think ‘I can go quicker, I can go quicker’, but when you actually do, it’s very hard to predict if the car is gonna stick or if it’s not gonna stick.
"Overtaking around here is different, dealing with traffic is different than it was in Spa, for example," Vandoorne continued. "We don’t have superior cornering speed to some of the LMP2 cars or even in the slow speed corners compared to GTs, so it’s very difficult for us to outbreak someone or overtake someone in the corners, so we rely more on the straight line speed now."
The Le Mans rookie also admitted he does not yet have any plans to stay with SMP Racing after Le Mans.
"No plans at the moment, no. My deal was just for Spa and Le Mans, which was a nice experience up until now, and I’m looking forward to experience this race here and have a lot of fun. I think it was kind of perfect to combine Formula E with a little bit of this program, but nothing it fixed yet."
"I can’t really tell much more, I don’t know what the situation is gonna be. In a way, yes I would like to continue."
"My Formula E program will always have priority, that’s my main program and where I put most of my focus, but in an ideal world I would like to combine it with WEC. We’ll see what opportunities come, I would say. There’s nothing decided, or there’s not been any real talks, let’s say."
Discussion about this post