Alpine Endurance reserve driver Jules Gounon told MotorsportWeek.com that the Alpine A424 LMDh car is much stiffer than what he’s used to in GT cars, and subsequently he’s had to adapt his driving style as a result.
“Let’s say of all the LMDh, when you see the behaviour on track, we are very stiff and so on,” said the Frenchman in an interview with MotorsportWeek.com.
Gounon has replaced Ferdinand Habsburg in the #35 Alpine A424. The Austrian fractured two lumbar vertebrae in his back in a test at Motorland Aragon, for this weekend’s 6 Hours of Imola, the second round of the 2024 FIA World Endurance Championship. Gounon will duly drive the car at Imola alongside his teammates Charles Milesi and Paul Loup Chatin.
He continued, “So it’s also harder for me to kind of feel no roll at all. In a GT, the car is laying over, pitching a lot, and so on. So it’s something I’m learning every lap, I try to put myself in a sponge mode to learn and try to feed my experience in.”
That stiffness has meant a change in driving style has been required, as Gounon, a factory Mercedes-AMG GT3 driver with many race and championship wins under his belt, learns more about the A424 with every lap he completes around Imola.
“It’s a bit different [to GT] because you feel the car a bit less.
“So sometimes you feel you are there and then it snaps suddenly where you didn’t expect it, where in GT, it would come much more slowly, so you see it coming.
“So sometimes you gain some confidence, then you have a moment and you lose a bit of confidence, but so far it was still a good start of the weekend for me. Trying to fill Ferdinand’s shoes is quite difficult, he’s a very good driver and so I’m trying my best and that’s what I’m aiming for.”
This isn’t the first time Gounon’s driven the A424, as he related in our chat.
“I had a, let’s say, first taste of the car at Barcelona, where I did 30 laps, to try to learn about the process and so on in February.
“And then I did a few stint in the endurance test they had in Motorland [Aragon]. So there it was my second time getting in the car, but I could see also yesterday I arrived in the car, everything comes so fast compared to the GT, you’re very tense, everything feels not so natural for me, especially with so little preparation.
“But already this morning, when I went back in the car I felt a step in terms of comfort, in the car.
“When you drive at the beginning, everything is new. You need to change the procedure, the braking points are different. You arrive 50 kilometre an hour quicker, you drive to 10 to 12 seconds quicker than GT.
“So there’s a lot of information to try to to get in and adapt. I think the more you do it the more natural it becomes, and also the more clean you drive, and that’s where the lap time comes.”
Traffic management is a big topic in Imola, but with extensive experience in GTs, Gounon felt this may help him.
“I think so. But still my main GT experience was always GT3 which is based on ABS car and for me right now, I’m a bit more scared, you know, to lock the wheel and hit a GT. That’s what I’m not looking to do, so at the moment, I’m pretty safe in the traffic again.
“We see in qualifying, we have some work to do for for the race, even if we collected a lot of data which which are positive. But, you know it’s not like if we are leading the 24 Hours of Le Mans and you need to be very aggressive on traffic, so we are there to learn – the driver and the team – and that’s what we are doing.
Alpine qualified 17th and 18th in qualifying, giving Gounon and his teammates work to do in order to score points, something Milesi, Habsburg and Chatin achieved in Qatar, the A424’s debut race.
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