Vaillante Rebellion will start the 24 Hours of Le Mans from fourth and fifth place on the LMP2 grid on Saturday afternoon after good laps from Bruno Senna in the #31 and Mathias Beche in the #13 during qualifying.
Senna put the car he shares with Julien Canal and Nicolas Prost fourth in class after a quickest lap of 3:26.736s, with the sister car of Beche, Nelson Piquet Jr and David Heinemeier Hansson a further 0.075 seconds back in fifth.
“It’s a great position to start the 24 Hours of Le Mans,” said Senna, who is competing in his fifth 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2017. “The team did a great job today and we had a great and consistent car which is really good on the tyres.
“Qualifying is always a bit of surprise, you have traffic and lots of things can happen. I’m really happy with our performance and I’m sure we can do very interesting things from 4th on the grid.”
Beche was equally happy with fifth and although pipped at the end by Senna, he feels both cars are in a good position to have a good 24-hour race.
“First of all I would like to thank the team for the work they’ve done, because out of 25 cars, to get these two cars in the top 5 is really a huge achievement and will allow us to approach the race in the best way,” said Beche. “It’s important to start at the front in Le Mans as to not fall behind and play for the leading positions right away.
“As for qualifying, I am a little frustrated because we didn’t manage to have a clean run and I had to slow down on my fastest lap because of a yellow flag, which made me lose time but I still managed to finish a good lap so that’s the most important thing.
“We have a very good working base for the race, the car seems very consistent and that’s what will make the difference with reliability. Let the number 13 of Michel Vaillant bring us luck!”
