The #47 Villorba Corse LMP2 team will take the start of the 24 Hours of Le Mans after readying their Dallara P217 chassis in time following its crash during Qualifying on Thursday evening.
The chassis survived the impact intact as Giorgio Sernagiotto suffered a suspension failure approaching the first Mulsanne Straight chicane, which pitched him into a spin that also saw him briefly go airborne before coming to a rest.
The session was red flagged as a result of the incident and not restarted as the marshals cleared up the debris, and the incident left the mechanics with a lot of work to do in order to prepare the car for the legendary twice-around-the-clock race at the Circuit de la Sarthe, that begins on Saturday afternoon.
Villorba Corse were forced to wait for a shipment of bodywork panels to be delivered from Dallara’s Italian base, but the work was carried out in time to allow the car Sernagiotto shares with Roberto Lacorte and Felipe Nasr to participate in Saturday morning’s warm-up session.
Nasr had qualified the car twelfth in the LMP2 class, but was more than three seconds off the pace of the class pole-setters Paul Lafargue, Paul-Loup Chatin and Memo Rojas in the #48 IDEC Sport Oreca, and the Brazilian feels the Oreca and Ligier cars may be out of reach to them in the race.
“We are struggling especially in the medium-high speed corners, because as soon as we try to bring some speed into the corner, we just don’t have enough front downforce,” Nasr is quoted as saying by Motorsport.com.
“They’ve done their joker already on the front splitter, but it’s clearly not enough. I’m sure people who look after that, they know what’s going on and hopefully they can do something.”
