Silverstone, 13 September 2008 – The Spyker Laviolette’s will start from a 6th and 10th position in tomorrow’s ‘Autosport 1000 km of Silverstone’, the last round in this year’s Le Mans Series race season. The weekend started for the Dutch team with two free-practice sessions on Friday. Although the first free practice session was held in dry conditions, the two remaining sessions were completed on a damp track.
The performance and handling of the C8 Laviolette in the wet was great. In the early stages of the second free practice session Tom Coronel, driving the #85 SNORAS Spyker Squadron car, was one of the quickest drivers out on the track. At one point he was faster than many prototypes. Tom joined Squadron regulars Ralf Kelleners and Alexei Vasiliev as Peter Dumbreck races in the Japanese Super GT this weekend.
Although it stopped raining this morning the conditions did not improve a lot and the track was still wet. Most of the cars, including the Spyker’s, went out on wet tires to continue their quest for the best possible race setup. As the track became dryer teams switched to intermediates or slicks and times continued to improve right until the end of the last practice session. Peter van Erp, managing director Spyker Squadron: “In the rain we were one of the teams to beat. We could quickly find a setup that worked well for us. This morning we continued with this softer setup but towards the end of the session, when the track got dryer, this caused our cars to oversteer a bit”.
This afternoon, in the 20 minute GT qualifying session, Andrea Chiesa set the 10th quickest time in the #94 Speedy Racing Team car he shares with Benjamin Leuenberger. Andrea: “Predictions for tomorrow are dry so it is a bit frustrating that we did not have enough time to finalise the setup for the race tomorrow. To get out for qualifying with a car that is not perfectly setup and directly drive on the limit of your skills is tough. Maybe I could have found another second but I did not want to take too much risk”.
Ralf Kelleners qualified the #85 SNORAS Spyker Squadron car. He managed to set the 6th best time in class. “I am happy with today’s qualifying result but for now we have always had a good balance for the race” said Ralf after the race. “This time we had limited practice time due to yesterday’s rain and the setup for tomorrow’s race is not yet perfect. So we will make some changes overnight and I hope that we will have a bit more grip at the rear for the race tomorrow”.
The race will start at 11:20 tomorrow and will be covered live by radiolemans.com and Eurosport.