We arrived at Arnage just before 9 pm
and parked in the nearest car park, just a minute or so walk from the Arnage
entrance. Due to our early arrival we were able to have a leisurely dinner, which
just had to be a sandwich Americaine
merguez for me!
We had brought our chairs with us and set up at the top of
the bank near to the big screen. This is one of my favourite points of the
weekend. I love the atmosphere at Indianapolis/Arnage, especially as the
cars set off for that first lap. You can hear them approaching from
miles away, all the way down the Mulsanne and then from Mulsanne Corner before
they burst into sight from Indianapolis. It's something I like to capture
on video as one of the real highlights! It was really good - we were
well-fed, comfortable in our chairs (the rain had long gone by now) and it was
just the perfect place to be.
We watched the full session
from here, but in truth, all of the explosive action occurred in the first two
laps for Porsche. I hadn't even got my headphones on to start listening to
the commentary, but when I saw James and Tony exchanging incredulous looks I
knew that something spectacular was happening. Porsche had of course
turned the wick right up from the outset, setting out their stall immediately
with an astonishing 3m 16.887 lap by Neel Jani in the #18 car. Although an
Audi did eventually get into the high 19's, I think we all realised at that
point that the battle for pole in LMP1 was already pretty much done and dusted.
The disappointments, even at
this early stage in the proceedings had to be the two Japanese teams, Toyota and
Nissan. After clearly being the fastest car last year the Toyotas were
left struggling to even get near their 2014 times, while the Audis and Porsches
had already totally eclipsed Toyota's pole time from last year by a massive
margin. Nissan by contrast, were uncompetitive, struggling with a brand
new car - and a brand new concept - with little (if any) hybrid power available
and which appeared to have all the handling of a house brick. By the end
of the session all three Nissans were propping up LMP1, beaten by the leading
LMP2 car, their best effort over 20 seconds off of Porsche and even 7 seconds
behind the slower of the two Rebellions. I'm honest enough to admit that I
really enjoyed seeing the Nissans out there as they brought something completely
different to the race, but even at this early stage it was looking like a pretty
grim uphill battle for them to take anything at all from the experience, no
matter how well Darren Cox talked up their performance.
The session ended with Porsche
1-2-3, Audi 4-5-6 and Toyota 7-8. And the overwhelming feeling was that
even though we still had another 4 hours of qualifying to go tomorrow, this
order of things probably wasn't going to change much, if at all.
You'll see that there are only
a limited number of photographs from the session. I didn't take any still
pictures at all while there was still some light, preferring instead to
concentrate on some video. Rather embarrassingly, it turned out that the
one piece of video I shot on my iPhone was much better than that I took on my
camcorder! As always though, I couldn't resist the temptation
to try a few shots with the camera once it was dark. The failure rate, as
always, was virtually 100%, but I've included a few shots for the sake of it.
As I've probably said far too many times before already, it is nigh-on
impossible to take decent shots as a spectator from between Indianapolis and
Arnage (unless you have an insanely fast lens and an insanely huge bank balance
with which to buy one) as the fencing there is so obtrusive. You're left
shooting at distance at the cars as the power away from Arnage corner itself.
At the
end of the session we made our way back to the car for the journey back to base,
getting there at about 1 am.
