Valencia: Pierre Ehret race report

Fast Pierre Ehret raised speculations - Rank four at Valencia

It was a very successful second round of the Le Mans Series for Pierre Ehret and his Team Farnbacher Racing at spanish Valencia. With rank four and being second best Porsche in GT category one returned home from Spain. Moreover one drove the fastest lap time of the category.

"I think, that we can be really happy with our fourth position ", explained Ehret after the race. Already in free practice the driver trio Pierre Ehret, Dirk Werner and Lars-Erik Nielsen and their "Flamingo Resort Hotel"-Porsche 997 GT3 RSR were quick on the track, improving from session to session. After rank eight in the first session, one improved to fourth and finally ended third in the last training.

"None of us knew the 4.005 kilometres long circuit of Valencia before. But we came to grips with it soon and were well-prepared." Optimistic the team started for qualifying on Saturday afternoon and after the 20 minutes session one reached the first starting row. With a time of 1:36.848 one drove second best time of the 17 cars comprising grid. "Maybe pole position was possible too, since we only were about 0.1 second behind", stated Ehret.

The 1.000 km race started sunday at 13.30 and the current Porsche Carrera Cup champion Dirk Werner drove the first stint. Partly he was classified on top, but later handed over the car to Pierre Ehret on rank three. The latter had major problems with his set of Pirelli tyres. "I had really bad oversteering and the car was difficult to control." Struggling with the performance of his car he handed over to his teammate Nielsen being in fifth position.

For the last 50 minutes of the race Pierre Ehret took a seat again, going out with new tyres. "We knew that some of the other teams would not have a stop any more and so we were well aware of loosing positions." But Pierre really rocked the boat and drove his very best race in the Le Mans Series this far, deriving consistently the same times as the top drivers . Speculations were raised by one of the leading teams if Pierre was indeed in the car and not their top gun driver Dirk Werner. This led that far, that Xavier Pompidou of the winning team Felbermayr-Proton did an official protest. The race officials visited the Farnbacher pits, verifiying that it was not Dirk Werner who was driving the car instead! But Werner stood in front of the timing-screens observing Pierre's fast laps. "This protest is a great compliment I am a little proud of. In fact everything worked perfectly and if the race would have lasted a few laps longer I surely could have been able to attack the third placed Ferrari Alex Caffi."

Unfortunately this was not to be and one finally ended up 2.5 seconds behind the third placed car. Nevertheless one can be happy with the result. "We lost ten seconds, due to replacing the front window. So that puts the seconds we ended up behing the third placed into a different perspective.

With this result the team again underlined, that one belongs to the top teams. The third round of the LMS will be held at Nürburgring on 29th June to 1st July and will be some kind of home race for Ehret. Here he wants to reach podium.

An interesting news can be reported aside the track: Pierre Ehret will drive a Porsche 997 of the italian Autolando Sport team with Allan Simonsen and Lars-Erik Nielsen during the 24 hours of Le Mans (16./17. June). The next weekend he will start for PZ Inntal during the season start of the Porsche Sports Cup at Hockenheim.

-credit: motorsport-xl.de