tyre carcass?
“It must have been. We looked back at the notes from race control and a couple of minutes before car #27 SMP car was reported going slow through that sector. I’ll speak to them at the next race but it seems to line up. Hitting a 9kg tyre carcass at 200mph is obviously going to do a fair bit of damage, but it definitely wasn’t an animal because there’d be blood, guts and all sorts!”
Some people were saying it was a cat. If it was that size I’d be notifying National Geographic!
“Personally I couldn’t see anything, because the on-board camera sits above me looking down onto the track whereas I have a much flatter view. Olivier Pla had just come out of the pits and was three seconds in front of me and he must have
missed it by an absolute whisker. It’s a shame because up until that point we’d had just one brake change and no other issues.”
You’ve obviously tested extensively and have acclimatised to sitting so far from the front of the car, but did the lights and glare at Le Mans force you to recalibrate your approach in traffic?
“Not really. I felt as the race went on you just feel very at home with it. We’re so strong under brakes and with top speed that judging (distance) became quite easy when you played to your strengths. But certainly the first time going around the outside the second right hander at Porsche Curves to pass a GT car that was a bit of a leap of faith, but once you’d done it once you recalibrate really fast.”
What’s the approach going to be for the
next races in Germany, China, Japan and the U.S.?
“We’ve got nine weeks off now so everything’s being put into boxes and sent back to America. At the moment everyone’s catching up on a bit of sleep; -my mechanics did an all-nighter the night before the race! I haven’t heard of a completely concrete plane, but we’ll be testing back in America, so I think we just need to keep learning and improving this year’s car.
The 2016 car’s already under way so attention is going into that, but we’ve also got a high-down-force kit coming soon for the more conventional circuits. I haven’t been to four of the next five tracks, so we’ll be learning this year and be back next year hopefully of a car capable of showing the others what we can do.”
Image: Nissan Motorsport