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Wet qualifying brings more positives than negatives for Halliday |
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Tuesday, 19 June 2007 |
Despite wet conditions throughout both of Thursday’s qualifying sessions Liz Halliday, the only female driver to contest this weekend’s iconic Le Mans 24 Hours, was happy to draw on the positives.
After a heavy downpour before and during each two-hour session, none of the 54-car grid was able to improve the times they set on Wednesday, but the Del Bello Courage LC75 was consistently in the top five of the LMP2 time-sheets and ended the day fourth fastest in class with a time of 4:24.793.
Halliday, whose stint in the car during the second session coincided
with some of the heaviest rainfall of the day, admitted that, despite
the conditions, the car felt good in the wet, and was confident the
team had found a strong base set-up for the race.
“The car felt really good,” she said “It’s a safe car to drive in the
wet and that’s important. It’s very stable on the straights, which is
always helpful, and I think we’ve got a pretty good race car for these
conditions. My time in the car came during some very heavy rain, but in
a way I’m quite happy with that because it gives me a chance to learn
how it handles the very worst of the conditions. It was very wet in
sector one and a lot of cars were going off there so I just made sure I
did nothing silly. But to be fair, once you know where the standing
water is it wasn’t too bad.”
With the weather forecast changeable for the race, it’s looking
increasingly important to have a car set up to adapt between wet and
dry conditions, and Halliday thinks her Del Bello team could have found
that happy medium. “Unfortunately we made a couple of changes on
Wednesday that we wanted to try in the dry and never got the chance.
But I think we’ve got a good car which can be fast in all conditions.
Hopefully in the morning warm-up on Saturday we’ll have dry conditions
so we can test a couple of things, but to be honest we’re pretty much
where we want to be right now.”
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