In the qualification of the sixth round of the 2018-19 FIA World Endurance Championship season, SMP Racing car No.17 (Egor Orudzhev / Stephane Sarrazin / Sergey Sirotkin) showed the third result, while the BR1 sport prototype of the Russian team No.11 (Mikhail Aleshin / Vitaly Petrov / Brendon Hartley) became the fifth.
The best lap of Egor Orudzhev was 1: 41.919, which allowed the squad to climb to the third position in the results from qualifying. However, at the end of the qualification, the judges decided that SMP Racing car prevented Dragonspeed’s rivals from completing the fast lap and gave a penalty point. As a result, the car No. 17 will start from fourth position.
The average lap time of the car No.11 was 1:43.005, which separated them from teammates time only by 0.023 seconds.
Egor Orudzhev: “I drove a good lap. I must admit that at night it was not easy to race, but I think we did pretty good. I had little experience driving along the track at night, so during the training session, I asked the team to give me one more segment at the end of the session. I think this helped a lot in qualifying. I made a plan for myself how I would drive this lap, and followed my ideas. It turned out well. There will definitely be a serious fight in the race.”
Mikhail Aleshin: “We had a little traffic and I can say that we were both in a similar situation with Stephane. This happened because we were driving at the beginning of the session, right after the qualification of the GT cars. They left a lot of sand, so we had to, so to say, roll out the track. The team took into account these factors, and the second stint of the drivers markedly improved the results. It’s great that we made a strong competition for Rebellion and we will start from the fourth and fifth positions.”
Source. SMP Racing
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