21 October 2026 – Press release Arthur Rogeon
Michelin Le Mans Cup LMP3, round 6, Portimao, 9 – 10 October 2026
The season ended on the grandiose Portimao circuit for the drivers in the Michelin Le Mans Cup. In 2026, Arthur Rogeon consolidated his stature as a coming man in endurance racing thanks to several stunning performances in LMP3: pole position and victory in Road to Le Mans, as well as two second places. What the driver from Laval, France achieved at Portimao gave him the runner-up spot and he also left his mark even when success wasn’t on his side. He is now ready to take on other challenges!
Arthur and his team-mate, August Raber, didn’t have only moments of joy in Portugal. In fact, the start of the meeting generated a few worries in the #12 Brutal Fish by Campos Ligier’s cockpit. “In free practice we were way off the pace. We had issues with the car so we tested different setup solutions until we realised that we had a defective damper, which prevented us from finding the right path to follow for the chassis adjustments.”
If you know the Portimao circuit with its gradients and vertiginous long corners, you can see that the quality of the dampers plays a major role in the driver’s confidence and the lap times. “So we found ourselves having to fit four new dampers and springs for qualifying without knowing how the car was going to react” Arthur explains. For the final race, Raber was entrusted with qualifying the car for the first time this season. Overall, he did a pretty good job given the circumstances setting the 12th-quickest time. The car was fine-tuned before the race and the Swede made a brilliant start. “At Portimao, the first string of corners is often dangerous, but August didn’t put a foot wrong. There was a collision at the front of the field while the pole sitter spun. August was able to go pedal to the metal round the outside and he was in fourth place by the third corner which is the first really heavy braking zone. He did his whole stint in this position in the wake of the team’s other car.”
it looked like the battle for second place in the championship would be fought out between the #19 and 12 Ligiers, the Brutal Fish by Campos’s two cars, which stopped at the same time to refuel after around an hour’s racing during an FCY neutralisation. “I left the pits just behind #19, which I passed immediately on cold tyres in the third corner. We scrapped with another Ligier that soon broke down and I tried to catch the Champion’s Duqueine at the beginning of my stint. But the fact that we were unable to optimise the setups in free practice penalised our race pace as much as our performance in qualifying.” So the Top 3 in the championship stayed in the same order until the finish, with Arthur managing to pull away from his sister car and secure second place at the chequered flag.
Arthur’s final words after the race were for all those who participated in making his season a success: “I’m very happy to have been able to work with Brutal Fish by Campos this year. They were making their debut in sport-prototype racing and they did a really great job. In addition, both cars were in the mix and duked it out at the front. I’d also like to thank my family and my partners without whom none of this would have been possible.”
Photo by Mihnea Tatu / European Le Mans Series
