Arthur Rogeon spent five weeks of enforced rest before learning, three days before the event, that he would be able to participate in Road to Le Mans, on the big 24 Hours of Le Mans circuit! But the flagship event of the Michelin Le Mans Cup did not produce the anticipated results for the crew of the CD Sport team’s #30 Duqueine in a difficult context which, nevertheless, allowed Arthur to come away from his experience in La Sarthe with some positives.
On Wednesday June 10, the crash at Paul Ricard was nothing more than a bad memory for Arthur installed in the cockpit of his LMP3 prototype for the first free practice session. Time to compete! The meeting began with two 30-minute sessions disrupted by several interruptions and some technical issues for Arthur and his teammate, Thomas Imbourg. “The red flag ended the first session when I had barely covered half a lap. In the second, I started first and was able to rack up more kilometres, but like the 24-Hours drivers, we suffered from an invasion of midges that plastered themselves on the windshield considerably reducing visibility. Therefore, finding our bearings was very difficult, if not impossible, especially with the setting sun. In addition, we already clearly had a problem with top speed.”
What can be said about qualifying, except that it didn’t really take place! Only 4 drivers out of 116 were credited with a time, and the stewards of the meeting took the decision to attribute positions on the starting grids according to the results of free practice, which didn’t please the drivers of the #30, who inherited 18th and 16th places.
On Thursday evening, Arthur and Thomas tackled Race 1 with minimal prior driving experience. Given that they were almost 6 km/h slower than the fastest car on the straight – 290.8 km/h against 296.6 km/h – it was difficult to hope for better than 16thin the LMP3 category. The positive side of an outing that turned into a full-scale test session was the collection of useful data for problem solving. “During Friday’s ‘off’’ day, we spent more than two hours looking at the data and the engine engineers intervened, which brought significant progress.”
In race 2, Arthur posted the fastest top speed with 295.6 km/h as well as the seventh-fastest time! The driver from Laval put on an aggressive display in his attempts to try and fight his way back into the points, but he was penalised for overtaking before the line in an attempt to avoid contact. He also spun while overtaking. Thomas spent most of his stint behind the safety car, which prevented him from climbing higher than 13th in the LMP3 category.
Even so, Arthur drew lessons from a hectic week: “It’s satisfying to see that we made progress, but we were starting from a long way back due to our various issues and the lack of practice. I didn’t have the time to prepare as I would have liked, but I’m happy to be back racing. I also discovered a circuit that was very different from what I knew. Being on bumpy, cambered secondary roads from Tertre Rouge to the Porsche curves means that you have to stay 100% focused, even on the straights! You have to constantly correct your trajectory. We have to keep working, and tests are planned for this summer before the next race on August 22 and 23 at Spa-Francorchamps.”
