The Honda Endurance Racing team will start the 12-hour EWC race at Portimão’s Autodromo do Algarve from 14th position, after a challenging second qualifying session around the spectacular 4.592km circuit located on the south western edge of Portugal.
After finishing ninth in yesterday’s first qualifying, this morning’s session began with a setback as Julien Da Costa had a small crash at turn 5 during his first flying lap. The Honda CBR1000RR Fireblade SP suffered no damage and the 34-year-old endurance specialist was able to make his way back to the pits; the team performed a quick check for further damage, before the Frenchman was able to get back on track. Due to the time lost, Da Costa was unable to finish higher than 16th.
It was then Sébastien Gimbert’s time to get out on track for his 20 minutes of qualifying: the former French Superbike Champion was running in twelfth place and improving lap by lap, before a red flag with four minutes to go broke his momentum.
Freddy Foray was the last of the Honda Endurance Racing trio to get on track: the 31-year-old from Sèvres pushed his Fireblade machine into the top 10 by setting his fastest lap of qualifying in 1’47.952.
With the overall average time calculated by using each rider’s quickest lap time in qualifying, it means the Honda Endurance Team will start tomorrow’s 12-hour race – which is scheduled to begin at 9:30 local time (GMT +1) – from 14th place.
Freddy Foray 111It looks like we lost a bit of direction today; we weren’t able to keep improving and put together a competitive lap-time. We tried different things on the bike, which unfortunately didn’t work out the way we wanted. The team worked really hard but so far it hasn’t paid off. Tomorrow will be a completely different scenario but we need to find something in warm up that can allow us to make that step forward we need. We’re not where we’d like to be but I’m confident we can still turn things around.
Sébastien Gimbert 111This is obviously not the result we were hoping for. For some reason we haven’t been able so far to put together the right set-up to be fast over a single lap. The team is evaluating some changes for tomorrow that we will try during the warm up to see if we can improve a little. We’re not losing hope and we’re quite sure that the race will be a whole lot different, so what matters now is to stay focused. Portimão is a very demanding track and, first of all, we need to be perfectly comfortable on the bike, otherwise the race can turn into a very long one.
Julien Da Costa 111This was a difficult day for us: it was nothing major with the bike, we were simply unable to be quick over a single lap. There’s still a lot of work to do ahead of the race but I think we are in a better position than our qualifying would suggest. We need to stay relaxed and keep or focus on the whole length of the race as this is where we can really make a difference.
Jonny Twelvetrees Assistant team managerWe didn’t get as high in position as we would have hoped today in qualifying; we are still looking for a quick lap time which, unfortunately, didn’t come to us. This is of course a little disappointing. On the bright side, our overall average lap-time – taken from every single lap completed by our riders – shows that our pace is good and very consistent and we hope this will count tomorrow. The goal is to climb up the order and get back to the sharp end of the field.
