Track Torque: Alonso helps end run of bad luck at Le Mans
It was gripping viewing, provided you could concentrate that long.
At last, Toyota has won Le Mans comprehensively after a long run of bad luck.
This time the only threat was the rivalry between the two cars themselves as, at one stage, they ran very close together for some time on the same lap.
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Fernando Alonso achieved his dream, together with Sebastien Buemi and Kazuki Nakajima, with the winning car covering 386 laps or 5 260 km in the 24 hours.
The second car driven by Kamui Kobayashi, Mike Conway and Jose Maria Lopez was two laps behind.
In third place was a French Rebellion powered by British V8 Gibson engine driven by Mathias Beche, Thomas Laurent and Gustavo Menezes, a further 12 laps behind.
The second Rebellion, driven by Neel Jani, André Lotterer and Bruno Senna was fourth a further lap back.
Porsche comfortably won both GT classes, the top GTE car finishing 17th overall, amongst the prototype cars and almost 50 other finishers.
The winning Toyota TS050 hybrid cars were powered by a 2.4-l twin turbo V6 and electric motors driving each pair of wheels.
Petrol and electric power was split equally at 500hp each so that the cars had a total of 1000hp going through the wheels.
The cars were very fast, extremely powerful machines that were supremely reliable for the event. Well done Toyota!
This coming weekend we will have the French Grand Prix at Le Castellet on the Paul Ricard circuit.
Sad in a way, but in the interest of safety the Mistral Straight which is again included, will have a chicane half way along its 1.9km length to slow the cars down. They should still get to about 330 km/h though!
It is 28 years since the track hosted a F1 race, which was won by Alain Prost in a Ferrari.
Similar in some ways to Canada, with two very high speed sections followed by slow corners, it is likely to be hard on brakes.
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The Ferrari pair of Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen should be closely matched by Mercedes drivers Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas while the Red Bull team of Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo will still be a bit down on top speed compared to the other two teams.
We can expect a hot race with a fairly large amount of tyre degradation unless it rains.
Either way it should be a very exciting proposition and great to be back at this wonderful venue.
The race this Sunday (24th) starts at 4pm, with qualifying this Saturday (23rd) at the same time.
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