24h Le Mans
As at the Rolex 24 at Daytona in late January, several 24 Hours of Le Mans winners will take the start at the 66th edition of the 12 Hours of Sebring - second round of the 2018 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship season - this coming Saturday.
Of the five previous 24 Hours winners, only one will be a contender to overall victory on March 17th: Romain Dumas (victor at Le Mans in 2010 with Audi and in 2016 with Porsche). Still under contract with the German marque, the French driver will once again represent CORE autosport, the team Porsche counts on for its North American GT program. Additionally, the American outfit will field an ORECA LMP2 (#54) in Prototype, the top class comprised of DPis and LMP2s in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship.
Third at the Rolex 24 at Daytona in January, Romain Dumas - set to compete at this year's 24 Hours of Le Mans with Porsche in LMGTE Pro and at Pikes Peak with Volkswagen - will not be joined by Loïc Duval for this race as he was at Daytona. Not including Duval, the previous Le Mans winners on the entry list for Sebring have all done Daytona.
Romain Dumas' former teammate at the 2010 edition of Le Mans, Mike Rockenfeller, will take the wheel of the #3 Chevrolet Corvette along with Jan Magnussen and Antonio Garcia. Another Audi driver, three-time Le Mans winner Marcel Fässler, will share the #4 sister car with Oliver Gavin and Tommy Milner.
The two drivers in the GTLM class (GT Le Mans, otherwise known as LMGTE Pro) will do battle with Earl Bamber, Le Mans winner in 2015 and 2017, and his 2015 teammate Nick Tandy, both representing the official Porsche team at the wheel of a 911 RSR.
The four men will take on the driver line-up that claimed the top step on the LMGTE Pro class podium at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2016 with Ford: Joey Hand, Dirk Müller and Sébastien Bourdais, recent winner of the opening round of the IndyCar Series, the American single-seaters championship. In the GTLM class, most of the drivers will take the start at the 86th edition of the 24 Hours of Le Mans on June 16th since every manufacturer active in the U.S. - Chevrolet Corvette, Ferrari, Porsche, Ford and BMW - will make the trip to Le Mans.
All drivers will hit the track on Thursday at 11:20 a.m. local time for the first one-hour free practice, then at 3:10 p.m. for the second session before taking part in the night session (in which all rookies must participate under penalty of being prohibited from any night stint during the race) at 7:35 p.m.
After a warm-up of one hour on Friday at 8:00 a.m. local time, drivers chosen by their teams will take part in qualifying beginning at 12:30 p.m., then hit the track on Saturday, March 17th at 8:00 a.m. for a 20-minute warm-up and prepare for the start of the race to be given at 10:40 a.m. local time (2:40 p.m. in the U.K.).
Watch the race live and in full at IMSA.TV (outside the U.S.) starting at 10:30 a.m. local time (2:30 p.m. in the U.K.) on Saturday.
PHOTO (Copyright - Richard Dole/LAT Images/IMSA): Four of the five 24 Hours of Le Mans winners will be competing in the GTLM class at the 12 Hours of Sebring, pictured here during the official testing sessions in February.
