Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsLe Mans

Solid start for Hulkenberg at Le Mans

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Nico Hulkenberg's debut Le Mans 24 Hours for Porsche got off to a solid start in Wednesday's free practice session.

The Force India driver is competing at Le Mans in the third Porsche 919 entry, driving alongside Earl Bamber and Nick Tandy in the #19 car. Having raced in the Canadian Grand Prix on Sunday, Hulkenberg was back at Le Mans at the start of the week and ended practice with the fourth quickest time, 1.4s off the pace of the lead #17 Porsche driven by Timo Bernhard, Brendon Hartley and Mark Webber.

Porsche filled three of the top four positions in the four-hour session, which was punctuated by rain showers and two red flag periods, the second of which was the result of the #48 Murphy Prototypes Oreca 03R-Nissan being driven by Mark Patterson - alongside Nathanael Berthon and former HRT driver Karun Chandhok - hitting the barrier at the Porsche Curves.

The #8 Audi of Lucas di Grassi, Loic Duval and Oliver Jarvis managed to get among the Porsches with the second fastest time, ending the session 0.5s adrift, while the #18 Porsche (Romain Dumas, Neel Jani and Marc Lieb) was third fastest having seen its quickest time deleted when Jani cut the chicane at the end of the lap.

Hulkenberg is the first active F1 driver to take part at Le Mans since Sebastien Bourdais finished second for Peugeot in 2009 when he was still racing for Toro Rosso. The German finished sixth in his debut World Endurance Championship (WEC) race at Spa last month.

Former Marussia driver Max Chilton is also taking part in his first Le Mans as the Nissan LMP1 project makes its WEC debut. All three front wheel drive Nissan GT-R LM Nismo entries were slower than one LMP2 car, with Chilton's #23 car - which he will share with Jann Mardenborough and Olivier Pla - ending the session 13th fastest, 19 seconds off the pace.

Wednesday night will see the first qualifying practice session take place from 2200 - 0000 local time, (2100 - 2300 BST) before two further two-hour sessions on Thursday evening.

Click here for a more light-hearted look at some of the images from the Canadian Grand Prix

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.