We’ve long known that there will be at least five Danes to start at the year’s 24-hour race at Le Mans, and now it’s confirmed that another Dane is coming.
It’s, however, not for the 24-hour race itself, but in the support race Road to Le Mans, that runs their first race Thursday afternoon, while the second race will be run Saturday morning before the big race.
It will be 22 year-old Christian Stubbe Olsen, who will be driving for Ecurie Ecosse/Nielsen team in car number 76. He’ll share the car with Alex Kapadia, whom he also shares the car with in European Le Mans Series.
The field is a good mixture of Michelin Le Mans Cup competitors, which the race also counts for, and also a lot of European Le Mans Series cars as well as other series.
It will be a hard field with 41 LMP3 cars, that has among others the reigning ELMS LMP3 champions John Falb and Sean Rayhall, as well as the former Le Mans winner Richard Bradley, who will share the car with William Lok. The former Aston Martin Racing factory driver Andy Meyrick will be driving with his usual Michelin Le Mans Cup co-driver Eric de Doncker, just to name a few.
Photo: JJ Media
The field will also have prominent names, not necessarily with a motorsport background. Swedish actor Mikael Persbrandt will drive for SPV Racing, together with Mexican Ricardo Sanchez.
Besides the 42 LMP3 cars, there will also be 8 GT3 cars on the track, so there could be almost as much traffic as the main race. The dissimilarity is that the laptime difference between the cars, despite only having two classes, are much bigger. There is a huge difference on the experience level amongst the drivers, and in the race in 2017 there was a 28-second gap between the fastest and the slowest man in LMP3! There were “just” 20 seconds between the fastest and the slowest in GT3 class – and actually the slowest man in GT3 was faster than the slowest man in LMP3. So the drivers need to be really aware.
Last weekend, Christian Stubbe Olsen won race 1 in LMP3 Cup championship in England. The race was run at Donington Park, where the young Dane beat all the competitors. Also in his ELMS debut, he showed good potential, where he played a part in getting the car to finish ninth in the LMP3 category, with the previously mentioned Kapadia as well as Colin Noble as co-drivers.
Christian Stubbe Olsen will be in the car again in two weeks’ time, when the second round of European Le Mans Series is run at Monza in Italy.
