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Stephen Kilbey 10 hours ago After a tough start to the season for CEFC TRSM Racing — including financial difficulties that forced them to sit out the season opener at Spa — the entire team is upbeat ahead of the competitive debuts for its Ginetta G60-LT-P1s at Le Mans next weekend.Team Principal Graeme Lowdon told
RACER he’s keen to praise his crew who, with support from Ginetta, have worked immensely hard to ensure that its cars are as ready as they can be for Le Mans.
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He’s confident that with the amount of track time on offer during the week, the team can make big strides before the race.“We’re really pleased that we’re moving forward” he said. “You can see from the other non-hybrid teams, that you can make a big difference after only a short amount of running. But we’re not trying to focus too much on pace at this stage because there’s a lot more we need to tick off the list.“It’s a one-and-a-half-year season, with two Le Mans and so there’s still a lot to discover. We’ve got some good people together, a good base package, but now we need to move forward. If we can get in the mileage we want, during next year’s race, we’ll learn a great deal too. We have to keep learning. This is just an epic race, which we have huge respect for.”The G60-LT-P1s will be in a slightly different aerodynamic configuration for race week than they were at the Test Day, though Lowdon was coy on any specific details, explaining that the team isn’t calling it a “low-downforce package.”“The car will kind of [be in a low-drag kit], but you have to remember we haven’t run the car much at all, so to be low downforce it means you have to be lower than something else. Yes, it’s going to be lower than what we’ve looked at previously, but I think we’re trying not to categorize it as a low-downforce package necessarily. The car already doesn’t seem to be short of downforce anyway!”Driver Alex Brundle is also eager to get going. He stressed that progress can be made quickly if the team can rack up lots of mileage in practice. “We have to max out practice,” he told
RACER. “If we do that then we’re in with much more of a chance.“There’s a lot more to come with the car. The 3:28 I did (at the test) was with a full tank and old tires. So you know there’s more. The test was more about making sure we were reliable. The progress is going to be leaps and bounds; the question is, is there time before the race to get to where we want to be?“The G60-LT-P1 is an incredible car, it just hasn’t had the time to develop. It’s hard to explain to someone who is just watching the timing screens, that we can make massive jumps. But once we iron out issues, at Le Mans, we’re not finding two tenths; it’s a second because it’s such a long lap.”