Maybe not the ace in the pack of the Porsche Penske Motorsport World Endurance Championship squad in year one of the 963 LMDh race programme, Kevin Estre came of age in 2024 when he had the car under him to do the business - and also, perhaps, when he didn’t!
The lap he pulled out of the bag to put the thing on pole at the Le Mans 24 Hours is at least part of the reason for his elevated standing here.
That and an ultra-consistent season that helped secure the WEC driver’s title. The Le Mans lap was special - the 963 most definitely wasn’t the fastest car.
Estre's Le Mans pole stunner
Estre only just made the cut to go through from first qualifying to the Hyperpole session at Le Mans. He ended up sixth and only a couple of tenths ahead of the first car to miss out on a place in the final quali session.
The track was changing through race week and the Porsche’s table-topping pace from the previous weekend’s Test Day looked like a thing of past.
It did, too, in the half-hour of running on Thursday evening that set the first four rows of the grid for the race.
Before a red flag that interrupted the session, Estre languished down the order. When the track went green, time and fuel were short to get in another quick lap or two. That meant not changing tyres to the second set of Michelin softs that were allowed for the half hour.
What followed was another traffic-interrupted lap and a time that would have left the Frenchman on the fourth row. But he just had time to do one more, and he produced something special to find more than a second.
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That much was clear because he went green in every sector on what he admits was a pretty much traffic-free lap. There were no purples, which relates back to the fact that he didn’t have the fastest car around the Circuit de la Sarthe. Also significant was that he did the time on tyres that already had five push laps on them.
“I pretty much maximised everything; maybe there were one or two micro-sectors where I had gone faster before,” he explains. “Looking back on the lap, I don’t think I could have done much better.”
