The colleagues turned rivals with scores to settle at Le Mans

For all the talk about LMP2 being one of the most closely fought classes in the World Endurance Championship, one team has been doing all the winning so far in 2020: United Autosports. But what about the European Le Mans Series? Erm, same there.

ORECAs fielded by the team co-owned by Zak Brown and Richard Dean have won all five races held under ACO-sanctioned rules this year across the two series, a run that goes back to the Bahrain WEC round in December last year at tracks including Austin, Paul Ricard (twice) and Spa (twice).

No wonder then that Paul di Resta, who has won the past three WEC rounds alongside championship leaders Filipe Albuquerque and Phil Hanson (who have also taken two of United's wins in the ELMS) is looking forward to this weekend's Le Mans 24 Hours rather more so than in the past two years.

On both previous occasions United was hampered by a Ligier that wasn't quite on the level of the numerically dominant ORECA and required drivers and team to be "so much more on-edge". For the Scot, who missed the Fuji WEC round to fulfil his DTM commitments with the doomed R-Motorsport Aston squad, 2020 marks the first time he comes to Le Mans with any form of parity.

"There's no question that we were up against it at every race, especially at Le Mans," says di Resta. "Over 24 hours, it was hard to pull any of that back. That's where the team grew and excelled from, and I think that's probably where you're seeing the difference happening at the moment.

"There's a lot of things that can happen in that 24-hour period that dictate where you are, but given the run that we're on, we're going to do what we can to try to maximise that."

And he isn't the only Brit at Le Mans with unfinished business.

Di Resta's Sky F1 colleague Anthony Davidson has significantly more experience at the Circuit de la Sarthe and has had a competitive car underneath him plenty of times, famously coming within touching distance of victory with Toyota in 2016 before his dreams were dashed in the cruellest possible fashion with just over a lap to go.

After 11 starts, he's twice been blameless in accidents that required medical attention (wheelbearing failure on his debut in 2003 in a Prodrive Ferrari, and somersaulting after contact from a GTE car on his first start for Toyota in 2012) and suffered several mishaps that prevented him gracing the top step of the podium.

It's little surprise therefore when he says that Le Mans "has been particularly cruel to me, I don't know what I've ever done to deserve such back luck at that one race".

Last year was a case in point. On his first appearance in LMP2 with DragonSpeed, Davidson was running third when, coming into the pits, he found the sister LMP1 entry in his bay. The resulting delay in servicing the ORECA he shared with Roberto Gonzalez and Pastor Maldonado dropped it to the back of the field and set them on a recovery drive that would likely have yielded "at least a podium finish" had Maldonado not crashed at sunrise at Tertre Rouge.

"There's no reason why we shouldn't be quick, but as we know, being quick isn't the be-all and end-all at Le Mans. It's about survival and being there at the end with minimal problems" Anthony Davidson

"That goes to show how even small things at Le Mans can end up snowballing and take their toll later in the race," says Davidson. "That dropped us way down the order and put us on the back foot for the rest of the race.

"Although it was a small moment, it was pretty big in terms of forcing us to claw back lost time, which is never the way to win Le Mans. I've had a few Le Mans where you're trying to claw back time and it rarely goes your way."

For the 2019-20 WEC season, Davidson has switched to Jota Sport - the team that won the LMP2 class at Le Mans in 2014 and 2017 - with Gonzalez and recently crowned Formula E champion Antonio Felix da Costa. The campaign didn't get off to the best of starts, with Davidson ruled out at Silverstone by a rib injury, and a hard-earned second at Fuji was lost to disqualification when scrutineers found that the ORECA's outside neutral switch was unable to disconnect the transmission.

They bounced back with victory at Shanghai, but since then it has been one-way traffic, with United Autosports building a commanding 22-point lead in the standings over its nearest opposition.

"Honestly, I don't know why we haven't won another race since Shanghai, but there has been some bad luck," Davidson says. "Look at Spa with the changing weather and missing out on safety-car periods where others pitted and we didn't.

"It's a shame we couldn't get to see how Spa unfolded with our new tyre in the dry. Hopefully we can take that to Le Mans and carry on that kind of speed and balance we have in the car. If the weather is right and we can get the tyre in the right window, hopefully we can be setting the pace."

In such a bitty season, Le Mans offers another chance for a reboot and, as one of the leading Goodyear-shod cars - Davidson's #38 ORECA will be one of only five of the 24 LMP2 entries not using Michelins - there will be plenty of opportunity for the recent competitive order to be reset.

"There's no reason why we shouldn't be quick," continues Davidson, who points out that da Costa is "flying high" on confidence at the moment. "But as we know, being quick isn't the be-all and end-all at Le Mans. It's about survival and being there at the end with minimal problems.

"In all the races I've done at Le Mans, there's only been one - 2013 (pictured below) - where nothing went wrong. It was the perfect race, there was no more we could have done on our car and we finished second. Every other one I've done, something has always gone wrong. People get fixated on qualifying performance or the fastest stint performance during the race, but it's not about that at all."

Di Resta reckons "the main competition will be on Michelins" but points out that the unknown conditions and how teams can react to them could play just as decisive a part.
"It's a very different Le Mans in September versus June," he says. "How much of the race is going to be in the dark? When is the temperature variation going to come in? We've got less track time, we've missed the pre-test, which then gives you two or three weeks to react and then come back to the race and properly get into it.

"At the moment it's just a full day on Thursday to get yourself into how the tyres work, how the car behaves, rideheights, downforce levels for quali and the race. If it's mixed weather that throws another thing into it, but we just have to go there with the best intentions.

"I feel that we've got as good a chance as anybody going into it, but it's no given and you can't underestimate what other people do and other people have got."

"We've narrowly missed out on a podium a few times, once was my mistake from pushing too hard, and last year we just genuinely didn't have the speed to make it and nobody slipped up" Paul di Resta

Di Resta concedes that prior to Mercedes announcing its exit from the DTM, "Le Mans wasn't something that was on my radar", but acknowledges a victory in "what I think is probably the hardest class at Le Mans to win" would be a boon to his chances of landing a drive in a factory programme capable of challenging for outright honours in years to come.

"I'll take it with both hands, it will be a massive step given what we've gone through [with the Ligier] the past couple of years," he says. "We've narrowly missed out on a podium a few times, once [in 2018] was my mistake from pushing too hard, and last year we just genuinely didn't have the speed to make it and nobody slipped up."

As for Davidson, there's no questioning that his desire to win the race is as strong as ever. "I look forward to Le Mans every time, no matter what it throws at me," he says. "I don't give up with this race because I love it, I keep coming back and I'm determined to win it.

"I'd like to win it outright one day of course, but at least in LMP2 would be a nice moment to win that race."