Le Mans 24H Test Day Results

The two, four-hour sessions offered the teams the only opportunity to work on car set-up and driver orientation before they run again in qualifying, in ten days.

With rain disrupting the afternoon session, the fastest laps were all set in the morning session, and at the end of the day, the two Pescarolo Judds were the fastest of the 50-car field.

The trio of Emmanuel Collard, Jean-Christophe Boullion and Erik Comas lapped the 13.65kms circuit in three minutes and 32.468 seconds, with Collard stating confidently that there was more to come from his car.

"For sure we could go quicker," the Frenchman said. "Today we were just using race tyres, and we were quick. If we had used qualifying tyres, we would definitely have been quicker - maybe 2 seconds. I was very happy with the set-up, and I have to say thank-you to my teammates; my first lap in the car was a 3:36s. It just seems perfect."

The French trio was almost 3.5 seconds faster than Pescarolo Sport teammates Soheil Ayari, Eric Helary and Sebastien Loeb, who finished the day second.

Rally champion Loeb won a race of his own: the Le Mans rookie was busy winning the Rally of Turkey in the morning, but had to rush to Le Mans in a helicopter in order to run the minimum ten laps required of first-time runners.

"There were two stages of the Rally of Turkey left today," Loeb said. "I started the stages with a 1:15s lead, drove carefully and won by a minute. I had authorisation from the FIA to miss the press conference, and flew straight here. Now it's okay, we've done our ten laps.

"The conditions were difficult, as I was on slick tyres and there was some rain on the track. The car was well prepared - Pescarolo had the two best times of today. Obviously going from the Citroen Xsara it's very different, but the car was okay. I was driving how I felt; I did a lap in 3:45s, the track wasn't too wet and I was going quicker, but then it started to get wetter. After that I just concentrated on staying on the track and doing the ten laps."

Last year's winning car, the Audi R8, finished in fourth, seventh and eighth places. Nevertheless, Renault's F1 test driver Franck Montagny, whose car finished seventh, was content with the result.

"Today was not a bad day," the Frenchman said. "We're quite happy with today's result with our car, it was what we expected. I used to work with the same people back in 2002, and everyone has improved - the reactions of everyone are better.

"It was a perfect day; we had no problems with the car, we didn't touch any kerbs or go through any gravel traps."

In the LM2 class, the two Lola cars swapped fastest times throughout the day, with car number 25 taking the early lead, but car number 32 ending the day the fastest - barely two tenths of a second ahead.

In the GT1 class, Aston Martin was unsurprisingly the dominant force of the day, the two DBR9 cars never losing first and second positions in their class. In the end, the trio of Tomas Enge, Pedro Lamy and Peter Kox finished ahead of teammates David Brabham, Darren Turner and Stephane Sarrazin by a mere half a second.

In the GT2 class, the clear leader through the day was the Porsche Gt3-RSR #90, with Timo Bernhard setting a new unofficial GT2 track record in morning session, of four minutes and 4.915 seconds.