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Minassian: We'll be stronger in the race

Nicolas Minassian has said that the all-French Pescarolo Sport team will be more competitive in the Le Mans 24 Hours than the results of the first qualifying session yesterday (Wednesday) suggest

Eric Helary qualified the Courage-Peugeot he shares with Minassian and fellow Frenchman Soheil Ayari 12th fastest in first qualifying. But despite the apparent lack of pace, Minassian feels the car will be a lot stronger in the race.

"The car is really nice to drive," Minassian told autosport.com. "The team has done a lot of work over the past few months to make the car comfortable, and I think we've got a very good race car. It's not a qualifying car, but it's a good race car. I think we can achieve a top-five finish. I think that would be nice."

Minassian reckoned that several teams were hunting for glory in the qualifying sessions. "If you look around, a lot of people are playing a lot of qualifying games," he said. "But we've been doing a lot of race simulation work. We've been running on full tanks and race tyres. We're really just getting ready for the race, which is what it's all about."

However, Minassian did admit that he would like to be able to fight for the top spot in qualifying. "It'd be nice to have pole," he said. "Everybody would like to go out for a run with low fuel and sticky tyres and qualifying on pole, but you'd have to be very quick to do so. We're not going to go quicker than the Bentley's in qualifying, so we have to play a different strategy."

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