Papis: Corvettes will keep attacking

Papis's No. 63 C6-R hit trouble near the beginning of the race, after teammate Johnny O'Connell spun into the barriers. The car was damaged and lost five laps in the pits.

The team later had to change the clutch, and the car is now lying in sixth place in its class, eleven laps behind the leading Aston Martin.

"We'll just attack, attack, attack," the Italian told autosport.com. "We are not here to finish in fourth or fifth position. We are racing to win. We won't spare the car, anything may happen.

"This 24-hour race started uphill for us. Johnny O'Connell had an accident in the first hour, and the work done in the last seven days was practically ruined: the chassis was completely bent.

"The boys have done an incredible job in putting the car back on track quickly, but it wasn't the No. 63 we had worked with for the entire week.

"We worked during the night in trying to put it back in acceptable conditions, and when we were three laps behind the No. 64 (sister Corvette) we had a problem with the clutch so we had to change it.

"We don't know if this problem is related to the accident we had at the beginning - it's possible, we are not sure.

"We'll keep on attacking: the car is going very well, much better than after the accident, when the steering wheel was off by some 20 degrees and the mechanics fixed it.

"I'm proud of the guys here, they've done an incredible job. They've changed the clutch in something like 15 minutes, it's incredible. I'm proud of what both Corvette Racing teams are doing. Unfortunately we stumbled into some problems by ourselves at the start, but that's understandable."

The other entry by Corvette Racing is having a better run in second place in GT1, fifth overall.