Toyota's Le Mans rookie Sebastien Buemi confident of being straight on the pace in night conditions

The former Toro Rosso Formula 1 driver has only completed three laps in the dark for Toyota at Le Mans so far as team-mates Anthony Davidson and Stephane Sarrazin took priority in Wednesday night's first qualifying session after an engine issue ruled the car out of most of free practice.

"Stephane didn't drive at the official test [due to injury] so that is why he had more running yesterday, and Anthony is going for the qualifying, so that took a bit more running away from me," Buemi told AUTOSPORT.

"But I don't think it's a big setback because we could see the data of the other car and what they were running. It's still pretty good considering the preparation we had.

"I'm new here and when you break the engine in the first session and don't drive, it's obviously not good. This is not a circuit that you can drive every day. But this is racing and you have to live with that."

Buemi only had three laps of night-time running, but said he was encouraged by how close he immediately got to Davidson's pace.

"On the in-lap I was on a very good lap, so I pushed because you know when you have three laps you just try to maximise everything," said Buemi.

"On my in-lap I would have been only half a second away from Anthony and it was my third lap on old tyres. It was good. He had some traffic as well, but it was good for me to see that I only need a few laps and I'm there."

While happy with his pace, Buemi admitted that he was still learning about Le Mans traffic.

"The biggest thing is how you deal with the traffic - how much time you lose, how much risk you take," he said. "If you are too kind, you will lose too much time. If you take too much risk, you might crash."