Vaillante Rebellion’s preparations for the 2017 FIA World Endurance Championship season got underway as the Vaillante liveried Vaillante Rebellion Oreca 07 made its public debut at Monza for the two-day Prologue group test that saw all the WEC teams together. As both days of the test were open to public, a large crowd came to see the 2017 cars in action for the first time.
With plenty of work to do before the season starts at Silverstone, it was a busy two days for the Vaillante Rebellion team.
The Prologue test was positive in many ways. The team managed to tick off all the points on their testing programme as planned. The two Oreca 07 Gibson powered cars showed good reliability and strong pace.
The #31 Vaillante Rebellion Oreca 07 car driven by Bruno Senna and Julien Canal set the second fastest time of the two days / five sessions test, with a 1:36.094, only 0.014 second behind the fastest LMP2 lap time of the test. Both cars, #31 followed by #13, topped the opening session on day 1 and car #13 driven by Mathias Beche and David Heinemier Hansson were the fastest LMP2 competitors in the wet night session.
From that point the focus was placed on car setup, tyre evaluation and system testing and validation.
Both the #13 and #31 Vaillante Rebellion Oreca 07 cars completed a total of 303 laps and 1755 km over the two days of the test. The team took the decision to not risk the cars when the track was too wet at some stages due to the short time ahead of the first race of the season in only 12 days from today.
After the official FIA WEC Prologue, the Vaillante Rebellion team is confident to tackle the season-opening round of the FIA World Endurance Championship on the 16th of April in the UK at the 6 Hours of Silverstone.
Bart Hayden, REBELLION Racing Team Manager : ” We are happy with the two days of testing, we have topped the timesheets a couple of times and covered many laps with all the drivers getting a good amount of seat time. It’s clear that the LMP2 class in the WEC is going to be really competitive and this test sets us up well for the first race of the season.”