His name is Mathieu Galoche, he is the – very- young track engineer of Romain Dumas/Neel Jani/Marc Lieb’s black coloured Porsche in pole position. At the age of 30, this Frenchman began in motorsports with Peugeot Sport in 2008, and now occupies a key position within the Porsche organisation. He is the one who bears all the responsibilities of No. 18: performance management, management of the drivers, track time, etc. Mathieu keeps an eye on everything.

"Actually, my role is that of conductor," he said. A conductor whose desk is by the pit wall that he never leaves during 24 hours. "I do go to the toilet, he jokes as if he wanted to hide his nervousness. In fact it’s always me who speaks to the drivers, who communicates race information."

Slow car on the track, yellow flags, time to gain here or to lose there, Mathieu remains concentrated on all small and big events of the race, whilst elaborating the present strategy and thinking about the future strategy.

"As far as strategy is concerned, he explains, first we take into account our car, then those of our competitors. In the background, we have two people whose work is to analyse the current strategy and to refine it live. They also project themselves into the future to try and plan the end of the race according to the speed of the car, change of tyres in order to see where we will be situated at the end of the race and with what margin. For example, is it the good moment to lose 3 or 4 seconds to refill with oil during refuelling or should we wait?"

But the hardest is of course to predict the end of the race.

"At the beginning, we treat the race as if it didn’t have an end. On the other hand, when we get closer to its end, we check what moment the last pit stop should take place and we try to see if we can or not save a pit stop until then. Weather conditions obviously play a major role and we have a guy from the French weather forecast who continuously gives us information. It’s fairly reliable but estimating the amount of time rain is going to last is slightly random."

Keeping slick tyres or changing to rain tyres is the question that Mathieu is going to have to ask himself several times during the event as the rain should come back during the night…

J.-Michel Desnoues

Photo: Mathieu Galoche, track engineer No. 18 Porsche (LE MANS, SARTHE), 13 JUNE 2015. At only the age of 30, the Frenchman Mathieu Galoche has broad shoulders. He is in charge of the No. 18 Porsche.