24h Le Mans
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Nicolas Prost with Swiss team-mate Neel Jani, are now one of the major partnerships endurance racing, worthy successors of Olivier Gendebien and Phil Hill, Henri Pescarolo and Gérard Larrousse, Jacky Ickx and Derek Bell. They took this year's privateer trophy in LM P1 in the FIA World Endurance Championship driving the Lola-Toyota #12 of Rebellion Racing, and scored an outright victory in the United States, at the Fifteenth Annual Petit Le Mans on the Road Atlanta circuit. Having concluded his endurance season at the 6 Hours of Shanghai, Nicolas Prost went to Abu Dhabi, where he took the wheel of the Lotus-Renault E20 in testing reserved for young drivers, organized after the eighteenth round of the Formula 1 World Championship. During the first day on the 6th of November, he set the third fastest time in the morning, then the fifth in the afternoon.
This first day of testing was dominated by the McLaren-Mercedes MP4/27 of young Danish driver Kevin Magnussen. Twenty years old, he is the son of Jan Magnussen, one of the biggest names in endurance racing. After twenty-five Grand Prix in Formula 1, he turned to endurance. Jan Magnussen now has fourteen participations at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, with four wins in GT categories (three consecutive years 2004, 2005 and 2006) as Corvette factory driver. Kevin Magnussen began at sixteen years old in Formula Ford in 2008, Nicolas Prost meanwhile launched his career in 2003, at twenty two. Two different career profiles, but neither one lacks talent, and still have the whole future ahead of them.
Jean-Philippe Doret
