Greaves Closes in on Le Mans Series Title

The Nissan-powered Greaves Motorsport team took its fourth win of the season today with an emphatic victory at Silverstone. The British team didn't put a wheel wrong and the strong line up of Tom Kimber-Smith, Karim Ojjeh and Olivier Lombard has taken Greaves to within a whisker of the 2011 Le Mans Series title. The team needs to score just one point at the season finale in Estoril in two weeks time to take the title.

“We need just one more point,” said Team Manager Jacob Greaves. “It's great to take our fourth win of the year. All three drivers performed well, our pace was good and the team didn't make any mistakes all weekend."

Tom Kimber-Smith paid homage to the strength of the team and the reliability of the Zytek-Nissan. “It means a lot to win this one,” commented the British driver. “The team did its usual brilliant job and this result is second only to our wins at Le Mans for me. It was a faultless race and he hope we can get out to Estoril and do it all over again.”

The Signatech Nissan team had to take a tough result today when technical problems caused some delays in the pits for the Oreca-Nissan. The team, which is competing for the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup title, finished in seventh place but, although it was a disappointing result, the race gave Lucas Ordonez the opportunity to take another step along the GT Academy journey. Within the team of drivers the most pressure falls on the one who qualifies and is behind the wheel for the start of the race. That job came down to Lucas today and he performed just as GT Academy expected him to: like a professional racer.

“We had some problems restarting during the pit stops, the reason for which is under investigation,” explained team boss Philippe Sinault. “We lost many laps with this problem so although our pace was very good we couldn't recover from such long delays. The most positive thing to come out of this weekend is Lucas' performance. He did a good job for us in qualifying and then in the race he completed two very strong opening stints.”

“In a race like this you have to have no problems at all for six hours if you want to win,” said Lucas. "Unfortunately this was not our day. It was not a great result but on a personal level I am happy as I was able to get into a really good rhythm today and made no mistakes.”

Although Greaves will head to Portugal soon for the final round of the Le Mans Series, the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup teams have completed their European season. The ILMC is going Stateside for its next round: Petit Le Mans in Atlanta, before finishing the season at Zhuhai in China in November.