Tatiana Calderón enjoyed another strong performance in last weekend’s second round of the European Le Mans Series at the Spa-Francorchamps circuit.
In her second appearance for the Richard Mille Racing team, Tatiana and her teammates – Andre Negrao and newcomer Beitske Visser – finished sixth after a smooth run over the course the four-hour race at the wheel of the #50 Oreca LMP2 car.
It comes after Tatiana and Negrao finished fifth in the season opener at Paul Ricard last month, putting the Signatech-run Richard Mille squad fifth in the LMP2 standings.
As she did on her LMP2 debut at Paul Ricard, Tatiana took the start again in Belgium, this time from 14th on the grid. Doing a double-stint, she stayed aboard the car for 40 laps, climbing inside the top 10 and gaining further valuable experience of both tyre management and traffic management that will help her in her Le Mans 24 Hours debut next month.
In all, the Colombian driver completed a little over 1 hour 40 minutes at the wheel – almost half the race – before handing over to Visser, who was drafted in at short notice to bolster the team’s line-up as Katherine Legge continues her recovery from injury.
Visser completed a single stint, while LMP2 veteran Negrao then handled the final double-stint and took the chequered flag, with the need to rotate through all three drivers denying Tatiana the chance to return to the cockpit of the #50 car after her first double stint.
Tatiana Calderón: “Considering the situation I’m very happy with P6. The team did a great strategy and my teammates Andre and Beitske also did a great job. Obviously it was hard to get someone new in the car, you have to give them priority, and we were going into the race not as prepared as I would like because we didn’t really test both compounds of tyre. We weren’t sure which would be better for the race. I did the first two stints with the same hard tyres, so I think it was a good learning experience for sure and useful preparation for Le Mans. And then to finish sixth was a great result, so overall I’m pretty happy with that. Let’s hope we can improve for Le Mans next month, and I’m looking forward to hopefully being able to go to Japan at the end of the month to make my Super Formula debut.”
The next round of the ELMS season – which will be held at Paul Ricard again instead of Barcelona owing to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic – clashes with Tatiana’s planned appearance at Motegi in Japan’s Super Formula series on August 29-30.
As such, Tatiana’s next appearance with the Richard Mille Racing team is scheduled to be at the legendary Le Mans 24 Hours on September 19-20.
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