Kobayashi Leads Disrupted Opening Practice in Bahrain

Toyota’s Kamui Kobayashi set the fastest lap in a heavily disrupted opening Free Practice session for the 8 Hours of Bahrain that was extended after a lengthy red flag stoppage.

Kobayashi registered a time of 1:59.856 in the No. 7 Toyota GR010 Hybrid, jumping ahead of his teammate Sebastien Buemi who was leading when the session was halted after nine and a half minutes.

A storm approaching from the west brought strong gusts that caused an advertising banner to fall on the pit straight. Race control elected to keep the red flags out for 45 minutes to ensure that other banners were secure and to take some of them down.

As the cars sat in their garages, a layer of sand drifted over Bahrain International Circuit but it soon cleared when a period of rain arrived.

The interruption consumed half of the available running time as the clock continued to tick down, but the session was extended to ensure teams got a full 90 minutes on track.

Kobayashi’s leading time came shortly after the resumption occurred, despite the track being declared wet.

As the rain intensified with half an hour to go, the No. 21 AF Corse Ferrari 488 GTE Evo of Franck Dezoteux needed to be recovered after stopping on track. The cause of the stoppage, which resulted in a short Full Course Yellow, was not immediately clear.

The rain eased up in the final minutes of the session but there were no improvements on the earlier times.

Behind the two Toyotas, third place overall went to Gianmaria Bruni who posted a 1:50.290 behind the wheel of the Proton Competition Porsche 963.

Fourth and fifth went to the factory Porsche Penske Motorsport cars driven by Laurens Vanthoor and Michael Christensen, followed by the other customer 963 from Hertz Team JOTA and the No. 2 Cadillac V-Series.R.

Filipe Albuquerque set the pace in the LMP2 class for United Autosports, steering the No. 22 Oreca 07 Gibson to a 1:54.100 benchmark.

Albuquerque beat Vector Sport driver Gabriel Aubry by around half a second, while Ferdinand Habsburg was third for Team WRT.

The fastest lap in GTE-Am came courtesy of Tomonobu Fujii in the D’station Racing Aston Martin Vantage GTE.

The Japanese driver produced a 1:59.516 effort to narrowly beat Daniel Serra in the Kessel Racing Ferrari 488 GTE Evo. Ben Barker was third for Porsche squad GR Racing.

Free Practice 2 is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. local time (10:30 a.m. EDT).

RESULTS: Free Practice 1