The Toro Rosso driver and former Porsche driver in the WEC, a competition in which the Spanish driver will participate this season, spoke to soymotor.com about the possibilities of Alonso in the 24 hours of Le Mans.
Hartley has no doubt that Fernando Alonso will be competitive in WEC. The New Zealand rider has raced with Porsche in the competition and has won two world titles in 2015 and 2017, and the prestigious victory in the 24 hours of Le Mans last season.
Brendon assures that Fernando will undoubtedly quick because “he is one of the best drivers in the world”, and above all he warns him about one of the biggest problems that he will find, the traffic: “Something that one has to understand is that he has to be patient with traffic, you have to take your time to understand the cars that are in. That may be frustrating at first, but in the WEC there is not only one race, but there are several, and there must be respect among all of them. Being efficient but also aggressive, finding that balance is the most difficult”, said the Toro Rosso driver.
The main goal of Fernando Alonso to participate in the WEC season, is to arrive prepared and with sufficient experience to the great event, the 24 hours of Le Mans. Precisely Hartley has won the race and described the experience well: “It’s 12 months of work for a single race, when you get there, you represent Porsche and you notice that. You know that it is enough to make a small mistake to end the work of so many people Le Mans is a very powerful weekend, with many activities scheduled, and getting rested to the race is already a challenge”, said Hartley.
The Toro Rosso also wanted to compare the two competitions that Alonso will alternate throughout 2018 and that he himself did at the end of last season, F1 and WEC: “With the Le Mans teammates you can be open. You know you are part of the team and you create a link, It is a relationship quite different from the one you can have in Formula 1. At Toro Rosso I feel part of the team and I get along very well with Pierre Gasly, but the relationship as partners is different”, Hartley said, and he added another difference, this time talking about tires: “With the Pirelli you have to learn a lot of things if you want to extract all your performance, that’s part of your job as a driver. And make a full weekend in Formula 1 is very hard, because there is a lot of competitiveness and many elements that fans may not see”, concluded Brendon.
The New Zealand driver also spoke about one of the controversies that has surrounded the F1 in recent times, the Halo: “In WEC there were problems of visibility in the past. They made some changes so that the pilots were sitting in a higher position, because it was difficult to see the vertices of the curves. The visibility of an LMP1 is much worse than that of a Formula 1, because there are blind spots. I tried the halo in the Free of Mexico and it was not a problem at all”, said Hartley.
Brendon will run his first full season next to Pierre Gasly, in which he hopes to continue learning, although as he says, “with his feet on the ground”.