British racing driver, Tom Kimber-Smith, had his first race of the season at Paul Ricard last weekend, driving the Greaves Motorsport LMP2 Zytek-Nissan in the opening round of the European Le Mans Series (ELMS). This year Tom and Greaves are the targets for everyone to aim at, as they defend their 2011 ELMS Drivers and Teams’ Championship crowns. Tom kicked off the season in style at Paul Ricard as he moved the car into the lead during his race-opening stint, and set up a solid fourth place finish for the squad after his team-mates, Lucas Ordonez and Alex Brundle, had completed their runs in the 6-hour encounter.

Unfortunately during the Saturday practice sessions Tom and the team lost some valuable car set-up time, as they chased and eventually cured a problem with the car’s throttle. This meant that Tom wasn’t fully happy with the handling of the Zytek-Nissan come the official qualifying session, but he still managed to put it 3rd on the grid and 7/10ths of a second off the pole-sitting Oreca-Nissan.

At the start of Sunday’s race the pole position TDS Racing car of Mathias Beche made a tardy getaway which also cost Tom some momentum and a place to the Murphy Prototypes Oreca-Nissan of Warren Hughes. He quickly made amends for this, however, and passed Hughes to reclaim third place. Although the team had been able to make some improvements to the handling of the car since qualifying, Tom soon found that its tyre wear was very high and he was unable to stay with the leading duo during the first hour. Tom adjusted his driving style accordingly to look after the tyres, and then at his first pits stop changed from the soft compound to the hard compound Dunlop rubber, which was a significant improvement.

During the remainder of his dogged triple-stint Kimber-Smith closed right back onto the tail of the front two cars, and was then able to jump ahead of them in the pit stops as he had looked after the tyres so well the team didn’t need to change them. The time saved in the pits put Tom into the race lead, and there he stayed until he had completed a superb 2½ hours behind the wheel. Unfortunately after Tom’s sterling drive, during the rest of the race an on-track incident which caused some damage and a time penalty for a pit lane rules infringement dropped the car out of contention for the race win, but it still claimed fourth place and a good points haul.

Tom comments: “Having worked so hard to lead the race, I’m very disappointed with the end result, but we can walk away with some encouraging things. The car is still fast and reliable just like last year, and we have a very strong driver line. At the next race I hope that the bad luck has gone away and we get a result that shows our true performance!”

Tom’s next outing is this coming weekend (April 7-8), where he has been signed up to make his debut in the FIA GT3 European Championship season opener at Nogaro in France.

Source : Tom Kimber-Smith