Suzuki 1-2 at Le Mans

From Team Suzuki

Suzuki Endurance Racing Team's number two squad led a SERT GSX-R1000 1-2 at the opening round of the World Endurance Championship at Le Mans in France Sunday.

Riders William Costes, Guillaume Dietrich and Barry Veneman took the lead from World Champions Vincent Philippe, Matthieu Lagrive and Julien Da Costa when the number one machine crashed during the night session of the 24-hour race, to win by 11 laps.

SERT 2 led for the first hour from Yamaha GMT94 and SERT 1. Yamaha took over temporarily at the second hour and then SERT 1 made a charge to the front - a lead they kept for almost half the race until a crash in the dark, thought to be due to a rabbit running onto the track.

From 16 laps down, the defending champions gradually moved back through the field, climbing into second place behind SERT 2 with five hours to go - a position they held until the flag.

Provisional results
1 SERT 2 (Suzuki GSX-R1000) 770 laps, 2 SERT 1 (Suzuki GSX-R1000) 759, 3 Acropolis Moto Expert (Yamaha) 756, 4 Infini Team/ Yohann Moto sp (Suzuki) 755, 5 Junior Team Suzuki - LMS (Suzuki) 753