The Dane is competing in his second 24 Hours of Le Mans, but notably his first in both the top-tier Hypercar class, and with Belgian outfit Team WRT.
In last weekend’s Le Mans 24 Hours pre-event test it appeared as though the BMW Hypercars were a step away from the front-runners, however opening day practice and qualifying indicated that the German brand is in the hunt for victory.
“It’s so close, it’s so exciting, and I’m very proud and happy to be part of a really cool team here with BMW, very big ambitions. WRT is a fantastic team, and I think we have a shot at winning this,” Magnussen said.
“I hope (the pace) is real, I think it’s, it was a little bit surprising, maybe for us.
“The top category, 21 cars in the Hypercar class, out of the 21 I think there’s at least 17 of those that really will think they can win.”
Yesterday in qualifying Magnussen’s teammate Dries Vanthoor was second fastest, just 0.04s off the benchmark of Alex Lynn in the #12 Hertz Team Jota Cadillac.
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Vanthoor is contesting a full campaign for BMW in the IMSA Sportscar Championship in which he has taken four of the first five pole positions this season, and will be looking to do the same in Hyperpole this afternoon.
“Looking at qualifying, it (pole) should be possible, he did a very, very good lap yesterday,” Magnussen explained.
“Le Mans is a long lap, so on a clean lap you can be easily be half a second to one second (faster).
“We hope all the others also did a very, very good lap, but we’ll have to wait and see there’s no way to know.
“Dries is obviously like a qualifying legend at the moment, he’s put the car on pole four times this year and qualified very well WEC also, yesterday we saw that.
“He’s a very, very special qualifying guy. But I don’t think there’s any real weak link between all of the Team WRT drivers, there is a very good level there from everyone.
“I’m certainly learning a lot from them, I’m still learning, still getting more confident, still understanding it better, but it’s really fun to drive.
“It is tricky to get the full picture (on the long runs), but what I think is that there is a big group of cars that are more or less balanced on pace.”
Magnussen believes his first win with BMW is coming upon reflecting on some of the near misses this year in both IMSA and WEC.
“I think we’ve had more speed in the car than the results,” he said. “I think we feel we missed some opportunities to probably win some races.
“Daytona, we really feel like we should have won that with the pace we had in the car, that was a missed one.
“There was a couple of other times where, I think we didn’t probably execute the best we could, but we have more chances and this is the biggest one, so this is the one we really want to get it right. It (the win) is coming for sure.”
The three-hour long Practice 3 has just commenced, with Hyperpole starting at 4.00am AEST (Friday).
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