After showing great pace all week, Risi Competizione’s Petit Le Mans is over before the green flag was waved.

Jaime Melo crashed the car during the formation lap at Turn 9 – just after the long back straight. The Ferrari 458 Italia suffering too much damage to be repaired in time for the start. Melo was to share the car with Toni Vilander and Rafael Matos.

“What can one say? We’ve worked so hard to be here, have had a very good week in practice and knew we potentially had a really great race car,” team boss Giuseppe Risi said.

“It’s a very sad way to finish our first season of racing with the F458, but the most important thing is that no one was hurt. The damage caused by the impact was considerable and, while our team of mechanics were perfectly capable of replacing broken mechanical parts, we were not prepared to take the chance of sending out a less than perfect car in this particular race.”